Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Gomułka’s successor, Edward Gierek, was a miner (he had quite good French, having worked in Belgium) and he wanted to profit from German Ostpolitik. He would make Poland ‘a new Japan’. His relations with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt were good; there was money to be had from the banks, stuffed with Arab dollars; Poland could export, as did the Far Eastern miracle-countries. Investment came in, and the skies above Upper Silesia — the Katowice region — turned a vague green, as factories pumped out their chemical smoke. For a time, this succeeded. Output rose by 11 per cent per annum and real wages by 7 per cent (1971-5). But consumption also shot up, as food to the value of $3bn was imported every year (in a country that, before the war, had exported it). However, Polish goods suffered for lack of quality, and when the second oil shock occurred, in 1978-9, the market for them went down. The external debt, at $20bn, could not be easily serviced, and investments, often pointless, were already taking 40 per cent of the national income. The ‘new Japan’ was looking instead at North Korea. Prices, preached the regime’s own economists (there had been quite a vogue for the sending of bright and orthodox Poles to business schools such as INSEAD), would have to go up, to take account of production costs. However, most workers could only see in that the privileges of the Party, and strikes began. The private butchers were permitted to sell the best cuts of meat, and could charge almost twice for them. Now they were permitted to sell cheap cuts as well, which affected ordinary consumers. The Lublin railwaymen got it into their heads that the lack of meat was caused by exports to the USSR, and they welded a train to the railway line heading east. At that, Gierek was summoned to explain himself to the General Secretary, Brezhnev, and a frigid communiqué resulted (in July 1980): ‘an exchange of information as to the situation in their respective countries’. In the docks of Gdańsk there was a stubborn woman, one Anna Walentynowicz, who worked a crane. There is always something of an imponderable about these working-class troubles in northern Poland: in that region, a great number of the people forcibly moved from the Ukraine had settled, including Polish Ukrainians (‘Ruthenes’) from the mountains of the south. Their children had inherited resentments to work out; and Anna Walentynowicz was herself from Rovno, in what had been a mainly Ukrainian area of old Poland. At any rate, she was refractory. She had been a good Communist and worker to start with — had even been decorated — but now she protested, and was dismissed, even though she only had a month or two before she would have reached the age of retirement. The workforce took up her cause, and there emerged another remarkable figure, Lech Wałęsa. Here was a good Catholic — eight children by the same wife — with a career as a fitter. He was also an organizer, and 13,000 people struck on 14 August 1980, in protest at the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz. They occupied the workplace, the Lenin Shipyard. Priests were well to the fore. A trade union, Solidarność (‘Solidarity’), emerged from this, and the very name had Catholic overtones, solidarietà in Italian, involving charity and co-operative movements, under clerical patronage.

A central matter, here, was that the Pope was a Pole. Karol Wojtyła was elected on 16 October 1978, having been Archbishop of Cracow, the most religious city in Poland. He had risen from the pious lower-middle class, and brought enthusiasm to everything (he was even in his youth a good amateur actor). He knew his Communists, and told people, even in 1946 when he was just a parish priest, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll finish themselves off.’ But he was also a good tactician: the formidable Cardinal Prince Sapieha promoted him, and when he went to Rome, though he did not like the changes in the Church that came with Vatican II, he was careful not to make a personal issue of things. He was also a considerable intellectual, very well-read in Catholic philosophy and able, when he invited the world’s philosophers to the Vatican, to hold his own. Other Popes before him had either been deeply troubled about the modern world, not really knowing what to do, or perhaps too keen to go along with it. John Paul II — the name he took — had no doubts. He really came from the triumphalist world of the later nineteenth century, when Leo XIII, with Rerum Novarum in 1891, had made an effort to reconcile Catholicism with socialism. Here, Leo had quoted Aquinas from the thirteenth century — when ‘capitalism’ had started — and tried to identify a Christian answer. The Conservative Party in England belonged in this context, and the Christian Democrats in Italy and Germany were exemplars; perhaps, even, the most interesting question in France is why there never was an equivalent. Pope John Paul certainly had the measure of the modern world, and had a good idea as to how it might be managed. For instance, he did not bother very much with the media, and had his chauffeur read out a fortnightly summary of the press in the back of the car. He did not bother very much about the secular pieties, such as democracy, which he probably associated with ugly women and uneatable food. However, he had a wonderful sense of timing, of stage presence (much admired by Sir John Gielgud), and a papal appearance was a memorable occasion. In Poland the audiences were in hundreds of thousands. It was the man and the hour. On 13 May 1981 Mehmet Ali Ağca tried to kill the Pope. There was a Bulgarian connection; Ağca himself was a Turkish Fascist who had already murdered the editor of a Turkish left-wing newspaper and had mysteriously escaped from his prison. The circumstances have never been explained, even by Ağca himself after long years of incarceration: he seems to have lost his mind. But it would not have been stupid on the KGB’s part to want rid of this Pope: for he did destroy them.

Communist Poland now disintegrated, at any rate down to its most basic parts. Gierek had a heart attack, was even imprisoned for a year and in the event he died in 2001 aged not far off a hundred. He was succeeded by a nonentity, Stanisław Kania. Communist Poland was now down to its essence, the army, in the shape of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. On 9 December 1981 Marshal Viktor Kulikov, as head of the Warsaw Pact forces, moved on Warsaw. On the 12th, at night, roadblocks were set up, borders were sealed, and special troops moved on the telephone exchanges with long axes to cut the wires abroad. At 6 a.m. on came the general, national anthem to the fore, sternness of gaze, while tanks patrolled the streets outside. It was a military coup. In military form, Jaruzelski was almost a fossil of the Kołakowski generation. It was not that he believed in Communism, but he did believe that the Poles must find a method of living with Russia, that the great mistake of the country’s history was to fail to do so. A good part of the aristocracy had thought the same, sometimes with a corrupt side, in the Convention of Targowice in the age of Catherine the Great (1792). Some priests at that time had behaved in a suicidally nationalist manner. Pope John Paul was determined not to let this happen again: the Church would this time have a strategic sense. He managed matters in Poland. He had gone there in May 1979, to an audience of 400,000 in Plac Zwyciestwa, and through Cardinal John Krol in the USA he had a good contact with Reagan. This Pope was not at all popular with the media, but the morning Mass in the Vatican was crowded as never before. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. This time round, a million people turned up for the Black Virgin at Częstochowa, and some pilgrims betook themselves there from Warsaw on their knees. The Politburo in Moscow were apoplectic. They had Afghanistan on their hands, and no-one wanted to repeat the experience of Prague in 1968 let alone Budapest in 1956. The only hope was that the Poles would themselves do something.