Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (51 page)

His observation was factually correct, but that did not diminish its potential to provoke. If there was one thing that Communist rulers feared more than anything else—even more than religion, in fact—it was labor unrest. The reason for this should be obvious. Communist regimes drew their legitimacy from Marxist ideology, and Marxism had proclaimed that world revolution would be spearheaded by the industrial working class. The working class was the avant-garde of the
revolution precisely because, according to Marx, power derives from control of the mode of production. In the modern world, accordingly, industrial technology, controlled by the workers, is the ultimate source of power. Once the proletariat rose up and directed that power to its own ends, there would be no stopping it. How could the bourgeoisie go on calling the shots if the railroads and the steel factories and the coal mines no longer obeyed orders? Marx paid relatively little attention to the role of the peasantry. To be sure, peasants had some degree of revolutionary potential. They could chop the heads off a few landlords. But it was the workers who really mattered.

Yet even the history of Communism has its history of strikes. There were some within the Soviet Union itself. Workers downed tools in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, years after Bolshevik rule was firmly established. At least one strike occurred as late as 1962, in the city of Novocherkassk. They were all brutally suppressed, of course, and the heretical notion of an anti-Soviet labor movement was airbrushed out of the historical record.

The real hotbed of labor activism, however, was in East Central Europe after 1945. This made sense. Many of the workers in East Germany (at least before the ascent of Hitler), Poland, and Czechoslovakia had lived in capitalist societies where there were strong labor movements, and those who had grown up later had inherited the knowledge from their parents. The most persistent strikers were the Poles, whose workers retained a fairly rebellious streak throughout Communist rule. Usually, however, their strikes revolved around economic demands rather than political ones.

What happened in the summer of 1980 at first followed a similar pattern. By the end of the 1970s, the early optimism of Gierek’s program had spent itself. The year 1979, it turned out, was not only a milestone because of the pope’s visit; it was also the first year since the end of the war that Poland’s national income declined, falling by 2 percent.
⁶
The hard-currency bill for Gierek’s international borrowing spree was coming due. Poland’s external debt skyrocketed; by 1980 it reached $18 billion. The borrowing policy’s most tangible effects were higher prices and the continued scarcity of basic goods. The only way the government could pay off its creditors was through exports, mostly agricultural goods that were already scarce at home.

In the summer of 1980, thirteen months after the pope’s visit, the workers once again began to bridle. On July 1 the government announced huge increases—from 60 to 90 percent—in the price of meat. Strikes broke out around the country. The government, which had prepared a strategy of concessions in advance, offered workers large raises and shipped in extra supplies of low-priced meat to areas of
particular unrest.
⁷
Yet this policy of carrots was not enough to satisfy the workers. On July 14 they spooked the Polish Politburo by stopping work in Lublin, a strategic city on the rail line that connected East Germany with the Soviet Union. The panicked party immediately threw even more cash at the discontented laborers, which had the effect of encouraging others. Strikes flickered up and down the Baltic Coast like St. Elmo’s Fire.

At the Lenin Shipyard, the director responded to Wałęsa’s arrival with the usual strategy, attempting to divide the workers by proposing especially large pay raises to the older workers. Many of them accepted his offer and left the yard. Once again the strike almost collapsed. But a dedicated core of several hundred strikers remained in the yard, sustained by family members and well-wishers who handed supplies of food and drink through the surrounding fence. Under Wałęsa’s leadership, the workers now expanded their agenda. They made explicitly political demands an integral part of the strike program. They insisted on legal guarantees of their right to strike, a loosening of restrictions on the media, and official recognition of their organization as a genuinely independent trade union movement.

Perhaps the most notable thing about this particular strike was its extraordinary sense of self-discipline. Among the strikers’ first acts was a ban on the consumption of alcohol, which was not only maintained by the strikers themselves but quickly picked up by many organizations in the surrounding city as well. Many contemporaries considered this especially remarkable, given the ubiquity of heavy drinking habits in Communist Poland.
⁸
Mass took place every day at five o’clock. A portrait of John Paul II soon adorned the shipyard’s main gate. These moral and religious undertones suggested that there was a bit more to this particular work stoppage than initially met the eye. That impression was borne out by the establishment of the Interfactory Strike Committee. From early on, emissaries from other workplaces had arrived at the shipyard to offer pledges of support and requests for cooperation. The founding of the Interfactory Strike Committee, which ultimately included dozens of delegates from all over Poland, had the effect of elevating the Lenin Shipyard protest movement from a local cause to a national one.

