The Year that Changed the World Read online

  In any event, he got what he wanted from the Central Committee by a single vote. Thus began Wojciech Jaruzelski’s slow, lonely path of self-redemption—and Poland’s 1989 revolution.

  A cold drizzle fell on the fifty or so demonstrators gathered forlornly, it seemed, outside a baroque palace in Warsaw. Everything was gray: the smog-ridden air, the begrimed buildings and broken pavement, the people in their drab, worn clothes and clunky East bloc shoes.

  It was all the more depressing given the momentousness of what was going on inside. It was February 6, 1989. For the first time since 1981, Polish authorities were meeting with Solidarity. The loyalists gathered in the rain dreamed of legalizing their movement and recasting Poland’s political system. Judging by their numbers, that seemed a frail hope. Yet pictures of the opening of this famous Round Table, with its great bouquet of flowers in the middle, became the talk of Eastern Europe. For there, face-to-face, former political prisoners sat conversing politely with their former jailers about their common future.

  Foremost among them was Lech Walesa, the electrician who scaled the fence around the Gdansk shipyard in 1980, founded Solidarity and was jailed by the very men who now faced him. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, a salute to the spirit of human liberty as well as to the tenacity of the man himself. And while the communist leaders seated around the table did not know it yet, they would before too long be addressing him as “Mr. President.” There was also Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a journalist, human rights lawyer and Solidarity activist who had spent more time in prison under the communists than any other figure in the opposition. Within seven months, to the astonishment of himself and his partners, communist and opposition alike, he would become the first popularly elected prime minister in Eastern Europe since World War II. There was Bronislaw Geremek, a gentle and bearded professor of medieval literature, Solidarity’s chief tactician, a future foreign minister and president of the Organization of European Security and Cooperation who would within a decade become responsible, among other things, for orchestrating NATO’s intervention in Kosovo. And alongside them, in turn, were a dozen other activists who would shortly replace the men, communist leaders all, who considered themselves the powers at this august occasion and many of whom, even now, scarcely deigned speak to anyone outside their ruling clique. Among them was the communists’ chief interlocutor, Czeslaw Kiszczak, head of the Polish secret police and minister of interior during the years of martial law, the onetime nemesis of virtually all those surrounding him.

  This bizarre moment, so rich with irony, would set the tone for changes elsewhere in Eastern Europe. When push came to shove in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, communists and anticommunists would call for talks on the Polish model. But only in Poland were they actually decisive, both in terms of their outcome and their bona fides as a genuine, give-and-take negotiation. This was made easier because both communists and opposition recognized that sheer economic necessity compelled them to work together. It helped, too, that neither side had any idea of the magnitude of what they stood to gain or lose.

  I had been flying in and out of Poland since September. Eight years of martial law had brought nothing but hardship. In a proud nation that had long considered itself to be West European, a third of the population now lived in poverty. Inflation stood at 60 percent annually but was accelerating toward 500 percent, according to the latest indexes. The country was not only slipping further behind Western Europe but also, humiliatingly, its own East bloc neighbors. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash, traveling in Poland during the time of the strikes, asked the demonstrators faced off against the police what they hoped to achieve. The memorable reply: “Forty years of socialism, and there’s still no toilet paper!”

  Walking the streets of Warsaw, it was impossible to miss the cadres of “garbage can people,” as one underground newspaper called them—scavengers who went about scrounging for scraps of food and clothing. In glaring contrast were the “banana people,” so named because they could afford to buy fruit. These wealthy few, usually the sons, daughters and spouses of the communist elite, could go to the special shops where, for a stiff premium in hard currency, they could pretty much buy any luxury or necessity they desired: toilet paper, women’s stockings, TVs, imported tea, coffee.

  Everyone else lived essentially as hunter-gatherers. They carried plastic bags wherever they went. If a line formed, they joined it, waiting patiently for whatever was for sale, making the rounds of shops where they might enjoy a personal relationship with the proprietor, who would put goodies away for them in return for whatever similar favor they might be able to offer. On the very day the Round Table convened, I stood waiting in line at a state bank to open a new account for the Newsweek bureau. Suddenly, every clerk in the place jumped up and ran out the door. Why? Downstairs on the street, someone was selling oranges. Hundreds of people stood in the bank queue for the next hour, shifting wearily from foot to foot until the clerks slowly filed back in, each clutching several precious oranges. The likes of us—indeed, the bank itself—had no choice but to wait for the employees to finish their private business. We didn’t dare sacrifice our place in line.

  Welcome to Poland, 1989. Danuta Zagrodzka was Poland’s spokeswoman for human rights. She shrugged at my tale of the oranges. As far as she was concerned, privations such as that were no more than a trivial inconvenience. They represented only the smallest tip of the iceberg of a far more general abuse of individual freedom—the right to a modicum of dignity and comfort. I had gone to talk with her about political prisoners in Poland, a big issue in the United States. She shrugged at that, too. Conditions were not good in Polish prisons, she readily conceded. Cells designed for three people held nine. Toilets didn’t work. There was lots of thuggery. Then she offered a novel defense of Poland’s human rights record. “The truth is that there are no longer any political prisoners in Poland,” she said, explaining that there were instead only degrees of deprivation—for all Poles, in prison or out. With that, she pulled a thick folder off a shelf. “What do you want to know? I have all the facts.” And without prodding, she began to read.

