Keys of This Blood (75 page)

Meanwhile,
perestroika
had as yet produced no tangible results. Food
queues at depleted shops were just as long; necessities were scarce; fuel was expensive; demoralizing stories were spreading about dissatisfaction in the Armed Forces, about continuing Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan; about the special supplies of rich food and beautiful luxury items available to the sacred
nomenklatura
; about revolts against Gorbachev within the Party—even within the all-powerful Central Committee. Besides, the Soviet economy was and still is suffocating from a worsening but hidden inflation, enormous budget deficits compelling billions of current rubles to lose their buying value, while price controls distort resource use and force goods onto the flourishing black markets, which only nourish an underground economy that does nothing for state revenue enhancement.

By the time the Soviet president would meet President Bush at Malta on December 2, 1989, the question most often heard abroad would be: “Is Gorbachev on the way out?” Several officials in the Bush administration openly stated that Gorbachev “cannot hold on.” Many spoke about “saving Mr. Gorbachev.”

In order to rebuff and beat down the “conservative” elements in the USSR who could prevail over him—so the message was conveyed to the West in a thousand and one ways—the endangered Soviet president needed a new type of cooperation from the West. Western pressures and demands must be tailored to suit his convenience in repelling the basic charges looming up against him on the home front.
Perestroika
was not working, his adversaries complained; and in all this
glasnost
, he was giving away the whole Soviet shop—selling out to the capitalists is what his opponent Ligachev meant—and at the same time demoralizing the Soviet Marxist spirit. Retired Colonel Igor Lopatin, as leader of the Council for Interfront, the Moscow lobby of Russian nationals in Latvia and the other Soviet republics, railed against Gorbachevism as threatening the units of loyal Communists throughout the Soviet Union.

Faced with such virulent opposition, Gorbachev let all concerned in the West know that he must not be perceived as conceding “humiliating” and debilitating conditions to the Western democracies. This was the much-desired “new thinking.” With Western cooperation, he could elude his enemies and pursue his main internal goals. There was much admiration in John Paul's Vatican for the terrier-like tenacity of will with which Gorbachev relentlessly pursued the dismantling of the Soviet satellite nations abroad while countering the “hard-liners'” reactions at home to that very policy, seeking even greater powers for himself at home and a more complete endorsement of his ideas. For that foreign policy vis-à-vis the satellites was intended to elicit—as one of its chief
effects—the “new thinking” of the West, and that “new thinking” would enable him to overcome his enemies at home.

As long as he could retain his general secretaryship of the Central Committee, his alliance with the KGB, and therefore his control over the officer corps of the Red Army, those czarlike powers he needed would be his because guaranteed by 230,000 KGB troops (with tanks, helicopters, artillery and planes of their own); by 340,000 Internal troops; by elite units like the 30,000 Spetsnatz; by some 70,000 paratroopers; and by some particularly trustworthy Guard divisions. All in all, his ultimate strength resided in this military arm of over three quarters of a million highly trained and carefully indoctrinated “effectives,” who could count on the blind ideological support and allegiance of perhaps 15–20 million citizens throughout the USSR. Gorbachev's personal fate and fortunes came down to that.

John Paul's observation to French journalist and writer André Frossard, although it anticipated by two years the surprising events of autumn and winter 1989, indicated how penetratingly he had understood the Soviet chairman's position vis-à-vis the West and to what lengths Gorbachev would have to go in order finally to elicit from his Western contemporaries the type of cooperation and collaboration that was needed if his reformed and renewed Leninist Marxism was to get the Party-State over the top of the biggest hurdle in its path since November 1917. “The Soviet leader must change the way the [Soviet] system works, without changing that system,” the Pontiff remarked to Frossard.

