The Penguin History of the World

After 1970, and even more after the Helsinki agreement of 1975, as awareness of contrasts with western Europe grew in the eastern bloc, dissident groups emerged, survived and even strengthened their positions in spite of severe repression. Gradually, too, a few officials or economic specialists, and even some Party members, began to show signs of scepticism about the efficiency of detailed centralized planning and there was increasing discussion of the advantages of utilizing market mechanisms. The key to fundamental change, nevertheless, lay elsewhere. There was no reason to believe that it was possible in any of the Warsaw Pact countries if the Brezhnev doctrine held, and had the Soviet army standing behind it.

The first clear sign that this might not always be so came in the early 1980s, in Poland. The Polish nation had retained, to a remarkable degree, a collective integrity by following its priests and not its rulers. The Roman Catholic Church had an enduring hold on the affections and minds of most Poles as the embodiment of the nation, and was often to speak for them – all the more convincingly once a Polish pope had been enthroned. It did so on behalf of workers who protested in the 1970s against economic policy, condemning their ill treatment.

The role of the Church, together with the worsening of economic conditions, was the background to 1980, a year of crisis for Poland. A series of strikes then came to a head in an epic struggle in the Gdansk shipyard. From them emerged a new and spontaneously organized federation of trades unions, Solidarity. It added political demands to the economic goals of the strikers; among them, one for free and independent trades unions. Solidarity’s leader was a remarkable, often-imprisoned, electrician and union leader, Lech Wałesa, a devout Catholic, closely in touch with the Polish Church hierarchy. The shipyard gates were decorated with a picture of the pope and open-air Masses were held by the strikers. As strikes spread, the world was surprised to see a shaken Polish government soon making historic concessions, crucially by recognizing Solidarity as an independent, self-governing trade union. Symbolically, regular broadcasting of the Catholic Mass on Sundays was also conceded. But disorder did not cease, and with the winter, the atmosphere of crisis deepened. Threats were heard from Poland’s neighbours of possible intervention; forty Soviet divisions were said to be ready in the GDR and on the Soviet frontier. But the dog did not bark in the night; the Soviet army did not move and was not ordered by Brezhnev to do so, or by his successors in the turbulent years that followed. It was the first sign of changes in Moscow that were the necessary premise of what was to follow in eastern Europe in the next ten years.

In 1981, tension continued to rise, the economic situation worsened, but Wałesa strove to avert provocation. On five occasions the Soviet commander of the Warsaw Pact forces came to Warsaw. On the last, the radicals broke away from Wałesa’s control and called for a general strike if emergency powers were taken by the government. On 13 December, martial law was imposed. There followed fierce repression and possibly hundreds of deaths. But the Polish military’s action also made Soviet invasion unnecessary. Solidarity went underground, to begin seven years of struggle, during which it became more and more evident that the military government could neither prevent further economic deterioration, nor enlist the support of the ‘real’ Poland, the society alienated from Communism, for the regime. A moral revolution was taking place. As one western observer put it, Poles began to behave ‘as if they lived in a free country’; clandestine organizations and publications, strikes and demonstrations, and continuing ecclesiastical condemnation of the regime sustained what was at times an atmosphere of civil war.

Although after a few months the government cautiously abandoned martial law, it still continued to deploy a varied repertoire of overt and undercover repression. Meanwhile, the economy declined further, western countries offered no help and little sympathy. Yet after 1985 changes in Moscow began to produce their effects. The climax came in 1989, for Poland her greatest year since 1945, as it was for other countries, too, thanks to her example. It opened with the regime’s acceptance that other political parties and organizations, including Solidarity, had to share in the political process. As a first step to true political pluralism, elections were held in June in which some seats were for the first time freely contested. Solidarity swept the board in them. Soon the new parliament denounced the German–Soviet agreement of August 1939, condemned the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and set up investigations into political murders committed since 1981.