But what to call it? One of the members of KOR who arrived in Gdańsk to help the shipyard workers was Konrad Bielinski, an alumnus of the Student Solidarity Committee that had defended the cause of the murdered student Stanisław Pyjas three years earlier. Bielinski now began editing a daily newsletter for the strikers and their hangers-on. Calling it the
Strike Information Bulletin
, he decided to add another word that harked back to his days as a student activist:
Solidarity
.
⁹
Solidarity—of workers, and of humans in generals—was also a concept frequently invoked
by Wałęsa and the other Strike Committee members. So it did not take long for the shipyard Strike Committee to seize upon the word as a fitting name for the larger independent union movement that evolved out of the strike. (Its official name was the “Independent Self-Governing Trade Union ‘Solidarity.’”)

Solidarity
is a word that points to the moral underpinnings of the peculiar revolutionary movement that began in Gdańsk in the summer of 1980. It is worth noting that John Paul II used the same word as the title of a section in his central philosophical treatise,
Person and Act
, and though it is certainly going too far to credit him with masterminding the name of the union, it is no exaggeration at all to say that the specific character of the strike owed a great deal to the concrete experience of religious solidarity that Poles had experienced in those nine days in June the year before. Not only did the strikers in the Lenin Shipyard celebrate the pope’s image and attend regular mass; they also sang hymns and patriotic songs together, just as Poles had done during the 1979 pilgrimage. Sympathizers brought flowers and food to the shipyard fence in voluntary displays of support, just as they had voluntarily organized themselves during John Paul’s visit. And the Lenin Shipyard, now “occupied” by the strikers, became an oasis of free expression and thought within the Communist state, just as the pope’s visit had created its own alternative spaces (such as the mass gatherings where dissident banners could be raised without fear of retribution, or the events organized entirely without the participation of the Communist Party).

To be sure, the church hesitated at first. In the early days of the strike, all too aware of the momentous implications of what the Lenin Shipyard workers were up to, none other than Cardinal Wyszyński gave a sermon in which he counseled the strikers to exercise restraint. Especially in the bowdlerized version issued by the government, his remarks appeared to stop short of guaranteeing the church’s support to the strike movement. The strikers chose to ignore the possibility that a member of the clergy was trying to slow them down. This proved wise. On August 27, the Polish bishops issued a statement that specifically approved the “the right to independence both of organizations representing the workers and of organizations of self-government” and cited Vatican II’s unambiguous commitment to human rights. The bishops’ announcement was a direct result of John Paul II’s personal involvement. He had urged the bishops to support the union and had assured them of his personal support.
¹⁰
This vote of confidence was crucial. The implicit promise of the church’s institutional and diplomatic backing gave Wałęsa—who had now been chosen to lead the workers’ team of negotiators in their talks with the government—a crucial boost in his subsequent round of negotiations.

What emerged from those talks was a momentous achievement, something that no one could have imagined just months before. The Polish government extended official recognition to the existence of independent, self-governing trade unions. Solidarity was “independent” because, for the first time since 1944, a large number of Poles had come together to create an organization capable of successively asserting itself against the overweening power of the Communist state. And for many, the adjective
self-governing
—an eloquent reflection of a new faith in the ability of Poles to manage their own affairs—harked back to the moment, a year earlier, when John Paul II’s visit had provided a brief window of opportunity for Poles to organize their own lives.