  Inflation and prices for everyday goods? Her latest figures pegged it at 60 to 80 percent, ten times higher than a year ago. According to the Central Statistics Office, the annual cost of living in Poland had increased by 55 percent more than incomes over the first half of the 1980s. The average Pole, she reported, worked half an hour to afford a loaf of bread, four hours for a chocolate bar. Outside the major cities, only 45 percent of Poles had running water; three-quarters had no indoor toilet. Consumer goods such as refrigerators were getting harder and harder to find. People seeking to buy one from a state store might have to wait anywhere from a month to three months. So that they would not have to stand in line all day, every day, for weeks or months, people would form “line committees,” with designated officers responsible for maintaining everyone’s place in the queue and fending off interlopers who might try to force ahead of them. During a lull in a Round Table briefing, one Polish journalist told of a Warsaw television store that recently announced it would begin accepting down payments for TVs, starting the next Monday. A line formed the preceding Friday. At opening time, fifteen thousand people were waiting for the privilege of paying nearly $1,300—a year’s average wages—for a no-frills set they would be lucky to receive in a few months’ time. “This is life by attrition,” he said. “After a time, you begin to feel that everything around you is crumbling.”

  Young Poles were especially desperate. Most had no homes of their own; in some parts of Poland, it could take twenty to thirty years to reach the top of the waiting list for an apartment. The wait for a telephone or a car could take ten to fifteen years. “Everyday life has been destroyed. The streets are broken. It’s dirty. Buildings are falling down and are never repaired. People are tired and worn to their bones,” Danuta went on. Let’s see, she said, consulting her notes one last time. “Oh, yes, Poles spend, on average, one-quarte
r of their waking day waiting in queues.” She closed her folder and added with only a trace of humor, “I can say these things because I am the smiling face of the establishment.”

  It would have been easy, under such circumstances, to portray Poles and their government as totally at odds. But that would be too simple. As Danuta said, she was the smiling face of the establishment—a senior communist official making no bones about her frustration with the system, not even bothering to pretend that it worked, and displaying immense sympathy for “the people” it was slowly crushing. In Poland by this time, Solidarity had become far more than a mere trade union movement, a political opposition. It was, increasingly, a way of life, a movement shared not merely among the ruled but, to a surprising degree, by their rulers.

  The author Janine Wedel captured this phenomenon in her memoir of the time, The Private Poland. Solidarity, she wrote, stood for renewal in social, economic and political life. Its name was a social injunction, a call to “help each other.” Its most common manifestation was the intricate network of personal ties that all Poles relied on to get what they needed in life—food, medicines, the latest books and magazines, anything that could not efficiently be delivered by Poland’s broken demand-but-no-supply economy. More abstractly, it became a shorthand for the Polish sense of morality, even honor. It was hardly unknown for communist officials to help the friends and family of jailed Solidarity activists, often at considerable danger to themselves.

  Yet martial law indeed drew some sharp social lines. Those deemed to be collaborators, who colluded in its imposition, became an unacceptable “them.” Wedel tells of a well-known actor, head of the communist party committee at a major Polish theater, who in 1981 went on the evening news to express his official support for Jaruzelski and his government. Ever after, when he appeared onstage, the audience would begin applauding—and not stop until he withdrew, unable to deliver his lines. A famous career was ruined. Similarly, a noted author endorsed martial law. Soon after, people began stacking copies of his books on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. They were “returning” them. Members of the political opposition would isolate “traitors,” refusing to shake hands with an academic, say, known to associate too closely with the government. When a nineteen-year-old boy died after being beaten by police, tens of thousands of Poles showed up at the funeral to protest. Hundreds of thousands marched at the funeral of a murdered pro-Solidarity priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, in 1984. And so it was again in 1989 when another clerical activist, Father Stefan Niedzielak, was found dead just days after Poland’s communist leaders offered to recognize Solidarity. Many interpreted the killing as a message to the resurgent opposition: go slow, or else.

  Perhaps it was only a matter of time before something happened. That previous spring, when the strikes first broke out in the south around Nowa Huta and Katowice and workers began demanding the restoration of Solidarity, I was visiting Poland for the first time. The party’s short, fat, bald and supremely funny spokesman, Jerzy Urban, invited me to lunch. He was full of contemptuous dismissiveness. “Solidarity is dead,” he assured me. As for that Lech Walesa… a wave of his hand, fat pinkie held delicately aloft as he sipped a luncheon liquor. He was merely a “private citizen,” not someone to reckon with, a “drunk,” a “misfit,” a “buffoon.” Yet it turned out to be “that Walesa” the communists would have to reckon with as 1989 began. “We must kick out the jerks who have brought us to beggary,” he had told strikers the previous summer. Street demonstrators soon took up a catchy slogan: “Hang the communists.” It had a ring, and no doubt helped focus minds within the regime.