In spite of all Gorbachev brought about in the Eastern satellites and the USSR by the end of November 1989, there remained that fundamental difficulty for the mind of the West: the Soviet system. The fright and apprehension it had engendered and generously fed for over seventy years was a fire that burned in the Western mind. The most impressive expression of that fright and apprehension was composed and published by an anonymous “Z” in autumn of 1989. “Z” was quite frank and forthright: No matter that the Soviet leader
is
making his socialist system more humane, and no matter even that by some political sleight of hand he apparently replaces it with a market economy—and even with the trappings of a Western democracy. No matter, asserted “Z”; the brute fact is that the Party-State remains intact. It is the monster. That is the only fact that merits attention. As long as that Party-State remains, “Z” recommended, it should be a hands-off policy for the West. Let Gorbachev and his Party-State stew in their own juice and perish—for surely they will perish.

The “Z” attitude, in other words, gave a negative opinion about John
Paul's questioning summation of Gorbachev's difficulty. No, “Z” answered; in order to survive and succeed, Gorbachev cannot do what the Pontiff suggested he had to do. But “Z” was speaking—as the Pontiff was—about facts. The wily Soviet president knew and knows that, fortunately for him, it is not facts that move international opinion and individual men's minds today; it is their perception of facts. Their perception becomes for them the reality, no matter what the facts.

The gambit in which the Soviet leader indulged between December 1, 1989, and mid-February 1990 would all but assure him that the overall Western perception became as follows: The Party-State, if not as dead as a doornail, is certainly on the way out of all effective existence. The “new thinking” would be pushed to its logical conclusion. “Z” was derided, in the words of Vladimir Simonov, political analyst for the government-controlled Soviet press agency Novosti, as “a hybrid of far-right extremism and naïveté … the position of
perestroika
's gravediggers … that still regard the Soviet Union as something diabolic.”

If anything was needed to show convincingly that the “Z” thesis had had no appreciable impact on the progress of the “new thinking” in the official mind of the West, it was the arrival of President Bush, on December 1, at the United States warship
Belknapp
in Maltese coastal waters, where he was scheduled to “summit” with Mr. Gorbachev on December 2. On the eve of the Vatican summit, the wryly humorous Soviet spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, commented: “They have been talking for years about a dialogue between Christians and Marxists. This time it will be real. This time it will be a conceptual talk.” On Gerasimov's Marxist lips, “conceptual” meant “down-to-earth” and “practical”—the opposite of religious emotion and ideological passion.

In the range of summits and “summitry” the world has witnessed since 1945, the Wojtyla-Gorbachev summit of December 1, 1989, struck a peculiar chord of its own. It displayed the usual characteristics of summits: two supreme leaders sitting down together to discuss their mutual relationship; panoply and power in evidence from both sides; worldwide interest in the meeting and its consequences; and a vital function of their meeting in the ongoing concrete affairs of their contemporaries.

But, unlike the other summits, when this one was over and done with, there was no satisfactory precision available about what was transacted between these two men, the Pope of All the Catholics and the Leninist Leader of All the Russias. For transaction there surely was, a transaction much desired by the Soviet leader in his race to achieve a wholly new international status for his USSR, and a much prized transaction for this Slavic Pope, whose papal policy and personal devotion are irrevocably oriented to the lands of the Slavs. And, let it be said, it was a transaction that was assiduously monitored by leaders in the West, who had been stimulated by the meteoric Soviet president to link the future of their countries and nations intimately with this man's future.

Yet neither in the weeks preparatory to that summit nor in its aftermath was any precision to be had. There were fourteen hundred journalists and reporters assigned to cover the state visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to Italy. He was to hold important meetings with government officials. But that side of his visit was put on a “newsworthiness” par with Raisa Gorbachev's visit to Messina on November 30. “Good copy,” certainly, but not front-page, large-headline news. The Wojtyla-Gorbachev meeting was the main focus of interest.

It was announced, analyzed and critiqued extensively and intensively
by the media for weeks before it took place. Comments by world leaders and predictions by pundits filled the newspaper columns and editorials. But no estimation of the forthcoming get-together between the reigning Pope and the current strongman of the largest, the most powerful, and still the officially anti-God state sounded satisfactory, even approximately accurate. Everyone knew some details. No one seemed able to spell it out in the round.

