Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (50 page)

Still, the overwhelming technological and military superiority of Moscow’s forces began to tell as the years went on. Perhaps the most devastating weapon in the Communist arsenal was the heavily armored helicopter gunship, the perfect vehicle for counterinsurgency warfare in rugged terrain. The Soviet General Staff also began deploying increasing numbers of highly trained and well-conditioned special forces, the
spetsnaz
, to the Afghan theater—just the sort of troops that could respond efficiently to the hit-and-run attacks staged by the guerrillas. By 1985, the
year that Gorbachev came to power, the USSR’s military could claim to be gaining traction in the war for control.

But it was all too late. The costs of the war were weighing on the Soviet treasury, already battered by declining productivity and sinking oil prices. Public opinion turned fairly quickly against the war, since few Russians or Ukrainians could see the logic behind sending their boys off to die in a distant conflict when the economy was in all too conspicuous decline at home. And the military edge that the occupiers had so painstakingly acquired soon evaporated when the Americans began supplying the Afghan holy warriors with Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles, which proved shockingly effective at shooting helicopters out of the sky. Gorbachevs declared priority, upon assuming office, was to reform the economic and political system in his country. The war in Afghanistan did little to further that end, and, indeed, perhaps even stood in the way of its realization. It did not take the new Soviet leader long to declare his intention to wind down the war.

In some ways, the damage had already been done. In a country that was spending as much as one-quarter of its gross domestic product on defense even before 1979, the additional burden of maintaining up to 140,000 combat troops in a distant theater of war—including all the vast logistical and administrative resources this implied—was debilitating. We now know, thanks to sources that became public after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, that the strains of the occupation of Afghanistan constrained Soviet policy toward Poland in 1980 and 1981. It turns out that the Kremlin’s threats to quash the unrest using its own troops, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, were a bluff. Struggling to control Afghanistan, the USSR had little military capacity to spare for a full-scale occupation of a second large country as well, and this was one of the factors that motivated Soviet leaders to pressure Polish communist leaders to deal with the problem using their own forces. In this respect, the two counterrevolutions in Afghanistan and Poland can be seen as mutually reinforcing events that contributed mightily to the collapse of the Communist system.

In some ways, Gorbachev’s relaxation of censorship actually aggravated the political and psychological effects of the war. As enterprising journalists began to produce candid reporting about the conflict, details of the high casualty rate, the astonishing level of brutality, and the glaring evidence of official mismanagement and corruption emerged into the public sphere. It soon became clear that everything the state had said about the war was a lie. Afghans were not welcoming socialism; the rebels were not just a few foreign-sponsored mercenaries but represented broad swaths of their society. Victory for the “forces of progress” was not in the offing. And
far more young men were dying in the war than had been officially acknowledged. Veterans of the war, known as
afgantsy
, returned home brutalized and disillusioned, often bringing with them profound problems—from combat trauma to drug addiction—of just the kind that the Soviet system, still locked in its official myth of the inherent superiority of socialism, was especially ill-equipped to confront. The war in Afghanistan did more than any other single event in the 1980s to intensify the public cynicism and apathy that had such a corrosive effect on the integrity of the Soviet system on the path to its collapse. Indeed, some of the
afgantsy
who failed to find a path back into society ended up joining organized-crime groups, and their propensity for violence contributed significantly to the gang wars that plagued Russia and other republics after 1991.