  Poland’s Round Table, beginning that cheerless February day, would stretch over four months of tortured negotiation. Every other week or so, I would fly in to see what was happening. From afar, it looked to be little. Progress stumbled on one critical point: Solidarity insisted that it be legally recognized as a union; otherwise, there would be no Round Table. The government was no less adamant. The workers Solidarity sought to organize comprised the backbone of the United Communist Workers’ Party. At the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Solidarity’s birthplace, thirty-five hundred of four thousand workers said they would join Solidarity if given the choice. “We would be committing suicide,” a senior communist party official confided over drinks late one night, just as the talks were getting going. “Recognizing Solidarity would mean the end of the communist party in Poland.”

  I nicknamed this man Kat, partly for the feline pleasure he took in drawing a cloak of mystery around what he knew and how he knew it. He was one of the few sources I found who could accurately and honestly describe what was happening within the party. “Consider these the views of a party official who feels he has wasted his life,” he told me in one of our first conversations, asking not to be identified. Beware, he advised. The talks between Solidarity and the government might look peaceable and encouraging, but only from the outside. From his vantage point, atop the bureaucracy that ran state media, the situation looked nasty. A dangerous act of political theater was playing out. Jaruzelski worried about the economy and rising social tensions. He wanted to change the regime’s cast of characters and address the problems. But he could not do so without alienating the party. Even with the backing of the army, he would not want to risk a split that would diminish his authority. As Kat saw it, swirling his scotch, legalizing Solidarity could lead to “civil war” within the regime.

  I mentioned this conversation to Bronislaw Geremek, the scholarly medievalist who over these months emerged as the chief strategist behind Solidarity’s rebirth. Bearded and bespectacled, as soft and gentle in manner as his patched and well-worn sweaters, Geremek was the epitome of the East European intellectual. This day, he sat in his book-lined study in a gray apartment block on a narrow backstreet in what remained of Warsaw’s Old Town. I didn’t call ahead, even in those changing times, because I preferred not to alert the secret police. Geremek nodded at the talk of “civil war.” Solidarity sought only one thing from the talks: legal recognition. The government was willing to offer everything but this, he explained. “They talk of ‘deep changes’ in our politics and economy. They tell us the opposition might be represented in parliament or the government. They offer changes in the tax law to encourage private enterprise and speak of a new ‘law of association,’ whatever might be meant by that. But on the issue of Solidarity, they say, ‘We can’t do this right now.’ From our perspective, this is the number one priority. Because it goes to the heart of democracy and the nation’s social and economic troubles.” Failure to reach what Geremek called a new “social contract” could lead to more than a war within the party. It could easily touch off a social “explosion.”

  The novelist Tom Wolfe, in his 1980s bestseller Bonfire of the Vanities, anointed one Reverend Bacon as the man who controlled “the steam” in New York, twisting a social safety valve to release pent-up pressure when racial relations approached the bursting point, or notching them up when he wanted to make a political point. In Poland in early 1989, that role fell to General Jaruzelski. As the talks between Solidarity and the government dragged on inconclusively, he would break the impasse. The Round Table had been his idea. He brought the two sides together. He faced down communist hard-liners threatening to bolt the party at that stormy January meeting of the Central Committee. Ultimately, he would push them to success. Those who led Solidarity would later admit that they “owed” Jaruzelski. Jacek Kuron, a union organizer who spent seven years in jail and would go on to become minister of labor, put it bluntly: “Jaruzelski was the one who saw it just wasn’t working anymore, not just communism but the whole system. He was big enough to see it.”

  That Jaruzelski should reach out to the hated Solidarity, at a moment when he saw Poland threatened every bit as much as in 1981, was as much an act of courage as it was pragmatism or expedience. Neither he nor the opposition knew where the talks might lead. And it’s striking how modestly each side defined their goals. At what
would be a fateful watershed, Solidarity sought little more than recognition of its right to exist; beyond that, it would accept what it could get. The government may have hoped for a partner in culpability. If there was no glory in socialism, party leaders reasoned, at least they could spread the blame of failure by giving the opposition a modest voice in power. But Jaruzelski also hoped that Solidarity could help smooth the road through some tough economic belt-tightening that he was wise enough to foresee as necessary.

  Only the true believers, the hardest of hard-liners, appear to have seen the threat as it was—the end of communism in Poland. Change began in Poland as it would across much of Eastern Europe, with a combination of blindness and expedience. The old guard knew their weakness and tried to remedy it. Yet they seemed to think they could control change, get out in front and lead. Seldom did they recognize the force of the events they set in motion.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Parallel Universes

  By tradition, any new head of state in the East bloc traveled first to Moscow. Not Miklos Nemeth. He went to Vienna, then Warsaw. “Hungarians got the message,” he said—a “small sign” that the country’s future lay to the west, not east.

  As spring approached, however, Nemeth felt he could defer a visit no longer. Hungary’s reforms were entering a crucial—and worrisome—phase. He would soon announce that free elections would be held, possibly before the end of the year. Kalman Kulcsar, his justice minister, was finishing the new constitution, with full guarantees of free speech and private property. It wasn’t just socialism with a human face. It was… a human face, period.