Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The Solidarity leader rose to his feet. His face, lit up by the television lights, appeared even more swollen than before. He had what he later described as a “subconscious premonition” of what was about to happen but decided that resistance was pointless. 167

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have no communications with the outside world. Perhaps they will be restored tomorrow, perhaps not. In connection with this, I wish you good night.”

He stood up, threw his hands up in the air, as if to say, “There’s nothing more I can do,” and strode out of the room.

BY THE TIME WAŁĘSA REACHED his apartment on the outskirts of Gdańsk, ZOMO squads were knocking on the doors of known Solidarity supporters all over Poland. If there was no response, they simply smashed the door down. Those detained in Operation X included some of the best-known people in the country: writers, actors, historians, film producers, and academicians, in addition to straightforward union activists. In an attempt to make the roundup seem a little more evenhanded, a handful of former Communist leaders, including Gierek, were also detained. Some of the would-be internees were already dead, an indication that the lists had been drawn up many months previously.

At 2:00 a.m. ZOMO in pale blue battle dress surrounded the Monopol Hotel in Gdańsk, where members of the Solidarity National Commission were staying. All exits were blocked. The police went from room to room, handcuffing Solidarity officials and leading them out into waiting police trucks. Members of the antiterrorist squad in tightly fitting nylon jackets guarded the roof. The twenty-seven-year-old leader of the Warsaw branch of Solidarity, Zbigniew Bujak, observed the scene from across the street. He could not believe his eyes. His first thought was that the government had gone crazy. The whole of Poland would go on strike. 168

The doorbell rang in Wałęsa’s apartment building in Zaspa at around 3:00 a.m. 169The Solidarity leader had gone to bed. His wife, Danuta, looked through the peephole to see the local Communist Party chief, Tadeusz Fiszbach, in the company of the provincial governor and half a dozen policemen with crowbars. A reputed liberal, Fiszbach had been woken a short time before and ordered to put Wałęsa on a plane to Warsaw for “talks with Jaruzelski.” He seemed upset. At first Wałęsa refused to go. After the governor told him that the ZOMO were ready to take him to Warsaw by force, he packed a few clothes and left. (Wałęsa never did meet with Jaruzelski. After a few weeks in a government villa outside Warsaw, he was taken to a hunting lodge near the Soviet border that had once been the playground of Poland’s “red bourgeoisie.”)

At 6:00 a.m. Jaruzelski appeared on television in full general’s uniform, flanked by the Polish flag. “Our country has found itself at the edge of an abyss,” he declared. “Poland’s future is at stake: the future for which my generation fought.”

In a voice laden with emotion, Jaruzelski accused Solidarity leaders of everything from “acts of terrorism” to economic sabotage. If the present situation were allowed to continue, he declared, the result would be “famine,” “chaos,” and “civil war.” Socialism was the only path possible for Poland. With heavy heart, he announced that a state of war had been imposed on the entire country. A Military Council of National Salvation had been formed to bring the country back from the brink of disaster. Military tribunals were being established to punish anyone acting against the “interests of the state.”

Jaruzelski ended his speech with the first line of the national anthem: “Poland has not perished as long as we live.” As he spoke, the chords of the patriotic mazurka sung by exiled Polish legionnaires following the eighteenth-century partition of their country welled up in the background.

From Jaruzelski’s point of view, the first few days of martial law went astonishingly well. A few Solidarity leaders—Bujak was the most important—managed to go into hiding, but most were arrested. As expected, workers at many large factories attempted to stage occupation strikes. All were broken up with brutal efficiency by the ZOMO, usually under the cover of the nighttime curfew. The Lenin Shipyard, regarded by the entire country as Solidarity’s inner fortress, held out for less than a week. The organizers of the strike had trouble persuading the frightened workers to guard the perimeter of the shipyard, including gate number two. After establishing a psychological advantage, the ZOMO smashed the shipyard wall at several different points and rounded up the protesters.

The most serious casualties occurred at the Wujek coal mine in Silesia, where Solidarity supporters armed themselves with axes, chains, and iron rods. The miners had vowed to defend themselves after hearing of beatings and mass arrests elsewhere in Silesia. Fierce hand-to-hand combat broke out after ZOMO units attacked the mine with tanks and helicopters, three days after the imposition of martial law. Encircled by the enraged miners in a narrow courtyard, the riot police opened fire. Nine protesters were killed. The wall where the miners died became a makeshift shrine. The victims’ helmets lay on the top of the wall for months afterward, along with mounds of fresh flowers and messages of support for the banned trade union. 170

With his massive blow against Solidarity, Jaruzelski succeeded in reversing the movement’s principal accomplishment: overcoming the fear that had divided Pole from Pole. As was the case before August 1980, the Communist regime now controlled an atomized and defeated society. The psychological walls that Solidarity had succeeded in smashing went up again practically overnight. Ordinary people began to mistrust one another once more. Anyone could be a police informer. The desperate economic situation also helped the general. The priority for most families in the exceptionally cold winter of 1981 was not politics, but keeping warm and finding enough to eat.

It was enough to look at the faces of people in the streets the day after martial law was declared to see that Jaruzelski had won his gamble. The exuberance and sense of pride that had been the hallmark of the Solidarity period disappeared overnight. The people themselves were different. Millions of rank-and-file Solidarity supporters retreated to the safety of their apartments. Their place on the streets was taken by hundreds of thousands of people connected in some way with the Communist regime. They immediately began ripping down Solidarity posters, guarding public buildings, and issuing permits of one kind or another. Their cynical, dissolute faces wore expressions of immense relief. Such people had been around all along; they had just lain low, waiting for better times.

IN THE SHORT TERM Jaruzelski won his “war” with the Polish people. Operation X was a model of its kind, one that will be studied by would-be military dictators for a long time to come. The coup showed that it is possible to turn back the information revolution. The most sophisticated communications technology in the world is no protection against a totalitarian regime. A sufficiently determined dictator can lock up the photocopy machines, unplug the automatic telephone exchanges, and hunt down the typewriters and computers.

The cost of doing all this, however, was immense. In order to reimpose Communist Party control over Poland, Jaruzelski had to take the country back into the Middle Ages. He turned an industrialized country in the heart of Europe into a land cut off from the outside world, a country without telephones and telex machines. He locked up ten thousand of the best and the brightest. He imposed a stifling censorship on the mass media, closing down hundreds of newspapers and obliging television news readers to wear military uniforms. The martial law decrees covered everything from the introduction of compulsory labor and political loyalty tests for millions of state employees to bans on recreational sailing and sales of gasoline. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was introduced. Poland’s borders with the outside world were sealed. In order to prevent information from flowing freely around the country, travel without a permit was banned. Even savings accounts were frozen to prevent money from reaching Solidarity activists who had managed to avoid arrest.