It was, undoubtedly, the collapse of the Polish economy, and the corresponding loss of confidence in the state’s ability to revive it, that fueled the Solidarity revolution. But an analysis of economic conditions alone fails to account for the timing, the content, or the forms that this revolution took. The state of the economy deteriorated sharply from 1980 to 1981. Yet, as historian Timothy Garton Ash has noted, the suicide rate among Poles dropped by almost one-third in the year after Solidarity’s triumph; the annual per capita consumption of pure alcohol dropped from 8.4 liters in 1980 to 6.4 liters in 1981 (which was equivalent to the level of 1973). The rise of Solidarity clearly gave Poles a renewed sense of purpose. Ash recalls a case in which a mob tried to lynch a policeman in a provincial town. Solidarity representatives intervened. The dissident Adam Michnik, who was present, used his own experience of mistreatment at the hands of the police to persuade the mob to renounce summary justice—and they did. It was, in fact, remarkable how the Solidarity revolution managed to press its aims without recourse to violence.
¹¹

For sixteen months, the Communist authorities chose to endure the rise of a grassroots movement that challenged their social hegemony. The Polish Communist leaders were squeezed, on the one hand, by their masters in Moscow, who pressed them to put an end to this disturbing experiment (but who were themselves reluctant to intervene directly, since they were already busy with their deepening military involvement in Afghanistan). At the same time, Stanisław Kania, the new party leader (who had replaced Gierek after he had allowed the recognition of Solidarity), was reluctant to crack down, knowing that this would compel Western governments to turn off the flow of credits, thus aggravating Poland’s economic troubles.

Then, on December 13, 1981, the party finally put an end to this remarkable cohabitation. Tanks and troops moved into position at key locations. The security services fanned out to pick up members of the opposition. General Wojciech
Jaruzelski, Kania’s successor, had declared martial law in Poland. The revolution of the spirit inspired by John Paul II two years earlier was over. The attempt to establish an alternate space for a free society had failed—like all those earlier attempts to do something similar in postwar East Central Europe. Or so, at least, it seemed to many at the time.

O
n October 23, 1989, I noticed a surprising bit of graffiti in the men’s lavatory in the central train station in the East German city of Leipzig:
Es lebe Solidarność
. Someone with a red felt-tipped pen had carefully rendered the famous Solidarity logo—the one that shows the word as a stylized crowd holding a banner aloft—on the wall of a stall.

As a budding journalist, I had come to Leipzig to report on the demonstrations that were, by then, taking place every Monday night. A few weeks earlier, East Germans had begun taking to the streets to protest the Communist government that had ruled the country since 1945. That evening I joined the demonstrators—around a quarter of a million of them—as they made their way along the ring road around the center of the city.

There were wisecracking high school students, and factory workers in blue denim suits, and necktie-wearing managers carrying briefcases, and blue-haired little old ladies. This was not the usual protest by a few earnest college kids or bookish dissidents. To be sure, there were all the chants and the banners and the interest groups that one might expect from a political event. But what gave this particular demonstration its distinctive character were the candles that many of the demonstrators carried as they marched, casting a calming glow as the immense procession moved through the evening darkness. The most prominent slogan, chanted at regular intervals, was “No Violence.” (The chant became loudest and most insistent when we passed the building that housed the local headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police.) Given the tiny figures for church attendance in East Germany, it was extremely unlikely that the people in that massive crowd regularly participated in formal services of worship. Yet there was something in the atmosphere that could only be described as religious.

The remarkable air of festive calm had much to do with the fact that the core demonstrators had begun by meeting in churches around the city, where pastors admonished them to respect the humanity of their opponents and to exercise restraint in the face of government threats. This spirit of conciliation was extraordinary, given the messages coming out of the Communist Party. Until just a few weeks earlier, the East German state media had been calling for a “Chinese solution” to
the problem of public discontent. The bloody crackdown of Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese Communist Party had dispersed thousands of student protesters by force in the center of Beijing, had taken place just five months earlier. The participants in the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig had heard the rumors that their own Communist leaders were planning to follow suit. The authorities had issued live ammunition to the troops and had ordered the hospitals to stock extra blood and plasma supplies. But on October 9, just before that night’s demonstration was about to begin, the director of the Leipzig Orchestra and several other local notables persuaded three local party leaders to come out publicly against a crackdown. Together they issued a call committing the party to “peaceful dialogue.” The security forces never went into action. After that the number of demonstrators swelled with each successive Monday evening.