Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (52 page)

In fact, the Leipzig tradition of regular Monday-evening “Prayers for Peace” dated back to 1982, three years after John Paul II’s first pilgrimage and three years before Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to the top of the Soviet leadership. Protestant clergy at Leipzig’s Church of St. Nicholas organized the prayers as a forum for the non-state-approved airing of controversial social topics, ranging from military conscription to industrial pollution. Although the human rights movement in the German Democratic Republic never assumed the same prodigious scale as its Polish counterpart, it is striking how much East German dissident activity—much of it avowedly secular and left-wing—took place under the aegis of local churches. The Prayers for Peace—which were emulated by other churches around East Germany—continued throughout the 1980s, opening up an important grassroots space for discussion of human rights issues. Among their many other activities, the pastors at the Church of St. Nicholas cultivated close ecumenical contact with their Catholic counterparts in Poland.

To anyone who experienced them, the peaceful revolutions of 1989 in East Germany and Czechoslovakia owed an obvious debt—freely acknowledged by those who engineered them—to the pioneers of the peaceful Solidarity revolution in Poland. The declaration of martial law in December 1981 seemed at first to represent the end of a chapter, another failed interlude of freedom in East Central Europe’s long postwar twilight. It took time to realize that the Solidarity experiment had actually changed the balance of forces in fundamental ways. It was not merely that the State of Workers and Peasants had morphed, under General Jaruzelski’s rule, into something more akin to a South American military junta; nor was it just that unleashing martial law had revealed the yawning gap between the government’s claims of popular legitimacy and the demoralizing reality of its estrangement from the
population. The ideological facade of Polish Communism, which had suppressed a genuine working-class movement by brute force of arms, had collapsed. All that remained was coercion.

In this light, Solidarity’s apparent “failure” to take over the state presents itself in a rather different light. As some sympathetic historians have argued, the point of the trade union’s existence was not to seize power, but to promote an “evolutionary revolution.”
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Polish dissident Adam Michnik noted that the form of social change embodied by Solidarity was, in fact, “self-limiting”: while it aimed for the radical (and perhaps unattainable) end of self-government at all levels of society, its method for pursuing this goal was always avowedly incremental and nonconfrontational. In a revealing contrast, Michnik wrote, “The Communist authorities—admittedly, under constant and brutal pressure from Moscow—were unable to offer any sensible model of coexistence.”
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Under martial law, Poles conspicuously refused to live in fear. They joined social resistance circles that spread information and helped the families of those who were imprisoned. Clandestine factory commissions from Solidarity continued to collect union dues and paid assistance to workers who lost their jobs or fell ill. Workers signed petitions for arrested union officials. Farmers sent food to the families of people who had been arrested, and workers reciprocated by supplying them with underground literature. Taken together, these gestures attested to the remarkable resilience of the diverse new civil society that Solidarity had helped to engender.
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Poles did all of this themselves. But the pope’s intervention—if we can so describe his 1979 pilgrimage—provided a vital catalyst. His trip did not merely boost Polish morale. By his very presence John Paul II posed a practical political challenge to party rule, one to which the Communist system had no ready response. The pope could not be thrown in jail or overwhelmed by Red Army tanks; he could not be silenced or cajoled into a corrupting moral compromise. To Poles, he became the living exemplar of an alternate morality and the protector of the national idea. His global stature offered a promise of redress. And, of course, the millions who had welcomed John Paul in those nine days had permanently confounded the party’s fundamental claim: that it represented the people. The people had seized the chance to demonstrate their true will, and they had chanted, “We want God.”

