A bad loser, too. Another of Poland’s periodic financial crises hit the country soon after the referendum debacle, prompted as usual by foreign debt. Poland was close to defaulting on loans, again a familiar position for the country. But this was worse than before. Now inflation was running at more than 50 per cent and rising fast. Living standards were deteriorating badly. There were severe shortages of basic necessities: milk, most medicines, cotton wool, sanitary pads, most cuts of meat, bread, fresh vegetables, mineral water. This was a time, said Michnik, ‘that the fondest dream was to find a roll of lavatory paper’.
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It was worst for the women, as they had to do most of the queuing. Alina Piekowska was a nurse at the Lenin Shipyard, a Solidarity activist from the first days of the 1980 strikes and married to a trade union organiser who had been one of the leaders of the Solidarity underground in the martial law years. ‘It was a struggle to get basic things like washing powder,’ she said;
That was almost impossible . . . I had to wash my hair with egg yolks because there was no shampoo. Getting hold of things required a lot of time and patience . . . A working woman just didn’t have enough time (in the day). If you wanted to live at a certain level, with work and standing in queues, you had practically no time for anything else. One of the worst things was that family ties, contact with my child, was getting so small . . . One could not satisfy the needs of growing teenagers. There was not enough protein and things that were essential for a developing child . . . After I paid for the kindergarten and rent there was hardly anything left. If we didn’t have information about life elsewhere, that would have been different. But we were conscious of the way [other] people lived.
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In April 1988 Jaruzelski did what all his Communist predecessors in Poland had done. He raised prices - by 40 per cent on most foods. Within weeks much of the country was at a standstill. The first strike, on 1 May, started in the bus and tram depot in the north-west city of Bydgoszcz, where workers demanded a 60 per cent pay rise. They spread rapidly. At the Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta, the giant sprawl- ing plant near Kraków, 15,000 men downed tools and demanded a 50 per cent wage increase. Security forces stormed the factory and detained around a dozen workers, as well as the Solidarity adviser Jacek Kuro. Strikes closed sixteen coal mines and the shipyard in Szczecin. Stoppages were being planned throughout the country’s transport network and at the Gdak plants.
The unrest revived Solidarity, which came through a period in the doldrums. Membership was less than half the nine million or so that it had been at the height of the union’s first flowering in 1980-81. Martial law and the following years of stagnation dashed people’s hopes and led to widespread apathy. Solidarity’s influence waned. The gnome-like features of Jerzy Urban, the face of Polish communism as press spokesman for Jaruzelski, was often to be heard calling Solidarity ‘a non-existent organisation’ and Lech Wałesa ‘the former head of a former trade union’ or ‘a private citizen’. Archbishop Glemp had told Vice President Bush, who visited Warsaw on a whistle-stop tour towards the end of 1987, that ‘Solidarity is a closed chapter in Polish history’.
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The regime had tried hard to discredit Wałesa. The secret police resorted to crude forgery at least twice. It released a film,
Money
, purporting to show him at a birthday meal with his brother Stanisław at which they are heard talking about how much cash the Solidarity leader was receiving personally from the West. It was a bungled exercise, as were so many of the SB’s operations. The dialogue had been made by splicing together some of Wałesa’s statements and meshing them with misleading extracts from a stolen tape they had of him meeting other Solidarity figures. The voice was not Wałesa’s, but that of an actor imitating him. It was a libellous fabrication and so obviously a fake that it was entirely counter-productive. Jaruzelski told the Soviet Ambassador, Aristov, that the SB was assembling new material, including some pornographic pictures of Wałesa in a com promising position, that the General said would expose the Solidarity leader as a ‘scheming, grubby individual with gigantic ambitions’. That never saw the light of day, as it did not exist.
