Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The pressure on the Polish leadership reached a peak in early April, a few days after yet another well-advertised invasion scare. Soviet military planes began flying over Poland without requesting permission. 124The Soviets then sent a military aircraft to take Kania and Jaruzelski to a secret meeting with Ustinov and Andropov. Remembering the fate that had befallen hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, the Polish leaders wondered if they would ever return. 125The session took place in a railway carriage in a forest on the Soviet side of the border. For a full six hours Ustinov and Andropov accused the Poles of turning a blind eye to “counterrevolution” and failing to respond to “anti-Soviet attacks.” The harangue continued until 3:00 a.m.

Kania and Jaruzelski sidestepped Soviet demands for the immediate introduction of martial law but promised “to restore order with our own forces.” Andropov reported to the Soviet Politburo that the Polish comrades seemed “extremely tense,” “nervous,” and psychologically “worn out.” 126

While the Soviets continued to threaten military intervention, they had good reasons to avoid such a step. One reason was economic. As a senior Soviet official explained to Honecker, who was itching to teach the Poles a lesson, the Soviet economy was reeling from a series of three disastrous harvests. Oil production, which fueled both the military machine and the civilian economy, was nearly 10 percent below projected targets in 1980. In order to make up the shortfall, planners were counting on a sharp increase in exports of natural gas. But this was possible only with large-scale technical and financial assistance from Western countries. 127If the West responded to an invasion of Poland with a trade embargo, the results could be catastrophic. 128

The military-strategic considerations were even more compelling. Nearly a hundred thousand Soviet troops were already committed to Afghanistan. What had been planned as a swift and relatively painless operation was turning into a classic military quagmire, with no end in sight. Andropov, who had helped mastermind the invasion, now realized Soviet troops were ill prepared to fight an unconventional war. To some of his associates, he appeared to be having second thoughts about the whole operation. 129An invasion of Poland would stretch the Kremlin’s resources to the limit.

“In practice, we already have three fronts,” said Ustinov, explaining the Soviet view of the world to Jaruzelski, as the two defense ministers inspected troops participating in a joint military exercise. Shouting to make himself heard above the roar of helicopter engines, the Soviet marshal ticked off the “fronts” one by one: Afghanistan; China, which was cooperating with the United States; and finally Poland, where Solidarity was acting as an imperialist “Trojan horse.” The implication was that one of the fronts had to be liquidated. 130

Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo ideologist and head of the commission on Poland, put the matter even more succinctly. He told his associates that the Soviet Union simply could not afford “a second Afghanistan.” 131

Like generals fighting the last war, both Polish and Western leaders were obsessed with the “Czech variant.” The world had changed since 1968, and there were many differences between Czechoslovakia and Poland. Even if the Kremlin had not been bogged down in Afghanistan, an invasion of Poland represented a much greater military challenge than the relatively peaceful Czechoslovak operation. There were more than twice as many Poles as there were Czechs and Slovaks, and the Poles had a history of resisting foreign armies. Furthermore, the Soviets never gave up on the Polish leadership, as they had with Dubĉek. Jaruzelski, in particular, was highly regarded in Moscow. 132

At the secret meeting in the railway carriage in the Belorussian forest, Ustinov was disturbed by the depressed state of mind of Jaruzelski and Kania and their penchant for procrastination. But he brusquely brushed aside Jaruzelski’s plea that he be allowed to resign because of exhaustion. “We need this pair,” he told his Politburo colleagues a few days later. 133

Soviet leaders treated their Polish counterparts as subordinates, bound by the discipline of the international Communist movement. When Brezhnev called Kania or Jaruzelski on the phone, he used the familiar ty form of address, as if he were speaking to a lowly apparatchik in Omsk or Tomsk. Polish leaders, by contrast, always took care to use the polite vy form in talking to Brezhnev. Kania and Jaruzelski replied to the Soviet leader’s slurred monologues as if they were the distillation of human wisdom, meekly thanking him for his continued “trust” and “support.” The Soviet treatment of Polish leaders was sometimes gratuitously insulting. The commander of the Warsaw Pact, Marshal Viktor Kulikov, even threw Kania out of his residence late one night, allegedly for being drunk. 134

Soviet leaders had one enormous advantage in the high-stakes political poker game that took place around Poland in 1980 and 1981. They could see the other side’s hand. The Poles and the Americans knew that the Soviets were in a position to invade, but they could only guess at the Kremlin’s real intentions. The Soviets, by contrast, had access to detailed firsthand information of virtually everything that happened in the Polish Politburo. Their spies were everywhere: in factories, government offices, military barracks. The KGB resident in Poland knew everything going on in the Polish Security Ministry. The Polish army was integrated into the Soviet chain of command, with Soviet “advisers” and “inspectors” at every level. 135Soviet leaders paid careful attention to Kania’s drinking habits and Jaruzelski’s fits of depression.

In the end this intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of their Polish “partners” allowed the Soviets to turn a losing hand into a winning one.

SLIM, STIFF, AND ALMOST PAINFULLY SHY Wojciech Jaruzelski was an enigma to his countrymen. They knew from his speeches that he was an orthodox Marxist who had absorbed the political lexicon of Poland’s conquerors. They knew he was trusted by Moscow; otherwise he would not have become the youngest general in the Polish army at the age of thirty-three. But they were also impressed by his aristocratic bearing and perfect diction. There were rumors that his family belonged to the class of feudal landowners known as the szlachta , the privileged gentry of pre-Communist Poland. It was said that Jaruzelski and his family had suffered greatly at the hands of the Soviets. The real thoughts of this aristocratic general, whose accomplishments included fencing and horse riding, seemed forever concealed behind a pair of thick dark glasses.

In the forest lands northeast of Warsaw, in the tiny village of Trzeciny, where the young Wojciech had grown up, the sense of confusion was even greater. The villagers remembered his father, Władysław, who had cut a dashing figure with his saber when he went off to fight the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. They remembered his mother, Wanda, a quiet, determined lady who had brought her children up to be good Catholics and good Poles, reading them stories about brave Polish heroes struggling against Russian rule. Finally they remembered Wojciech himself, a timid, frail child who appeared in church without fail every Sunday, before being packed off to a strict Warsaw boarding school at the age of ten. The villagers found it difficult to believe that this was the same Wojciech who later became head of a Communist government and first secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Something must have happened to him. The story spread that the Soviets had kidnapped the real Wojciech and cunningly sent a Communist double back to Poland in his place. 136