Throughout Solidarity’s bloodless revolution, the church was a major source of “nonconfrontational solutions,” and this was not just a matter of the Vatican extending the hand of protection from Rome. Priests played an important role in calming potentially destructive emotions even as they created space for the legitimate expression of protest. The most famous example of this dynamic was Father
Jerzy Popiełuszko, an activist priest who had started his pastoral mission by ministering to steelworkers and later became closely allied with Solidarity. During the early years of martial law, he went right on assailing the party’s abuses of power in his enormously popular sermons in his church in the working-class Warsaw district of Żoliborz—a phenomenon that, at the time, was entirely unique within the countries of the East bloc (combined population: 400 million). “Nowhere else from East Berlin to Vladivostok could anyone stand before ten or fifteen thousand people and use a microphone to condemn the errors of state and party,” as
New York Times
reporter Michael Kaufman perceptively observed in one of his reports about Popiełuszko.
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When Popiełuszko was murdered by the secret police in 1984, it was other priests who neutralized and salved popular anger. A quarter of a million people, including Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, attended Popiełuszko’s funeral.

It has always been tempting to see John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland as a uniquely Polish event. That is understandable but somewhat inaccurate. This was a pope of a distinctly European avocation—more so, indeed, than many of the Italians in the job who had preceded him. His gift for languages had a great deal to do with it. And so, perhaps, did his intense appreciation of the artificiality of the Cold War divisions of Europe. From the first moment of his papacy, he unnerved the Soviets by identifying himself as a “Slav pope” with a particular sensitivity to his fellow believers to the East.
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(It was, indeed, a good measure of the artificiality of the Yalta order that anyone should have regarded this as a provocation.)

He made a point of offering tangible support to the beleaguered Catholic churches inside the Soviet Union itself. Upon his election as pope, he sent his cardinal’s zucchetto to a leading priest in Lithuania. He openly supported Cardinal Slipyj, the head of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine, who had suffered considerable persecution at Soviet hands since his appointment to the post in 1944.

Crucially, John Paul II also gave his backing to Cardinal František Tomášek, archbishop of Prague from 1977 to 1991. Tomášek, who had spent three years in a labor camp in the early 1950s, had actively supported the Prague Spring reformist movement. Then, after the Soviet invasion that put an end to it in 1968, he fell silent. But John Paul II’s pilgrimage in 1979 gave the archbishop new heart, and with the Vatican’s help Tomášek became an eloquent defender of the Czechoslovak human rights organizations that began to play an increasingly influential role in the 1980s—above all Charter 77, the group whose founders included leading dissident Václav Havel. In January 1988, Tomášek publicly came out in favor of a petition calling for religious freedom that drew six hundred thousand signers (both Christians and non-).
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The petition was an important act of resistance that set a precedent for the tumultuous events of the following year, when the Czechs (inspired by
the examples of their neighbors in Poland and East Germany) succeeded in launching their own nonviolent uprising against Communist rule that came to be known as the “Velvet Revolution.” Here, too, Tomášek also played a vital part, pledging the support of the church to the peaceful demonstrators who clashed with the security forces.

To be sure, John Paul II cannot be credited with masterminding everything that happened in Central Europe in 1989. The ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 was, of course, a factor of enormous consequence; so, too, was the deepening economic malaise within the USSR, which weakened its ability to retain its hold over its satellites. Yet neither of these conditions determined the form that change, when it came, would take. In this respect, the nine days of John Paul II’s June 1979 pilgrimage had a profound impact. We have fallen into the habit of regarding the collapse of Soviet-style Communism as inevitable: the direct consequence of a dysfunctional economic model of central planning, of the rigidity and institutionalized lies of command politics, and of the vast gap between the sublime designs of Marxist-Leninism and a reality that proved infinitely more vicious and mundane. This is simplistic. That Communism’s disintegration in East Central Europe could have taken a starkly different course was demonstrated by the brief but bloody civil war in Romania during its own revolution in 1989 and the long savagery that followed in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. One of the most remarkable aspects of the 1989 revolutions in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia was how peaceful they remained—and here the pope’s eloquent embodiment of the principle of non-confrontational resistance, during his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland and subsequent visits, served as a far-reaching example. All this makes it hard to disagree with the assessment of Timothy Garton Ash: “Without the pope, there would have been no Solidarity movement; without Solidarity, there would have been no Gorbachev; without Gorbachev, there would have been no 1989.”
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There is a great deal else to be said about the significance of John Paul II’s papacy, but much of that lies outside the purview of this work. His supporters will long continue to revere him for his prodigious energy, his intense and mystical faith, his devotion to young people, and his bold acknowledgment of the church’s historical responsibility for anti-Semitic teachings and the attendant revitalization of ties with the Jewish world. No other pope has pursued his pastoral mission so expansively. During his papacy, John Paul II visited 129 countries, laying the foundations for an extraordinary reglobalization of the church’s mission.

