Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (121 page)

Gorbachev did not achieve his objective, a reformed and efficient Communism, shorn of its dysfunctions. Indeed, he failed utterly. But his achievement was impressive none the less. In the USSR there were no independent or even semi-autonomous institutions for critics and reformers to mobilize on their behalf: the Soviet system could only ever have been dismantled from inside and by initiative coming from above. By introducing first one element of change and then another and then another, Gorbachev progressively eroded the very system through which he had risen. Employing the vast powers of a Party General Secretary, he eviscerated the Party dictatorship from within.

This was a remarkable and unprecedented feat. No-one could have predicted it in 1984, when Chernenko died, and no-one did. Gorbachev, in the view of one of his close advisers, was ‘a genetic error of the system’.
²⁸⁴
In retrospect it has become tempting to conclude that his ascent was uncannily timely—as the Soviet system was tottering, so there emerged a leader who understood what was happening and successfully sought an exit strategy from empire. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Perhaps. And Mikhail Gorbachev certainly was not just another apparatchik.

But he surely had no idea what he was doing and would have been horrified had he known. His critics were more perspicacious. On the one hand, Party hardliners understandably hated Gorbachev—many of them warmly endorsed the notorious letter published in the newspaper
Sovetskaya Rossiya
on March 13th 1988 in which Nina Andreyeva, a Leningrad schoolteacher, angrily warned (reasonably enough, as it transpired) that the new reforms would inevitably lead the country back to capitalism. On the other hand, Gorbachev never had the unconditional support of radical reformers, who grew increasingly frustrated with his apparent indecisive-ness. It was one of Gorbachev’s weaknesses that in order to keep control of events he felt constrained to occupy the center ground whenever possible, encouraging new ideas but then slipping back into the arms of Party conservatives just as radical reformers like Yakovlev or Boris Yeltsin were pressing him to go much further. These vacillations, Gorbachev’s seeming reluctance to press the logic of his initiatives, and his insistence on not going too far or too fast left many of his early admirers feeling let down.

The trouble was that by relinquishing the Party’s monopoly of power and initiative, Gorbachev commensurately reduced his own influence as well. He was thus obliged to forge tactical alliances and trim between the extreme positions of others. This is a familiar if uncomfortable necessity for democratic politicians; but in the eyes of a nation accustomed to seventy years of dictatorship such maneuverings simply made Gorbachev appear weak. From the early months of 1989 onwards the Soviet President fell steadily in opinion polls. By the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev would have the support of just 21 percent of the public.

Long before his fall from power, then, Gorbachev had decidedly fallen from grace. But only at home: elsewhere, ‘Gorbymania’ flourished. On his increasingly frequent visits abroad Gorbachev was fêted by west European politicians and cheered by enthusiastic crowds. Late in 1988, Margaret Thatcher—one of Gorbachev’s most ardent fans—pronounced the Cold War ‘over’, Seen from Eastern Europe this might have been thought a little premature; but there too Mikhail Gorbachev was wildly popular.

In the ‘peoples’ democracies’ the Soviet leader’s domestic travails, though duly noted, counted for less than his foreign pronouncements, notably a widely reported speech to the United Nations on December 7th 1988. After announcing unilateral cuts in Soviet conventional forces in Europe, Gorbachev went on to advise his audience that ‘Freedom of choice is a universal principle. There should be no exceptions.’ This was more than just a renunciation of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, an acknowledgement that Moscow would not use force to impose its version of ‘Socialism’ upon fraternal states. What Gorbachev was conceding—and was immediately understood to have conceded—was that the citizens of the satellite states were now at liberty to go their own way, Socialist or not. Eastern Europe was about to re-enter history.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, the Soviet Union since 1985 had progressively removed itself from direct oversight of its client states. But the implications of this growing detachment remained unclear. The peoples’ democracies were still run by authoritarian party cliques whose power rested upon a massive repressive apparatus. Their police and intelligence services remained closely bound and beholden to the Soviet Union’s own security apparatus and continued to operate semi-independently of local authorities. And while the rulers in Prague or Warsaw or East Berlin were starting to appreciate that they could no longer count on Moscow’s unconditional support, neither they nor their subjects had a clear sense of what this meant.