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Rumours began to circulate that Wałesa was an SB informer who had betrayed around a dozen Solidarity activists to the authorities during the martial law years. His opponents inside the union, with whom he had fallen out over the years, were spreading these stories with alacrity. It is true that in the early 1970s Wałesa had been ‘in contact’ with the secret police, as the SB files state. The documents name him BOLEK and apparently implicate him in links with the intelligence services. He signed a few ‘interrogation protocols’, but these appear to have been routine statements he made when he had been picked up for questioning. They show little else. This was the period before he was Solidarity leader, when he was a relatively unimportant figure. The SB was notorious for exaggerating its competence, often boasting it had recruited informers when all it had done was to ask a suspect a few questions. Like all espionage agencies, it had a vested interest in claiming successes it may not have earned. KG B and Polish security files do not prove anything against Wałesa. One Soviet document claims that when he was detained under martial law the SB had tried to intimidate him by ‘reminding him that they had paid him money and recorded information from him’. This may be the only reference to money passing hands in thousands of pages on him in Polish and Russian secret police files. It is more than likely to be part of the various plans to smear him. Wałesa always denied that he ever betrayed anyone to the SB and there is no evidence that he ever did - least of all while he was detained, when his brave resistance to the military regime infuriated the junta.
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The strikes continued throughout the summer and Wałesa put himself at the head of them. He was convinced now that this would be the final showdown with the Communists, but winning would be a laborious process. ‘I knew that the Communist system was finished,’ he said. ‘The problem was what would be the best way to get rid of it.’ He repeatedly pleaded for talks with the regime to form ‘an anti-crisis front’. General Jaruzelski always thought of himself as a realist. It was a conversation he had with Gorbachev that finally convinced him that it was time to face the fact that the government needed Solidarity. Some Communist reformers had been saying so for some time. His Foreign Minister, Marian Orzechowski, said: ‘Martial law could work only once . . . The army and the police cannot be mobilised against society again.’ The new Prime Minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, said that ‘in practice we have recognised the opposition as a lasting element in the country’s political map’, and it was time formally to accept the realities. Still, the General delayed.
On 12 July Gorbachev visited Warsaw and was given a rapturous reception by, mainly, Solidarity supporters. Jaruzelski told the Soviet leader that he was considering legalising Solidarity and negotiating with Wałesa. Gorbachev asked what he was waiting for and urged him on. Jaruzelski knew that the Soviets would do nothing to save him if his political skin was in danger and he had to look out for himself. The strikes had brought the country to a virtual halt. Poland was almost ungovernable. He had managed to obtain a loan of half a billion dollars from the Soviets to stave off immediate bankruptcy, but he realised that no money would be forthcoming from the West unless he could find a way to cut a deal with Solidarity.
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On 26 August Jaruzelski contacted Wałesa and proposed a ‘Round Table discussion’ to end the impasse facing Poland, but he left it up to his Interior Minister to work out the details. Kiszczak was a curious figure, a dapper sixty-three-year-old career intelligence officer who had much good humour and charm for a man of his profession. He established a curious relationship, almost a friendship, with the opposition even though he was their sworn enemy, the man who had presented the harsh face of military rule. He was one of the chief sponsors of the Round Table talks and did much to ensure their success, while simultaneously spying on the opposition. When he met Wałesa, he said Solidarity could be legalised, and that a wide range of democratic reforms could be introduced, if the union leader would get the striking workers to return to their jobs. Wałesa knew how high the stakes were. He calculated that he had to accept the offer, though breaking a strike yet again could risk undermining his authority within Solidarity. Many of his closest advisers warned him that he was making the biggest mistake of his life by entering into the talks. Bronisław Geremek, one of the canniest members of Solidarity’s leadership, understood the regime’s tactic. ‘What they meant to do was to corrupt Solidarity, divide us, compromise us,’ he said. Wałesa persuaded him and the other doubters that there was no alternative. He understood the risks, he said, ‘but better a round table than a square cell’. There was no way of winning without talking, he added. A crucial factor was that the Pope supported the talks, as did the Church in Poland, which was one of the chief sponsors of the Round Table.
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But even the talks about talks were heavy going. Wałesa told Kisz czak that there had to be a timetable for the legalisation of Solidarity. The police chief said that was impossible. At the end there might or might not be a legal union, depending on how the negotiations went. Wałesa accepted the deal. For the next few days he toured the country, using all his skill and energy to persuade the workers that negotiating with the regime was the only way to secure what they wanted. He assured the workers that he could be trusted not to sell them out. Reluctantly, most of the membership went along with him.