His critics, of course, will denounce John Paul II precisely for his defense of church traditions and his insistence on received dogma, including his rejection of birth control, homosexuality, and women in the priesthood. The harshest verdict is
likely to involve his handling of the scandal involving the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests, which has devastated the standing of the church in many of the countries where it long enjoyed privileged status. The pope’s failure to ensure a full and transparent reckoning of the crimes committed by members of the priesthood must also now be reckoned as a part of his legacy.

Yet history is never one-dimensional. And if we are to arrive at a full understanding of the end phase of the Communist system in Europe, we cannot neglect the extraordinary homecoming of the newly elected Polish pope in that sweltering summer of 1979.

T
he Islamic Revolution unquestionably succeeded in its aim of fundamentally altering Iranian society. It did away with the shah and his regime, and brought many aspects of his ambitious Westernization program to a grinding halt. The thousands of foreign specialists who once lived in the country departed, never to return. So, too, did hundreds of thousands of Iranians, most of them pillars or beneficiaries of the old regime.

Scholars tend to measure the impact of revolutions by the extent to which they affect the status of those who hold power in a particular society. By this standard, the 1979 revolution in Iran was a profoundly transformative one. It brought stark change to the ruling classes, as historian Shaul Bakhash notes.
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Industrialists and bankers left;
bazaaris
with good contacts to ruling clerics pushed aside the elite merchants who had exploited their ties with the royal family. Many high-ranking members of SAVAK and the military who were unable to flee ended up in front of firing squads; so, too, did many officials of the shah’s government, like Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the reformist ex-prime minister who refused to exploit an opportunity for escape and insisted on staying in Iran after the revolution. He paid for it with his life.

The shift was felt even within the tightly knit world of Iran’s religious establishment. Well-established clerical families whose scions refused to endorse Khomeini’s views on Islamic government faced precipitous decline. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who may well have saved Khomeini’s life through intervention on
his behalf in 1963, ended his life as a virtual outcast, his family the victims of vicious persecution by the new revolutionary regime. But there were plenty of candidates eager to fill the ensuing vacuum—most of them middle-ranking clerics, some of them former students of Khomeini, all more than willing to propagate the ideals of the new theocratic regime. The new regime did not draw only on the ranks of the clerics, though. Mohammed-Ali Rajai, for example, was a street peddler and schoolteacher before he became prime minister of the Islamic Republic in 1980.
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Perhaps the best example of revolutionary social mobility is that of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader. One of Khomeini’s most devoted students, Khamenei paid for his political engagement with a series of stints in the shah’s jails in the 1960s and ’70s. After the revolution, he became one of the imam’s key political advisers, distinguishing himself by his fanatical devotion to the principle of clerical rule. Khomeini had originally envisioned that only an ayatollah could fill the office of the supreme leader, but as he neared the end of his life, he realized that none of the likely candidates lived up to his criteria, so he pushed through a constitutional revision that lowered the bar to include mere “experts in Islamic jurisprudence.” Khamenei, who duly acceded to the position of supreme leader in the wake of Khomeini’s death, was acclaimed an ayatollah soon after taking office. Several of the highest-ranking clerics refused to accept Khamenei’s new religious status.