The situation in Poland encapsulated these uncertainties. On the one hand, the declaration of martial law had re-asserted the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party. On the other hand, the suppression of Solidarity and the silencing of its leaders did nothing to ease the country’s underlying problems. Quite the contrary: Poland was still in debt, but now—thanks to international condemnation of the repression—its rulers could no longer extricate themselves from difficulty by further borrowing abroad. In effect, Poland’s rulers were facing the same dilemma they had tried to address in the 1970s, but with even fewer options.

Meanwhile, the opposition might have been criminalized but it had not evaporated. Clandestine publishing continued, as did lectures, discussions, theatrical performances and much else. Solidarity itself, though banned, maintained a virtual existence, especially after its best-known spokesman, Lech Wałesa, was released from internment in November 1982 (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, the following year). The regime could not take the risk of forbidding a return visit from the Pope, in June 1983, after which the Church became ever more engaged in underground and semi-official activities

The political police favored repression: in one notorious instance in 1984 they orchestrated the kidnap and murder of a popular radical priest, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko—
pour décourager les autres
. But Jaruzelski and most of his colleagues already understood that such provocations and confrontations would no longer work. Popiełuszko’s funeral drew a crowd of 350,000; and far from frightening off opposition the incident merely publicized the scale of popular support for the Church and for Solidarity, legal or no. By the mid-‘80s Poland was fast approaching a stand-off between a recalcitrant society and an increasingly desperate state.

The natural instinct of the Party leadership (in Warsaw as in Moscow) was to propose ‘reforms’. In 1986 Jaruzelski, now state President, released Adam Michnik and other Solidarity leaders from prison and through a newly installed ‘Ministry of Economic Reform’ offered a modest raft of economic changes designed, among other objectives, to attract renewed foreign funding of Poland’s national debt, now fast approaching $40 billion.
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In a bizarre nod to democracy, the government actually began asking Poles in 1987 what sort of economic ‘reform’ they would like: ‘Would you prefer’, they were asked, ‘a fifty percent rise in the price of bread and one hundred percent on petrol, or sixty percent for petrol and a hundred percent for bread?’ Unsurprisingly, the public’s response was, in essence, ‘none of the above’.

The question—and the decision to pose it—nicely illustrated the political as well as the economic bankruptcy of Poland’s Communist rulers. Indeed, it says something about the authorities’ crumbling credibility that Poland’s membership of the IMF was made possible in part by the
consent
of Solidarity itself. Despite being banned, the union had managed to maintain its organization abroad and it was Solidarity’s Brussels office that advised the IMF Managing Director in September 1985 to admit Poland—while insisting that Jaruzelski’s partial improvements were foredoomed and that only a package of thoroughgoing reforms could address the country’s troubles.
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By 1987 the most arresting aspect of the Polish situation was the sheer helplessness of the Party and its organs. Without actually facing any visible threat to its monopoly of power, the Polish United Workers Party was slipping into irrelevance. The ‘counter-society’ theorized by Michnik and others a decade earlier was emerging as a
de facto
source of authority and initiative. After 1986, debate within the Polish opposition turned not so much on teaching society to be free as on how much the opposition should agree to engage with the regime, and to what end.

A group of young economists at Warsaw’s School of Planning and Statistics, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, was already drawing up plans for an autonomous private business sector freed from central planning—i.e. a market; these and other proposals were intensely debated among ‘unofficial’ Poles and widely discussed abroad. But the guiding tenets of political ‘realism’ and the ‘self-limiting’ objectives of 1980-81 remained in force—confrontation and violence, which could only play into the hands of Party hardliners, were studiously and successfully avoided. Conversations were one thing, ‘adventures’ something else.