Jaruzelski had problems of his own. His advisers - particularly Rakowski - outlined a cynical strategy that they assured the General would preserve real power for the Party, while appearing to grant major concessions to Solidarity. The opposition would be given a few ministerial posts in a new ‘unity’ government. Solidarity would share responsibility for the crisis - and the blame if things went wrong. The West would be impressed by Poland’s move towards liberalism and offer new loans. Jaruzelski was convinced, and declared that ‘it was worth the risk’. Many in the high ranks of the Party were deeply sceptical. The ‘cement group’ of diehards were certain that to share power would ultimately be to lose it and they were scared of giving up their perks and privileges. ‘Many of us were afraid that [if we accept Solidarity] now . . . we would not be able to put the genie back in the bottle,’ said Stanisław Ciosek, a former Polish Ambassador to Moscow. ‘The Party was much better able to understand and trust the Catholic Church, another strong and centralised structure, than an unbridled Solidarity.’
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Some were scared of losing their lives if the ‘counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries’ took over the country. They demanded, and got, more time to consider such a momentous decision that one of them said ‘will be the beginning of the end for us’. The General had a battle on his hands persuading his comrades to accept his leadership.
TWENTY-FOUR
PRESIDENT BUSH TAKES CHARGE
Washington DC, Tuesday 8 November 1988
THE OVERWHELMING ELECTION VICTORY of George H.W. Bush in the US presidential election was hardly a surprise. He had been a well-known figure even before he became Ronald Reagan’s Vice President eight years earlier. He rode on the coat-tails of one of the most popular Presidents in American history and he had faced a lacklustre Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, who mounted a poor campaign. Despite the Iran-Contra scandal that engulfed Reagan during his last term, he remained a hugely admired, a loved, figure at home. He had succeeded in his main aim of making America feel good about itself. And now he could claim, reasonably, that he had played a leading role in reducing Cold War tensions. Bush was widely respected, if not much liked. He was a fit-looking sixty-four at his election, tall with a loping stride and a patrician air. While Reagan was warm and approachable, Bush could appear cold and distant. He had been training himself for the top job in American politics for decades. He was the son of a Senator, a Washington insider, though he had moved to Texas in his twenties to make his fortune in the oil business. Earlier, he had been a decorated fighter pilot in World War Two. Bush had served administrations of both colours, as Ambassador to China, Director of the CIA, Ambassador to the UN and finally as Vice President. He was vastly experienced, particularly in foreign affairs.
Bush had never been a favourite of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. He was a moderate, a traditionalist, who did not wear his religion on his sleeve. He was not a romantic, like Reagan, who he said privately had become ‘too sentimental about the Soviets’. He was prosaic and pragmatic. Bush was no hawkish neo-conservative like the ideologues who had surrounded Reagan in his first term, men he described as ‘marginal intellectual thugs’. But he was a conventional man, who believed that nuclear weapons had kept the peace for forty years. He thought that disarmers like Reagan were reckless dreamers who could wreck the global superpower balance. He was sceptical about the agreement signed in Washington DC the previous year which Reagan thought was one of the high points of his presidency. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was the first time an entire range of nuclear weapons was abolished. In public Bush supported the deal, under which hundreds of European-based, land-launched missiles from both sides were destroyed. But he expressed some doubts in private. He was not convinced that the Soviets were prepared to cede their East European empire and he thought that all their talk of the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ was mere public relations spin. He was contemptuous of the ‘theatre’ that the Reagan/Gorbachev roadshow, as he put it, had become. One scene he watched on television when Reagan visited Moscow earlier in the year angered him. The President was on a walkabout around Red Square. Gorbachev suddenly picked up a small boy and asked him to ‘shake hands with Grandfather Reagan’. A reporter asked the President if he still thought the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and he smiled. ‘No, I was talking about another time, another era.’ From that point on Bush deliberately began to sound more sceptical about the Soviet Union and during the election campaign he declared many times ‘that the Cold War is not over’.
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