Down with Big Brother (13 page)

There was a pause as he struggled for breath.

“But if there are complications, we will go in. We will go in.”

Another long pause.

“But without you, we won’t go in.”
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A few hours later the high command of the Warsaw Pact withdrew the order for eighteen divisions of highly trained combat troops to move into Poland at midnight on December 8 for the
Soyuz
80 “maneuver.”
¹¹⁶
The first stage of the crisis was over. The second was about to begin.

W
HILE THE
P
OLISH LEADERS FLEW
home to Warsaw, the Soviet, East German, and Czechoslovak troops that had been expecting to crush the “counterrevolution” in Poland began to demobilize. As the days went by and the threat of a Soviet invasion failed to materialize, there were sighs of relief in Western capitals. Superpower relations, already seriously damaged by the invasion of Afghanistan, would not be thrown back into the ice age. But a tantalizing question remained: What had caused the old men in the Kremlin to pull back from the brink?

In their memoirs both Kania and Brzezinski claim some of the credit for persuading Brezhnev to back down. The arguments of Polish leaders, and the public and private warnings issued by the White House, must have had some impact on Soviet calculations. But Politburo records released in Moscow after the collapse of communism provide another explanation for Soviet restraint. The Soviet leaders had no intention of invading Poland, except possibly as a last resort, in the event of massive civil disorders. The Kremlin strategy all along was to pressure the Polish leadership to do its dirty work. Large-scale military maneuvers around the country’s borders—which would certainly be observed by American spy satellites—was one particularly effective method of raising the psychological stakes. Repeated American warnings of a Soviet invasion of Poland may have inadvertently served Moscow’s purposes by increasing the pressure on Warsaw to take drastic action against Solidarity.

Kremlin documents show that Soviet leaders began actively considering the martial law option as early as October, a full fourteen months before Jaruzelski eventually took the plunge. They knew about the contingency plans for a state of emergency and wanted the Polish leadership to put them into effect. Brezhnev contrasted the passivity of the Polish leadership with the repressive policies adopted by Tito’s successors in Yugoslavia, who used the pretext of some minor labor unrest to arrest three hundred Albanian dissidents.

“Wałęsa travels from one end of the country to another and is treated in high esteem,” Brezhnev grumbled. “Perhaps they really should introduce martial law.”

Other Politburo members agreed. “If martial law is not introduced, then the situation is going to become more and more complicated,” declared Ustinov. “There are rumblings in the [Polish] army.”
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The ostentatious manner with which Soviet generals shared their invasion plans with their Polish colleagues also smacked of political intimidation. The Soviets even allowed a visiting Polish delegation to make copies of a map showing precisely where the eighteen Warsaw Pact divisions would be deployed. Polish staff officers accompanied Soviet advance troops on reconnaissance missions into Poland.
¹¹⁸
Looking back at the events of December 1980 twelve years later, Jaruzelski acknowledged that Soviet leaders had stage-managed the summit “to scare us out of our wits.”
¹¹⁹
The deputy chief of staff of the Warsaw Pact, General Anatoly Gribkov, conceded that the Kremlin had sought to “put pressure on the Polish leadership and society in every possible way.”
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The exercises produced their intended effect. After returning from Moscow, Jaruzelski ordered that preparations for martial law be accelerated. Lists were drawn up of four thousand leading Solidarity activists who would be interned as soon as a state of emergency was declared.
¹²¹

By early 1981 the Kremlin strategy had become clear. “We must subject the Polish leadership to constant pressure,” Ustinov told the Politburo on January 29. “We are planning maneuvers in Poland in March. I think we should extend these maneuvers so as to create the impression that our forces are ready [to intervene].”
¹²²
Three months later a secret Kremlin document described the fear of a Soviet invasion of Poland as “a factor that restrains the counterrevolution” that should be “exploited to the maximum possible extent.”
¹²³

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.
¹²⁴
The 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.
¹²⁵
The 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.”
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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.
¹²⁷
If 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.
¹²⁹
An 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.
¹³⁵
Soviet 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.

WARSAW
December 12, 1981

S
LIM, 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

But it
was
the real Wojciech. Jaruzelski fitted the classic Marxist-Leninist profile of a “class enemy.” His family could trace its heraldic crest, a blindfolded crow, back to the thirteenth century. His paternal grandfather had been sent in chains to Siberia after taking part in the great antitsarist insurrection of 1863. Because of his defiance, the family had lost most of its property. Despite his noble status, Władysław Jaruzelski was reduced to working as an administrator on the family’s former estates. After the Red Army had occupied eastern Poland in September 1939, the Jaruzelski family fled to Lithuania, where they had relatives. A few days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, in June 1941, Jaruzelski senior was arrested as a “socially dangerous element.” By the time he was released from a labor camp in January 1942, following a deal between Stalin and General Władysław Sikorski, the head of the Polish government-in-exile, this strong two-hundred-pound man had become an emaciated skeleton, weighing no more than a hundred pounds. He died of dysentery and malnutrition six months later.
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