Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The unofficial opposition was ready to help the government find a way out of the crisis—for a price. Polish society had to be allowed to develop its own “self-governing” institutions. The Communist Party would have to provide guarantees that it would no longer resort to arbitrary violence and would not renege on concessions extracted in moments of weakness. Leaders who had previously been accountable to no one but themselves would have to submit to some kind of social control. At the very least, that meant open discussion of the economic and social catastrophe facing the country.

After the government had cut telephone and telex links between Gdańsk and Warsaw, the boundlessly energetic Kuroń devised a human relay system to circumvent the information blockade. As soon as something happened at the shipyard, his acolytes in the free trade union movement would drive a hundred miles or so in the direction of Warsaw. When they found a functioning telephone, they would call Kuroń. The system was cumbersome, but it worked.

On Saturday, August 16, Kuroń’s informants reported that the strike committee had agreed to a compromise pay offer and had called off the strike. A few hours later came news that the shipyard workers had decided to continue the strike—in solidarity with other workers in the Gdańsk region.

As Kuroń relayed the story, Wałęsa had been on the point of going home to his wife and children when he was confronted by angry delegates from other factories. “If you abandon us, we’ll be lost,” screamed the representatives of the striking bus and tram drivers. “Buses can’t face tanks.” Several hundred predominantly young workers surged around Wałęsa, chanting, “Solidarity, Solidarity.” Wałęsa grabbed a microphone and began speaking to the crowd gathered in front of the shipyard gates. 86

“I promised you that I would stay here to the end. Who wants to go on with the strike?”

Chants of “We do,” “We do.”

“Who wants to end the strike?”

Silence.

“The strike goes on!”

It was a crucial moment, as Kuroń was quick to appreciate. The Communist authorities were dealing no longer with an isolated outbreak of labor unrest, but with a vast protest movement that would grow until it enveloped all sections of Polish society. As a first step the workers in Gdańsk had established an interfactory strike committee to represent the interests of striking workers all over the country. Wałęsa had been elected chairman. The workers’ principal demand, stabbing like a dagger to the heart of Communist ideology, was free trade unions.

EDWARD GIEREK REMEMBERED with bitterness how the whole country had breathed a sigh of relief when he came to power. Striking workers along the Baltic coast had hailed him as one of their own. Communist apparatchiks had predicted that he would help restore the party’s depleted authority. The Kremlin had showered him with compliments, describing him as an “outstanding Marxist-Leninist.” Even the West had joined in the applause for a personable Communist leader who seemed to understand the value of détente and economic cooperation. Everyone was sick and tired of Gomułka, who had been brought to power during a previous wave of workers’ unrest, in 1956.

The wheel of Polish history had turned full circle, Gierek reflected. Everybody was turning on him, just as everyone had turned on Gomułka in December 1970. In the space of a few days he had become the object of almost universal derision. At the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk the same workers who had shouted, “We will help you, Comrade Gierek,” ten years before greeted his most recent television appearance with jeers and catcalls. His allies in the Politburo seemed embarrassed to be associated with him. The Soviets were making ominous noises about the “threat to socialism” in Poland and the “mistakes” committed by the Polish leadership. Western leaders who had once beaten a path to his door were gloating over the extraordinary challenge to his power. Everywhere, people were saying that he was finished.

As usual, ordinary Poles expressed their sentiments about their political leaders in a joke. “Question: What is the difference between Gierek and Gomułka? Answer: None, only Gierek doesn’t realize it yet.”

At Politburo meetings the Kania-Jaruzelski tandem was already taking aim at his economic policies. Jaruzelski, whom Gierek had earlier regarded as an ally, claimed he had learned about Poland’s huge foreign debt from a broadcast on Radio Free Europe. Kania, the party secretary in charge of national security, complained that the Politburo had been treated with “total contempt.” 87Other Politburo members, who had previously groveled before the first secretary, joined in the attack. In order to appease the critics, Gierek had been forced to sacrifice six of his closest associates. He was under enormous stress. He felt isolated and abandoned. 88

The first secretary was still surrounded by the trappings of power: the bulletproof limousine, the deferential secretaries, the security guards. The plain black telephone on his desk was a direct line to Brezhnev. A companion white telephone, with push buttons, provided instant communications with Communist Party leaders in other Soviet bloc countries, from Czechoslovakia to Bulgaria. Just along the hallway was a special communications room dominated by a large wall map of Poland with forty-nine miniature lightbulbs, one for each vojvodship (province). Seated behind a microphone, Gierek could speak directly to any provincial governor in the country. Or he could flick a switch to light up all forty-nine lightbulbs, representing forty-nine local Communist Party bosses ready to carry out his orders. It was a perfect example of the command economy transmitting instructions downward. 89

To Gierek’s dismay, the bureaucratic machine was no longer responding to his orders. It was not so much that someone else had grabbed the levers of power as that the levers themselves had ceased to function. Senior leaders appeared on television—and no one paid any attention. Instructions were issued to rank-and-file party members and promptly forgotten. The map in room 115 flashed its lights, but the list of striking factories grew ever longer. Communist Party branches in the Lenin Shipyard and hundreds of other proletarian bastions around the country had withered away overnight. The party itself—a mighty organization with more than three million members—was doing nothing. Its leaders had become generals without an army.

At first Gierek took comfort in the thought that the strike leaders did not represent the workers. He was disabused of this notion by the government representative in Gdańsk, Mieczysław Jagielski, who insisted that the strike had the “total support” of society. “My feeling is that we are going to have to agree to the creation of free trade unions,” Jagielski reported on August 26. “Today the workers are still asking our permission [to establish their own unions]. Tomorrow they may not bother to ask us.” 90

The following day, August 27, the Soviet ambassador came to see Gierek with a letter describing the Kremlin’s growing concern over events in Poland. Soviet leaders were outraged by the presence of so many foreign journalists in the Lenin Shipyard. They wanted a much more vigorous propaganda campaign against the strikers, citing the way Lenin had dealt with the “anarchosyndicalist” opposition in 1921. Gierek understood this to be a reference to the purges of opposition leaders and the Red Army’s brutal suppression of a rebellion at the Kronshtadt naval base, with the loss of several thousand lives. Shaken by the comparison, he told the ambassador that the deployment of the army on the streets might only make things worse.