Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (5 page)

Nor was this merely an economic problem. Just as central planning failed to keep up with the volatile demands of globalization, so, too, the ideological hegemony of Marxism-Leninism stifled the moral and spiritual development of East-bloc populations. Every citizen of the Soviet empire lived the daily contradiction between the triumphant pronouncements of official propaganda—tirelessly and uniformly repeated in schools, workplaces, and the official media—and the shortages,
bottlenecks, and petty corruption of real life. In Stalin’s day, the discrepancies had been overlaid by the exercise of state terror and the demands of everyday survival. By the time of Brezhnev’s dotage in the 1970s, these more immediate constraints had given way to apathy, cynicism, and squalor. Those who lived through the period dubbed it the “time of stagnation.” It was a label that evoked a psychological crisis as well as an economic one. Some responded to the void with drink; alcoholism soared. A select few questioned the rationale behind the party’s monopoly over history, culture, and the search for meaning. It is no accident that the 1970s were the decade of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. They may have spoken only for a minority—just as did the sixties counterculture radicals or the civil rights activists in the United States. But what they had to say resonated for society as a whole.

This contradiction between public orthodoxy and private skepsis was at its strongest, perhaps, in Poland. Communist rule in Poland, since its establishment in 1944, had a rocky history. Some Poles had managed to continue armed resistance to the Soviet-installed government well into the 1950s. Every few years, it seemed, Poles took to the streets to protest the communist system. In 1956, workers rioted in the central city of Poznan. In 1968 students took to the streets, inspired by the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia and the youth revolts in Western Europe. In 1970, workers in factories and shipyards along the Baltic seacoast went on strike and marched through cities. All of these public protests were suppressed by force.

Some of the worst violence took place in 1970, when at least three dozen workers were killed and some one thousand others wounded during an operation involving thousands of heavily armed troops. The reigning party leader, Władysław Gomułka, had sparked the unrest by sharply hiking food prices. He was now forced into retirement as punishment for his error. Gomułka, who had lived for years in Moscow, was a classic slogan-intoning apparatchik. The man who replaced him as communist party leader, Edward Gierek, seemed to offer something different. Gierek—who had studied for a while in Belgium and even spoke a bit of French—was a natty dresser and a self-confessed technocrat who felt equally at home meeting with workers and foreign dignitaries. As soon as he assumed power, he headed off to Gdańsk to apologize to the workers there for the bloodshed and to promise a fresh beginning. Then he embarked on a series of “consultations” with various social groups to demonstrate his democratic credentials. German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing pronounced Gierek a man they could do business with and took every opportunity to sing his praises.

Gierek differed from Gomułka in economic policy, too. Gomułka, like many traditional Stalinists, had praised the values of economic self-sufficiency, but Gierek
saw nothing wrong with expanding foreign trade. Gierek believed, in fact, that cooperating with the West might even offer a way out of an economic impasse that failed to provide Poles with adequate supplies of meat, milk, or housing. As he saw it, his government didn’t need to make fundamental changes to the existing system of central planning; instead, it could borrow money from Western banks to modernize the economy. The resulting growth would enable repayment of the loans, Poles would have more consumer goods, and everyone would be happy.

And for a while, it seemed to work. In the first half of the 1970s, Poland posted growth rates of 10 percent per year. The number of private cars in Poland rose from 450,000 in 1970 to more than 2 million by the end of the decade.
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An opinion poll in 1975—yes, there was such a thing, even in communist Poland—found that some three-quarters of the population judged that their living standards had been rising.
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Poles were happy that life seemed to be improving. Yet this still did not mean that they accepted the official view of communism as the best of all possible systems. This skepticism was something that they had in common with many other citizens in the communist bloc. But there was one particularly striking thing that set Poles apart, and that was their loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church. For centuries—even when their nation had been divided up among more powerful European empires—the Poles had linked their national identity with the church, and this pact continued even in the People’s Republic of Poland.

The party had done everything it could to efface its rival from the hearts and minds of Poles. In 1953, the Polish primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, who had managed to maintain important church prerogatives at the very height of Stalinist persecution, went to jail rather than bend to the dictates of the Politburo. When he emerged three years later, he enjoyed a moral prestige that few party functionaries could have challenged and firmly established the church as a credible spiritual alternative to official Marxism-Leninism.

For whatever reason, Poles kept going to church. The communists inaugurated officially sanctioned name-giving rituals for newborns—but people kept asking priests to baptize their babies. The party offered benefits for teens who participated in communist coming-of-age ceremonies—but parents continued getting their children confirmed. The state promoted civil wedding services—but couples kept tying the knot in churches instead. In 1975, despite decades of antichurch propaganda, 77 percent of Poles surveyed declared that they regularly participated in religious activities. The most active group of churchgoers were workers (about 90 percent).
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For intellectuals, the church offered the possibility of regular immersion in a competing narrative, one that was not couched in the language of historical materialism. Children who attended Catholic Sunday schools learned about a system of morality that contrasted with state utilitarianism. Those who read Catholic books and regularly attended mass absorbed a Christian eschatology that stood at odds with the dictatorship of the proletariat; along the way, too, they sometimes picked up a historical narrative about their own country that had little in common with official communist myths about the triumph of the working class. By the late 1970s, the Catholic weekly
Tygodnik Powszechny
(General Weekly) had a circulation of forty thousand (compared to three hundred thousand for the party’s official equivalent).
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The Catholic University of Lublin was the country’s only nonstate institution of higher education.

