Under siege

Nikolai Tolstoy

The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980-82 Timothy Garton Ash (Cape £12.50)

'What we had in mind was not only bread, butter and sausage but also justice, democracy, truth, legality, human dignity, freedom of convictions and the repair of the republic. All elementary values had been too mistreated for people to believe that anything could improve without their rebirth. Thus the economic protest had to be simultaneously a social protest, and the social protest had to be simultaneously a moral protest.'

Such were the declared aims of Solidarity, whose flowering and suppression are chronicled in Timothy Garton Ash's scholarly and moving account. For 16 months the world witnessed the un- contemplatable: an entrenched socialist totalitarian state shouldered aside and ig- nored as superfluous by its subject popula- tion. This `revolution' (it was in reality a counter-revolution) took place moreover without a single drop of blood being shed by the insurrectionists.

It is an extraordinary and genuinely heroic tale, one incalculably important not only in itself but for what it portends. It was once to be feared that Communism would only be overthrown as the result of some bloody crisis, most likely a major war. Now one can see that it may after all take place quite peacefully when the time is ripe. The Party apparatus of tyranny has long been irrelevant to national life, and soon it will be universally seen to be so. Marx and Lenin professed to believe that one day the state would wither away, and ironically it is likely to be the Marxist state that shrivels in this way.

In Solzhenitsyn's words, `there is the most intimate, most natural, fundamental link: violence can only be concealed by the lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Once the lie has been dispersed, the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its repulsiveness, and then violence, become decrepit, will come crashing down.'

That was in 1970, and it was exactly a decade later that Solzhenitsyn's prophetic statement translated itself into historical' fact. It was indeed moral force that defied and daunted overwhelming material power, driving the enemy cringing into his strong places. It began with the Pope's visit to Poland in 1979, when the neo-Darwinist doctrines of Marx and his heirs were stood abruptly on their heads. Materialism, the dialectic, and scientific humanism all vanished away, fleeing before the reassert- ion of moral law and suprahuman values.

Poles are often accused of being roman- tics, impractical idealists rashly setting themselves against the iron laws of a predetermined history. But the actions of Solidarity were intensely ingenious and practical. Armed rebellion or repudiation of the 'state' was eschewed from the begin- ning. The Party was isolated, but its posi- tion in any case had always rested on the protection of its barbaric supervisor in the east. What was planned was to move gradually into the social void which exists everywhere beyond the physical presence of the Party and police in socialist states. Cautiously pushing forward into that vacuum, the movement would eventually absorb so much of the social order that the decaying state-rump would provide no more than the facade necessary to keep Soviet power from lashing bloodily out of its frontiers once again.

The skill and patience with which this policy was evolved and implemented appear truly remarkable when one considers that they arose almost spontaneously among the inchoate millions who comprised Solidari- ty. If the reassertion of spiritual values refuted Marx, the strategy made nonsense of Lenin's claim that only a vanguard Party could provide the leadership required of a revolutionary movement. But of course in historical terms Marxism has invariably been imposed on nations by means of a Putsch or foreign invasion, whereas it was among the peoples of the Roman Empire that Christianity made headway long before it ascended to senatorial villas and imperial palaces.

The success of Solidarity placed the regime in Poland in a ludicrous situation. It had long been incapable of doing anything about the economic order except sabotage it, and now its direct intervention in na- tional affairs became limited to a series of burglaries and muggings, interspersed with pathetic pleas to be allowed to negotiate with the people. This pitiable state of af- fairs was highlighted by a tacit agreement on Solidarity slogan-painting, which was allowed to take place during daylight hours, while emissaries of the regime crept out at night to try and deface them.

By now the Polish `Government' was revealed openly for what it had been in essence since its beginning, a paradoxical

misnomer more striking than that of the Holy Roman Empire. It was neither Polish nor a government, but an occupying force repelled and laid under siege in its citadels. The closest historical parallel would perhaps be that of the mediaeval German robber barons who, secure in their castles, sallied out from time to time to plunder and lay waste the countryside.

What attracts Western admirers to Marx- ism is its apparent monolithic control and direction of the population. Alienated in- tellectuals, who themselves no longer have even a housemaid to order about and whose children are invariably beyond control from the age of three, derive vicarious satisfac- tion from seeing an entire community at the disposal of idealists like themselves. Their need to believe is too great for disillusion- ment. But for others Solidarity has per- formed a remarkable service by proving what was long suspected.

The totalitarian state is not only based on a lie, but lives out a further lie. So far from permeating society, it scarcely belongs to society at all. Its ideology is rejected with cynicism by the rulers and with indignation by the ruled. It possesses no organic life of its own, institutionally or individually, and its reality consists almost exclusively in the pistols, blackjacks, poisonous drugs, elec- tric cattle-goads and other weaponry with which the occupying force defends its privileges. The `Polish' armed forces (military and paramilitary) comprise some 337,000 men. Of these, nearly 40 per cent are directed solely towards waging war on the internal enemy, the Polish people. Dur- ing the Solidarity crisis even this resource proved sadly deficient, and the so-called Polish Army (in reality a mercenary detach- ment of the Red Army) was called in to sup- plement the professional guards.

One is reminded of the Soviet reaction to the German invasion of 1941, when greater priority was accorded to massacring and evacuating real or imagined internal enemies than to repelling the Germans. We have enemies all around us, Comrades!

The triumph of Solidarity also exposed another salient factor in 20th-century Marx- ism: the fact that in large part it was the Ac- quisitive Revolution. In Russia the Bolshevik leadership wasted no time in all- propriating ('socialising') to personal use the houses and estates of the exiled nobility, and Stalin's wealth came in time to exceed that of Nicholas II. (The richest member of my family since its beginnings was probably that Alexei Tolstoy who shrewdly returned after 1917 to join in the share-out).

By the time the Revolution came to be ek ported to Poland, wealth, luxury and moral corruption were the automatic privileges of the elite, a fact glaringly illuminated when Solidarity temporarily threw back the shut' ters. However, the new Sovietised plutocracy had failed to acquire the graces of the hereditary aristocracies it displaced, and at the time of writing has yet to throw up a Pushkin, a Turgenev, a RiniskY' Korsakov or a Tolstoy. Instead we have satraps like the brutish eunuch Kazimieri

Doskoczynski, whose profligate enter- tainments on his 60,000-hectare estate in- clude troops of prostitutes and Western film shows. As Politburo member Andrzej Zabinski put it succinctly, 'I've said it before, but I'll say it again in this group: I don't know anyone who is not corrupted by power; the only question is how far and how fast.'

Timothy Garton Ash has written the definitive account of the Polish counter- revolution. It is recommended to anyone who believes in the essential decency of man, and to all those who admire the Poles for once again proving heroic testimony to that faith.

It may distress others, however, who should be warned. They include British trade union leaders like Len Murray and Bill Sirs, who have long gazed approvingly on the powers granted their counterparts in the USSR and Soviet-occupied countries, damning with faint praise or condemning outright those who sought the liberties they enjoy; Mr Philip Windsor, who thinks 'martial law preferable, in some cir- cumstances [i.e. Polish ones], to anarchic lawlessness'; and Dr E.P. Thompson, who was offended by Polish lack of interest in his ingenious scheme for making the Soviet Union the only nuclear power in Europe. It is a distress I suspect Mr Garton Ash can live with.