All this was still in the future as the Soviet invaders hunkered down in their positions in the waning hours of 1979. At the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow,
²⁸
Andropov opted for a break with tradition. In the years before, the Soviet secret police had made a tradition of honoring operatives who lost their lives in the line of duty by hanging portraits of them in the buildings corridor’s. But the chaotic assault on Amin’s palace had taken the lives of at least one hundred members of the KGB’s elite commando squad; some of them, even more embarrassingly, were casualties of friendly fire. Andropov decided that such a large number of mourning portraits would draw unwanted attention to the losses. So the deaths of the men went unremarked by their comrades. It was a fitting portent of the squalid war to come.
²⁹

O
n August 7, 1980, her bosses fired Anna Walentynowicz from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in the Polish city of Gdańsk. Walentynowicz was not a run-of-the-mill shipyard laborer. Popular among her fellow workers, she had once received a decoration as a “hero of socialist labor” for her exemplary work. But in the course of the 1970s she had evolved into a critic of the Communist system, and she eventually found herself drawn to a group of activists who were setting up an independent association they called the “Committee of Free Trade Unions.” The SB, the secret police, had informed Walentynowicz’s bosses of her activities. Hence her dismissal.

Early on the morning of August 14, a few young men sneaked into the Lenin Shipyard with posters calling on the workers to strike for the reinstatement of Walentynowicz and a pay rise of one thousand zlotys. Some of the shipyard workers took up the call—but just as they were about to march out of the yard, others stopped them, reminding them of what had happened ten years earlier. In 1970, workers along the Baltic coast, including those at the Lenin Shipyard, had also announced a strike. In order to elicit public support, they had decided to leave their workplaces and take to the streets to press their demands. By doing that, however, they made themselves easy targets for the government security forces that had been ordered into the affected cities. The strikers had been gunned down by the dozens. Walentynowicz’s supporters vowed not to repeat that mistake. They opted to stay put.

Workers began to congregate in front of the shipyard’s head office. As the swelling crowd discussed how they should go about coordinating their efforts, the shipyard’s director climbed up on an excavator and began haranguing them to go back to work. Some of the men seemed to be thinking it over, and for a moment the fate of the strike hung in the balance. (Indeed, another attempt to start a strike just a few weeks earlier had fizzled.) But then a short, stocky man climbed up behind the director and tapped him on the shoulder: “‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘I worked here for ten years, and I still feel I’m a shipyard worker. I have the confidence of the workers here. It’s four years since I lost my job.’”
¹

The name of the man, an ex-shipyard electrician who had also lost his job because of his extracurricular activities as a dissident, was Lech Wałęsa. He had sneaked back into his old workplace by climbing over a wall. The workers greeted him with a cheer. Some of them recognized him from an unofficial ceremony that had been held at the shipyard gates the previous December to commemorate the dead of the 1970 protests. At the ceremony, Wałęsa had stepped forward and given a rousing speech, urging the workers to organize themselves independently in order to oppose the might of the state.

Now, back inside the shipyard, he put his own advice to work. He declared an “occupation strike,” reinforcing the workers’ decision to stay where they were. He took charge of the effort to set up a strike committee, and in short order it issued a set of demands that included the reinstatement of Walentynowicz and himself, pay raises, security against reprisals, and a monument to the men who had died in the 1970 crackdown. The committee’s negotiations with management were broadcast over the shipyard’s public address system so that everyone could hear what was happening.
²

Even before Wałęsa spoke, Walentynowicz had made it back to the shipyard and joined the strike. The shipyard director, desperate to demonstrate his good intentions and to quell the rising protest, sent his own car to fetch her. As with Wałęsa, her return was greeted with cheers and applause. That the shipyard workers welcomed both Walentynowicz and Wałęsa back with such enthusiasm was noteworthy. Both had been explicitly singled out by management as enemies of the state. Back in an earlier day, the workers might have been inclined to shy away from someone so clearly identified by the party as an “enemy of the people.”

The alliance between the workers and the opposition had evolved significantly over the previous decade. In 1968, caught up in the transformative turmoil of the Czechoslovak anti-Communist movement that came to be known as the Prague Spring, Polish students had taken to the streets, calling on the workers to join them.
The workers demurred. Two years later, when workers in the industrial belt of the Baltic went on strike, the students paid them back by standing by as the security forces cracked down with tanks and thousands of troops. Dozens of workers died.

