Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Like many high-ranking Polish Communists, Gierek could not understand why the security chiefs had allowed the labor unrest to grow and grow without taking elementary countermeasures. Had they wanted to put a stop to the strikes, he reasoned, it would have been a simple enough matter to isolate the principal troublemakers and prevent information reaching Western correspondents in Warsaw. But Kania had said repeatedly that the situation was under control and that Gierek should go ahead with his Crimean holiday. Now that the strikes were spreading along the Baltic coast, the task of restoring order was more difficult.

Gierek’s first instinct was to counterattack. Obviously, he told the Politburo, the strikers were inspired by “outside forces.”

“This is not something we need to discuss today, but we do need to think about it,” said Gierek, suggesting he might favor an armed crackdown. “It is clear that this period of tension cannot go on indefinitely. It may take a more dangerous form—and that would compel us to use force.” 83

Within hours of Gierek’s return to Warsaw, the machinery of repression had moved into high gear, and columns of riot troops were moving in the direction of Gdańsk. The Polish government placed three army regiments stationed in the Gdańsk region on a state of alert. Soviet naval ships appeared off the Baltic coast. Warsaw Pact troops in East Germany and the western Soviet Union were called up for what the Soviet news agency Tass euphemistically described as “routine maneuvers.” 84Telephone communications with Gdańsk were cut. A task force was established in the Ministry of Interior to prepare a plan to crush the rebellion and normalize “the country’s social and political situation.” The plan, code-named Summer ’80, envisaged the storming of the Lenin Shipyard by helicopter, the arrest of Wałęsa and other strike leaders, and twenty-four-hour surveillance of “antisocialist forces.” 85

The immediate priority was to contain the revolt within the Lenin Shipyard.

WHILE GIEREK WAS DEMANDING a smothering of information about the unrest in Gdańsk, a balding man in a moth-eaten silk dressing gown was busy dispensing it as rapidly as possible. Jacek Kuroń lived in a three-room apartment on Adam Mickiewicz Street, a fifteen-minute tram ride from the Central Committee building. Over the last month he had slept no more than three or four hours a night. He spent his days and nights on the phone, relaying information from the strike committees springing up around Poland to Western news organizations in Warsaw.

Kuroń’s address book contained the names and telephone numbers of hundreds of opposition activists in towns and villages all over Poland, from Arłamow to Zakopane. Western correspondents used to joke that it was the most subversive document in the Soviet empire. Its owner sat behind a large wooden desk, littered with half-drunk cups of coffee, discarded cigarette packages, old newspapers, hastily scribbled notes, and a battered orange phone. A human dynamo, he was seldom in repose. He would dial one number, listen for fifteen or twenty seconds, and bark out a few commands. Practically hoarse from a surfeit of talking, smoking, and drinking, he would pause only to dial a new number. He talked at machine-gun speed—as if expecting the telephone to be cut off at any moment. In the rare moments when he was not on the phone, Kuroń devoted his attention to the never-ending stream of visitors who tramped through his apartment. After the last visitor had left, he would slump down on a couch in the corner of the room for a few hours’ sleep.

For Poland’s Communist leaders, this disheveled personage was Lucifer incarnate, an “enemy of the state” and a “hireling of world imperialism.” For the country’s rapidly growing dissident movement, he had an almost godlike status. He was organizer, ideologist, and den mother rolled into one.

A former “Red Scout” and lecturer at Warsaw University, Kuroń had received an orthodox Marxist education. He had been active in the Communist youth movement and had appeared destined for a brilliant Communist Party career. But he had fallen out with the authorities in the early sixties for writing a Trotskyist critique that accused the Communist bureaucracy of exploiting the working class as ruthlessly as capitalists did. Since 1965 Kuroń had spent more than six years in jail for “antistate activities.” While he was in prison, his political views had evolved. He found inspiration in Polish history books, particularly works about the great nineteenth-century insurrections against Russian rule. He ceased to think in Marxist terms. Although he never became a believer, he came to respect the Catholic Church for its role in preserving Poland’s national identity. He began to consider the problem of how civil society could develop in the shadow of a totalitarian regime.

Contrary to what the official news media said about him, Kuroń did not advocate an all-out confrontation with the state. Indeed, he was convinced that society had no chance of winning a violent showdown with a heavily armed opponent. This was the lesson of the workers’ rebellion of 1970.

The only solution was to bypass the party altogether. Society would ignore the institutions of the Communist regime and create its own unofficial structures, rolling back the frontiers of totalitarianism. By behaving as if they were free, Poles eventually would become free. Underground newspapers would make a mockery of government censorship. A “flying university,” meeting in private homes, would circumvent the state education system. A network of civic defense committees would result in de facto freedom of association. The structures of Communist power would be preserved as an ideological fig leaf for the Kremlin, but Poland would become a pluralist society in all but name.

“Don’t burn down party committees; found your own” was Kuroń’s motto.

The free trade unionists in Gdańsk formed part of Kuroń’s extended opposition family. At the heart of the network was the Workers’ Defense Committee, known by its Polish initials as KOR. Founded in 1976 by a group of Warsaw intellectuals to assist the victims of police brutality, KOR soon developed into a political pressure group. Its members issued statements drawing attention to human rights violations and criticizing the Communist Party’s management of the economy. KOR became a kind of umbrella organization for other opposition groups, ranging from peasants’ defense committees to underground publishers. When a new wave of labor unrest broke out in July 1980 over a government plan to raise the price of meat, Kuroń established a strike information center in his apartment.

Kuroń and his friends recognized that the Polish Communists were not going to give up any of their hard-won political power willingly. They believed, however, that the stark facts of economic decline would oblige the regime to come to an understanding with the opposition. By holding down the living standards of ordinary people, the Communist countries of Eastern Europe had achieved some remarkably high rates of economic growth in the fifties and sixties. But the era of high growth rates had now come to an end. In 1979, for the first time in postwar Poland, the economy had actually shrunk by some 2 percent. The sacrifices had been in vain. The boom had turned into a bust.

The most immediate crisis facing the regime was a crippling foreign debt. During the early seventies the Gierek government had borrowed billions of dollars to finance grandiose investment projects. Western banks and governments had fallen over themselves to provide credit; the Soviet bloc was generally considered a “good risk.” Surely, it was argued, the Kremlin would never allow one of its satellites to default. Gierek boasted about building “a second Poland.” The idea was to construct hundreds of modern factories, dramatically increase the production of consumer goods, and pay back the loan with increased exports to the West. But the plan had misfired. Few of the projects selected by the supposedly omniscient planners had been economically justified. Most were the result of the personal whims of Polish leaders, large bribes from Western companies, or sheer bureaucratic incompetence. By 1980 Poland owed its creditors some eighteen billion dollars. Virtually every dollar that Poland earned in foreign exchange from exports was earmarked for servicing the debt.