The trigger for the Party’s final eclipse, predictably enough, was yet another attempt to ‘reform’ the economy—or, more modestly, to reduce the country’s un-sustainable debt. In 1987 consumer prices were raised by some 25 percent; in 1988 by a further 60 percent. As in 1970, 1976 and again in 1980, so now: the sharp price rises sparked a round of strikes, culminating in a massive movement of stoppages and occupations in the spring and summer of 1988. In the past, lacking any leverage over the workforce, the Communist authorities had either abandoned efforts to raise prices or else resorted to force—or both. On this occasion they had a third option—appealing to the workers’ own leaders for help. In August 1988 General Czesław Kiszczak, the Interior Minister, urged Lech Wałesa—nominally a private citizen, the unacknowledged leader of an unrecognized organization—to meet him and negotiate an end to the country’s labor protests. Initially reluctant, Wałesa at last agreed.

Wałesa had little difficulty appealing to the strikers—the moral authority of Solidarity had only grown in the years since 1981—but the underlying issues remained: the country’s inflation rate was now approaching 1000 percent p.a. There ensued four months of sporadic unofficial contacts between Solidarity and the government, stimulating more public calls for ‘reform’. Drifting helplessly, the authorities oscillated between gestures and threats: replacing ministers, denying any plans for negotiations, promising economic change, threatening to close the Gdansk shipyard. The public’s confidence in the state, such as it was, collapsed.

On December 18th 1988—symptomatically if coincidentally just one week after Gorbachev’s seminal UN speech—a Solidarity ‘Citizens Committee’ was formed in Warsaw to plan for full-scale negotiations with the government. Jaruzelski, his options seemingly exhausted, at last conceded the obvious and forced a somewhat reluctant Central Committee to agree to talks. On February 6th 1989 the Communists officially recognized Solidarity as a negotiating partner and opened ‘round table’ negotiations with its representatives. The talks lasted until April 5th. On that day (once again a week after major Soviet developments, this time the open elections to the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies), all sides agreed to the legalization of independent trade unions, far-reaching economic legislation and, above all, a new elected Assembly.

In hindsight the outcome of the round-table talks was a negotiated termination of Communism in Poland, and at least to some of the participants this much was already clear. But no-one anticipated the
speed
of the dénouement. The elections to be held on June 4th, while allowing an unprecedented element of real choice, were rigged to ensure a Communist majority: voting for the national Senate was to be genuinely open, but in the elections to the Sejm (Parliamentary Assembly) half the seats were reserved for official (i.e. Communist) candidates. And by scheduling the elections so soon, the government hoped to capitalize on the disorganization and inexperience of its opponents.

The results came as a shock to everyone. Backed by Adam Michnik’s impromptu new daily ‘Election Gazette’ (
Gazeta Wyborcza
), Solidarity won 99/100 seats for the Senate and all the seats it was allowed to contest for the Sejm. Meanwhile only two of the Communist candidates standing for ‘reserved’ seats secured the 50 percent of the vote required to take up their places. Faced with a complete rout and unprecedented public humiliation, the Communist rulers of Poland had the option of ignoring the vote; declaring martial law once again; or else accepting defeat and relinquishing power.

Put thus, the choice was clear—as Gorbachev made quite explicit to Jaruzelski in a private phone conversation, the election must stand. Jaruzelski’s first thought was to secure a face-saving compromise by inviting Solidarity to join him in a coalition government, but this was rebuffed. Instead, after some weeks of further negotiation and unsuccessful Communist efforts to nominate their own prime minister, the Party leadership bowed to the inevitable and on September 12th 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki was approved as post-war Poland’s first non-Communist Prime Minister (although the Communists retained control of certain key ministries).

Meanwhile, in a shrewd political move, the Solidarity parliamentary group simultaneously voted to make Jaruzelski Head of State, effectively co-opting the Communist ‘moderates’ into the ensuing transition and easing their embarrassment. The following month Mazowiecki’s government announced plans to institute a ‘market economy’, presented in a stabilization program—the so-called ‘Balcerowicz Plan’—that was approved by the Sejm on December 28th. One day later, the ‘leading role’ of Poland’s Communist Party was formally excised from the country’s constitution. Within four weeks, on January 27th 1990, the Party itself had been dissolved.