The 1970 crackdown prompted several key members of the dissident movement in Poland to realize that this gap between laborers and intellectuals would have to be closed if there was any serious hope of creating a credible alternative to Communist rule. The crackdown of 1970 was followed by a period of relative liberalization under Communist Party leader Edward Gierek, who was eager to prove his moderate credentials to the Western governments who were giving him loans, and the dissident intellectuals gradually found ways to take advantage of the resulting space for maneuver. They circulated their publications, shared their ideas, and expanded their network of contacts.

Gierek, who had taken power in the wake of the 1970 strikes, had awakened genuine optimism among some sections of the public with his welcoming rhetoric and his new economic policies. But by the mid-1970s, the bloom was off. Prices rose, shortages deepened, and workers were being asked to increase their output. In 1976 another bout of major labor unrest flared at some of Poland’s biggest factories. The Communist Party managed to quell the protests with the usual mix of force and carefully calibrated concessions. Yet something was changing. Workers were exploring possibilities for labor activism. In 1976 a group of dissidents seized the opportunity by forming the Committee to Defend the Workers (known by its Polish acronym as KOR). They worked to encourage and advise a nascent movement for independent unions that was stirring the country. Yet the ingredients for broader grassroots social organization were not yet in place.

But by the time of the strike at the Lenin Shipyard, there was a surprisingly large number of workers who shared the labor activists’ skepticism about the government. The alliance had gained traction after the pope’s 1979 pilgrimage. John Paul II’s visit established a number of important preconditions. It gave Polish society a powerful sense of self-confidence after long years of humiliation and discord. There was also the crucial experience of self-organization on a mass scale. Party institutions had ceded the task of managing the millions of pilgrims and maintaining order to the citizens themselves, an accomplishment that turned out to be hard to forget. The millions who showed up shared in the experience of self-recognition: they realized, to their astonishment, that they had the numbers to convincingly counter the weight of the state. Together they listened to the pope proclaim his insistence on the centrality of Christ and the inviolability of individual human rights. This was a
message that unified many Poles across class boundaries: students, peasants, workers, and even quite a few not terribly religious intellectuals.

Yet the message, for all its firmness, was couched in language that avoided the rhetoric of confrontation and insisted on the primacy of reconciliation and restraint. This, too, was important. The pope’s pilgrimage showed Poles that they could “live in the truth,” rejecting the lies of the Communist regime, without resorting to violence. Not only that: nonviolence was a crucial precondition for the sort of cultural resistance that the pope’s visit had helped to make possible. The opposition could hardly claim to present a credible alternative to Communist rule, with its embrace of revolutionary “class warfare” and its daily practice of coercion, unless they convincingly demonstrated their allegiance to nonviolent change. The Communists were not a faceless, stereotypical “enemy.” They were human beings, fellow Poles and Europeans, and they should be addressed as such, in the interest of a common humanity, and according to the values so movingly articulated by the pope.

In the course of his public conversation with Polish society, John Paul had also made a point of addressing the varied concerns of particular groups. He was particularly intent on including the workers. In Jasna Góra he had celebrated mass for a congregation of some 1 million workers and miners from Upper Silesia and Zagrebie, the region from which the party had barred him during his trip. The pope’s remarks outlined an image of work that dispensed with the stale invocations of class struggle: “Work must help man to become better, more mature spiritually, more responsible, in order that he may realize his vocation on earth both as an unrepeatable person and in community with others.”
³
He saw workers not as a social force, but as a group of individuals with shared concerns, and urged them to retain awareness of the spiritual and moral dimensions of their lives: “Do not let yourselves be seduced by the temptation to think that man can fully find himself only by denying God, erasing prayer from his life and remaining only a worker, deluding himself that what he produces can on its own fill the needs of the human heart.”
⁴
And he noted approvingly that “the immense development of industry” in postwar Poland had “gone hand in hand with the building of churches, the development of parishes and the deepening and strengthening of faith.”
⁵