Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

“A soldier in a tank is only effective if he is willing to shoot. These soldiers are Poles, and we don’t know if they would be willing to shoot at workers.” 91

Gierek postponed a decision on what to do. He seemed to be hoping for a miracle or at least more concrete guidance from Moscow on how to deal with a crisis that confounded all Marxist-Leninist theory. The situation had continued to deteriorate, and by Friday, August 29, half the country was out on strike. By official count, some seven hundred factories were being occupied by around seven hundred thousand workers. “Strike alerts” had been declared in many of the country’s remaining factories. The protests were on the verge of becoming a general strike. The labor unrest had spread from the Baltic coast to the textile city of Łódż in central Poland and the coalmining region of Silesia in the south. Practically every sector of Polish industry was affected.

The news that the coal miners had joined the strike was a terrible blow. Gierek regarded Silesia as a personal fiefdom, the one region of Poland that would never betray him. Silesia had been the springboard from which he had launched his political career. Its people were reserved and industrious, not given to dramatic political gestures. The local security forces kept a tight rein on dissidents. As the situation in the rest of the country grew progressively worse, Gierek considered making a last stand in Silesia.

“We will withdraw from Warsaw to the South and then we will reconquer the country vojvodship by vojvodship,” he told an associate, in the desperate tone of a man who knows that he has already lost. 92

Over the past two weeks the first secretary had changed his mind several times about how to respond to the labor unrest. In his memoirs, written ten years after the event, he claimed he consistently opposed the use of force. His Politburo colleagues and Soviet interlocutor present a different picture of his actions and state of mind during those tension-filled days. According to these accounts, Gierek considered calling for Soviet military assistance at the beginning of the crisis. His Politburo colleagues opposed the idea, and nothing came of it. At other times Gierek insisted that the protests be defused peacefully. Many different emotions were churning inside him: the desire to hang on to his job; bitterness at the disloyalty of those around him; concern for his own reputation.

“There were many different Giereks,” recalled Kania, the man closest to him during this period. “Not only the early Gierek, the man of the early seventies, who had social support, and the later Gierek, who had to leave the political scene. In every period there were several Giereks, and during the most difficult times there were several Giereks in the course of a single day.” 93

Now Gierek sat quietly as the debate swirled around him at the Politburo meeting. His tactic of choice—procrastination—was no longer feasible. There were essentially two alternatives: agree to the demand for free trade unions or suppress the unrest by force. The Interior Ministry task force had devised a plan to storm the Lenin Shipyard and take over the Baltic ports. That morning, the head of the task force, General Bogusław Stachura, had reported that his men were ready “to liquidate the counterrevolutionary nest in Gdańsk.” 94In the Politburo the spokesman for the hard-liners (or men of cement, as they were known in Polish) was a former trade union boss named Władysław Kruczek, an elderly holdover from the Stalinist era. He demanded the immediate declaration of a state of emergency.

“The regime must begin to defend itself. Even the most beautiful speeches are not producing any results.” 95

This was the signal for the Politburo members in charge of security to mount a counteroffensive. Although they had secretly begun drawing up plans for a crackdown, they thought it was too early to put them into effect. 96Kania described the proposal for Wałęsa’s arrest as “a daydream.” Jaruzelski, the practical military officer, pointed out that the Polish constitution made no provision for a “state of emergency.” If force was used, the government would have to declare a “state of war” (stan wojenny) , but such a step was “unrealistic” at a time when half the country was on strike. One should not give orders that could not be carried out. A similar point was made by the police minister, Stanislaw Kowalczyk. The security forces lacked the manpower to crack down everywhere at once. His men could seize port facilities in Gdańsk, but there would certainly be bloodshed.

The Politburo was in a quandary. Gierek’s frantic appeals to Moscow for guidance had produced no result. Brezhnev was officially said to be “unavailable.” The Kremlin was not prepared to issue a dispensation to the Poles to embrace the heresy of free trade unions, which it saw as tantamount to the “legalization of the antisocialist opposition.” 97On the other hand, Soviet leaders were frightened by what might happen if the Polish leadership failed to reach some kind of agreement with the workers. So they did what Soviet bureaucrats usually did when they could not make up their minds: They stopped answering their phones. They also put their own forces in the region on “full combat alert” and called up one hundred thousand military reservists. 98

The first secretary summed up the mood of the meeting by telling his Politburo colleagues that free trade unions were unacceptable, ideologically and politically. There was, however, no other acceptable short-term solution. “We are being threatened with a general strike. We have to choose the lesser evil and then find a way of extricating ourselves from it.”

THE LAST DAY OF THE STRIKE at the Lenin Shipyard began, as usual, with a mass. A wooden platform had been erected in the middle of the shipyard to form a makeshift altar, complete with carpet and wooden crucifix. A few yards away, on the wall of an administration building, was a faded hammer and sickle flag. A priest in resplendent white vestments broke a ceremonial wafer in front of ten thousand kneeling workers and television cameras from all over the world. Other priests fanned out through the crowd to hear mumbled confessions.

When the time came to sign the agreement giving workers the right to form independent labor unions, Wałęsa produced a foot-long souvenir pen of the pope’s pilgrimage to Poland the previous year. It was a typical Wałęsa gesture, a tongue-in-cheek way of sending a message to millions of his fellow Poles. He knew that state television planned to broadcast large parts of the signing ceremony, and he wanted to distinguish himself from the party functionaries with whom he had been negotiating. He would never permit himself to become one of them. He also wanted to recognize publicly his debt to the man who had inspired the nation to voice its opposition to totalitarian rule. The ploy was successful. That evening Polish television viewers were permitted their first glimpse of the strikers who had been defying the Communist government for the past two weeks. When they saw a worker with an oversize mustache and a pen with a portrait of the pope on it sitting next to some bureaucrats in expensive-looking suits, they immediately knew which side they were on.

Unusually for him, Wałęsa read his speech declaring an end to the strike from a prepared text. He paid tribute to Jagielski, the government negotiator, and “a certain rather reasonable group” in the Politburo that had resisted the use of force. “We reached agreement as Poles with Poles…. Did we achieve all we wanted, fulfill all our longings and our dreams?… Not everything. But we all know we gained a lot…. We got all we could in the present situation. The rest will be achieved because we have what matters most: our independent, self-governing trade unions. That is our guarantee for the future.” 99He stressed the words “independent” and “self-governing” as if they were a magical mantra, before concluding, “I declare the strike over.”