By the second half of the 1970s, the optimism of the early Gierek period was evaporating. The government was having trouble finding the hard currency to service its growing foreign debt, and its only choice was to squeeze domestic producers harder to make up the shortfall. A new round of price hikes in 1976 triggered strikes and protests in the industrial city of Radom. Gierek rescinded the increases within twenty-four hours, but the upheaval had an interesting side effect. A new civil society began to emerge. One of the dissident groups perceived a growing but inchoate potential for working-class protest. What if the intellectuals started helping strikers with political and legal advice? The new organization called itself KOR, the Polish acronym for “Workers’ Defense Committee.”

The assertiveness of these new activists spooked Gierek’s Politburo. Western leaders wanted to see their East-bloc counterparts observe the niceties of respect for human rights, and Gierek, eager to preserve the flow of foreign credit, accordingly ordered his secret police, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service, known by its abbreviation as the SB), to tolerate a certain degree of dissident activity—a policy wryly referred to by its beneficiaries as “repressive tolerance.”

The tolerance was not always in evidence. On May 7, 1977, a young university student named Stanisław Pyjas, a member of KOR, was found dead in a Kraków alleyway. He had been murdered. His classmates took the opportunity to stage public demonstrations against the killing and call for an investigation. Even workers and peasants from the area joined in—testimony to the increasing effectiveness of KOR’s efforts.
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The students who organized it all called themselves the “Student Solidarity Committee.” The priest who chose to preside over the funeral mass for Pyjas was none other than the archbishop of Kraków himself, Karol Józef Cardinal
Wojtyła, the man who would later be known as John Paul II. Pyjas, he said, had “fallen victim to the authorities’ hatred of the democracy movement among the students.”
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He openly supported the protests.

It was a bad moment for Gierek. In July, eager to avoid being censured by the West, he announced an amnesty for some KOR members (though the secret police continued to harry the group, albeit less visibly). The activists returned to the work of building ties among themselves, the workers, and the Roman Catholic Church, thus laying the groundwork for a concerted opposition to the regime. In retrospect, this can be seen as a crucial precondition for what was to follow.
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But it certainly didn’t look that way at the time. The socialist system, after all, had weathered far more serious challenges in the past.

M
atters looked radically different in another part of the communist world. While the leaders of the USSR found themselves confronting the symptoms of stagnation at home, the People’s Republic of China faced the opposite problem. The Chinese entered the 1970s in a state of upheaval.

In 1966, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong had launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1960, prompted by Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinization policies, Mao had broken off relations with Moscow, denouncing the Soviets as “revisionists” and declaring, even more provocatively, that the Kremlin had embraced “state capitalism” (an allusion to Khrushchev’s tentative efforts to loosen central planning).

The Russians had also roused Mao’s ire by criticizing his utopian plans for the wholesale introduction of communal agriculture at the end of the 1950s, the so-called Great Leap Forward. The disruptions caused by this hasty attempt to reengineer Chinese agriculture resulted in nationwide famines that ultimately killed some 45 million Chinese from 1958 to 1961. For Mao, Moscow’s attacks on his policies were further proof that the Soviets were backsliding, exemplified by an ossified, bureaucratic mind-set that amounted to a wholesale rejection of Stalin’s revolutionary achievements. Mao insisted that China set itself apart by embracing the principle of “continuing revolution,” renewing itself through repeated assaults on the remnants of the privileged classes. As Mao saw it, his views were under attack at home as well. Even though he still stood at the center of an all-encompassing personality cult, he saw many enemies among his own comrades at the top of the party. There was no question that the catastrophe of the Great Leap had cost him some political capital within the leadership; in the wake of the great famine, some of his high-ranking colleagues—most notably Liu Shaoqi, chairman of the People’s Republic, and Deng
Xiaoping, CCP general secretary—had modified some of Mao’s most foolhardy reforms, thus ameliorating the crisis. This was something that Mao was not prepared to forgive, and he was eager to unleash a purge that would enable him to get the upper hand on his domestic opponents. His already rampant paranoia was reinforced by Khrushchev’s downfall in 1964, the victim of an internal Kremlin coup. If the Soviet leader’s enemies could band together to take him down, what was to stop Mao from meeting a similar fate?
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The Cultural Revolution was his attempt to regain the initiative. Seventeen years of tough communist rule had left society seething with resentment, and through a carefully orchestrated effort Mao now directed these pent-up frustrations against the party establishment and anyone else who could be labeled an enemy of change. Urged on by Mao and his allies, mobs of radical young students and workers, organized into detachments known as “Red Guards,” began to launch assaults against officials, intellectuals, or anyone with alleged connections to the “bourgeoisie” or nefarious foreign powers. Between 1966 and 1976, millions of people were tortured, killed, or driven to suicide on the slightest of pretexts. Countless cultural artifacts and cultural monuments were destroyed as part of a frenzied campaign to vilify the past.

Many of the victims were tried-and-true Communists. Mao skillfully directed the vicious passions of the Cultural Revolution against his own foes within the party. The ranks of the purged reached to the highest levels of the state. Liu Shaoqi, who had become chairman of the party in 1959, was arrested and tortured, finally dying from abuse in 1969. Millions of others were denounced in humiliating mass “self-criticism” sessions, thrown into jail or labor camps, or sent off to farms or factories in remote places.

They were soon followed into exile by many of the authors of their misfortune. It didn’t take long for the violence of the early stages of the Cultural Revolution to descend into armed anarchy, as competing detachments of Red Guards began battling each other in obscure doctrinal feuds. (The fighting was anything but trivial, though; in some cases, even tanks and artillery were involved.) Mao soon realized that enough was enough and called out the army to restore order. The government shut down the universities, and millions of radical students were dispatched to the impoverished countryside to discover the joys of honest manual labor. Many never returned.