For patently it was not a religious event, as we normally understand such a happening. Yet who could doubt that religion would be a conditioning factor on that day's exchange between papal host and Soviet visitor? This was no ordinary meeting of the “greats”: a gelid encounter of wary warriors around the green-topped table of raw power. But still, if any genuine power existed on that day, it surely rode on the shoulders of Papa Wojtyla and Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Soviet man was not in Rome on a social visit “to trace the footsteps of the Caesars” and, just by the way, “to see the Pope.” Nor was it a bargaining session, a “hard-tack” negotiation between international “horse dealers.” Lesser men, the “gremlins” and “back room” boys in Vatican and Kremlin, would do all the haggling and point-by-point bargaining.

Nor, finally, was it foreseen as one of those “celebrations,” a diplomatic get-together wreathed in smiles and handshakes, punctuated with photo opportunities, highlighted by a public “signing” ceremony and giveaway memento pens, evoking good “feelings” about “the other side” and culminating in the clinking of champagne goblets at a state banquet for the glitterati. There would, indeed, be handshakes, and smiles, and photo opportunities, and—for the working “gremlins” backstage—refreshment
alla italiana
; but all that usual panoply was rendered in the chiaroscuro peculiar to the age-old
romanità
of the Holy See.

During the last weeks and days of November, there were diligent attempts to downplay the meeting, to describe it as a quiet triumph of the Vatican's long-suffering, almost fifty-year-old
Ostpolitik
originating in the Vatican of Pope Pius XII, maintained by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and crowned by Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli. But this was not so. The twists and turns of that
Ostpolitik
had provided temporary easements in isolated cases. But the forthcoming meeting, if the child of that
Ostpolitik
, would be as surprising as a brilliant flamingo born from two bewildered barnyard fowl. Casaroli's
Ostpolitik
was a long, winding, dark tunnel with never a speck of light, with no end in sight ever.

If there never had been an
Ostpolitik
, that meeting would have taken
place anyway. If there had been only that
Ostpolitik
, it would still be mired down in the morass of deliberately awkward protocol, and tortured on the brambles of intentional ill will. Only because of what Wojtyla had accomplished in his first ten years, and only because Gorbachev in his desperation looked beyond the here and now of mummified Leninist Marxism, was the forthcoming meeting possible.

Other analysts saw it as a chance for those men—each one needing something from the other—to display their bargaining chips and claim their IOUs. But this was not the case. The IOUs had been paid. The chips had eliminated each other. That had been the essence of
Ostpolitik
.

Still others contemplated the coming meeting with misplaced piety and historical myopia, seeing it as a fatal compromise bordering on blasphemy—the Church entertaining, beside the Tomb of the Apostles, the one man closely resembling the unclean Beast of Apocalypse foretold as polluting the Holy of Holies! But Papa Wojtyla had no intention of allowing that Tomb to be besmirched—he relied on the protection of the Archangel Michael for that proviso. President Gorbachev had no intention of trying to desecrate, to desacralize, or even to trivialize the Vatican ground he trod on and the sacred presence of the Most High housed immemorially within those walls. Anything of that nature was as distant from Pope and President in their intentions as a banal act of common lewdness.

Between any such motivations and what actually animated the two leaders in the December meeting, the distance and the difference can be aptly compared to the distance and difference between a pigsty on a dirt farm and Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Not cluttered with busy details of personality and career, not hobbled with little vanities (complaints, preferences), and not designed even partially with a view to “the voters back home” or homeside parliamentary politics, the meeting concerned the structure of our human society, its substance, its promise, its perils and its ultimate foreseeable fate.

In spite of the pervasive imprecision coloring the forthcoming summit, when all the conceivable forecasts and pre-analyses had been endlessly set forth, there remained one solid and widely shared persuasion, never expressed fully in words, but nevertheless washing around the minds of people.