Poland: the Ides of March
Tim Garton Ash
Berlin Poland seems once again to have stepped back from the brink of the abyss. Last Friday saw the largest ever strike in the history of the Communist world. Posters appeared on the walls of Wroclaw advising 'what to do if the Russians come'. Signposts should be reversed and street names obliterated to confuse the invading armies: As in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Solidarity national strike committee in Gdansk issued instructions for the event of an 'external military intervention', recommending both passive and active resistance. People stocked up with food as for a siege, while the Warsaw Pact manoeuvres showed no signs of drawing to a close.
On Monday evening, the threatened general strike was called off at the last possible moment. How far Solidarity's militant national leadership, and their yet more militant rank-and-file, will be satisfied by the partial agreement reached remains to be seen. In an atmosphere which verges on desperation, nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.
Probably the most important of last week's happenings was the extraordinary 18-hour plenary session of the Communist Party's Central Committee which ended at four o'clock on Monday morning with a very ragged rendering of the Internationale. At the risk of being kicked in the teeth by history, we will attempt to make some sense of developments inside the Party. In an open letter to rank-and-file Party members published last week, the reformist Secretary of the Journalists' union wrote, 'Our hard-liners have no programme other than confrontation and disinformation . . the present crisis is the last chance for those who want the Party to abandon its policy of seeking agreement with the people, for those who are leading the state and society to catastrophe'.
Who are these hard-liners? At the highest level sits a certain Mr Stefan Olszowski, long feted as a 'Liberal' by the Guardian. Through the Ides of March Mr Olszowski, through looking neither lean nor hungry, has been giving a pretty imitation of Cassius, He has powerful support amongst what is called the `Apparat' or Womenklatura% the corps of perhaps two to three hundred thousand people appointed by the Party to key posts and enjoying all the accompanying privileges, including the privilege of the oldest profession in the world: power without responsibility. They therefore have most to lose directly from the ill-advised attacks of local Solidarity branches on individual corrupt officials ('the thieves', as they are generally known in the union), and indirectly from the proposals for Party reform which concentrate on the question of accountability.
It becomes increasingly clear that these forces have mounted a counter-offensive directed in the first instance against Solidarity, but secondly against the 'moderates' and 'reformers' within the Party. In Lodz five Solidarity members were sacked from an Interior Ministry hospital: their offence being that they discovered a secret cache of 13 pounds of meat reserved for senior management. The head of the hospital, formally an officer with the rank of colonel, said he was acting 'on orders'. The predictable result was a protest strike, breaking the truce proclaimed by General Jaruzelski. Scarcely a week after that dispute was settled, there came another provocation — this time far more serious: the beating up of three Solidarity activists by plain-clothes men in Bydgoszcz on black Thursday, 19 March. Whoever was responsible must have known that this would result in a vigorous response from Solidarity. If the local union had gone ahead with an immediate stoppage, it could have disrupted railway communications on the first day of the Warsaw Pact manoeuvres. Instead, the union's national leadership spent a week in extended talks with the Government before ordering Friday's disciplined and selective demonstration.
So what is the hard-liners' game? Will we see another black Thursday, to which Solidarity's furious activists might well respond with that violence which Cassius and his kind seem bent on provoking? There are two possible explanations for their conduct. The deputy prime minister responsible for relations with the unions, Mr Mieczyslaw Rakowski, hinted at the first when he spoke recently of certain 'politicians who deliver. . very courageous speeches about respect for principles (Marxism-Leninism) but who have not visited a factory for months and don't realise that it is impossible to deliver such speeches there'. In other words they have lost touch with reality. Living as they do a privileged and isolated existence, inconceivable even for a Eurocrat in the West, they do not realise that there has been a sea-change in the consciousness of a whole people. What was possible even in September is no longer possible now.
Seven months of Solidarity have transformed the expectations of workers in a way which 37 years of Communist government never did; and yet these politicians still believe that the workers' movement can be put down with the domestic, Polish forces which are at their disposal, on paper at least, and that such a confrontation would not inevitably lead to a Soviet intervention. To a rational Western observer this seems literally incredible. But then, if there is one safe generalisation about the top nartY bosses in Warsaw and Moscow; it is that we really do not know what they know and therefore how they see the world. The second explanation is simpler: they already. reckon with the intervention. Mr Olszowski sees himself as the Polish Husak. He maY even be working directly with the Russians. On the first hypothesis there is a chance that the forces of realism will win the day inside the Party. Their strongest advocate is now the Prime Minister, General Jaruzelski. Only his threat to resign Prevented Mr Olszowski's temporary majority in the Politburo from taking steps towards declaring a state of emergency in the viak,e of Black Thursday. He is very closely. 111 touch with the real state of public opira" through his military intelligence sources. I:le knows, that, as a national proverb has it, 'When the Pole is hungry he is angry' (winch is, of course, where emergency food suP", plies from the EEC come in). He knows that Solidarity's members are genera' more militant than their national leadersh. IP (for example, a poll conducted by the utu011,, in the industrial city of Plock last we showed that 79 per cent of those asked were in favour of a general strike). Above all, 11 knows what his own soldiers would and would not do. Moreover, he more than anY other Communist politician enjoys the confidence of the nation. 'This is a uniform we can trust', as Lech Walesa Put it. According to Polish Radio, Silesian mine,rs decided to work last Saturday, officiallY designated 'workfree', as a gesture of 'support for the government of General Jaruzelski'. Last week was remarkable for the flood of resolutions from local party organtsaj tons criticising the intransigent stance 0' the leadership. The assembly hall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, where it all began with the workers' occupation last August, was re-occupied on Sunday — PY, Communist Party members. They 'sat In, throughout the long session of the Central Committee, listening to the speeches on. the wireless and sending off protest resolutions by telex to Warsaw. Shades of Solidart.tY. This pressure from below may help realists like Jaruzelski and perhaps Mr Kania Oh° Dubcek by inclination) to carry thri/ng, those reforms of the Party which are sruPdt unavoidable if it is to work with, and r1°.t against, the independent unions. Or might run away with them. Most Western analysts would argue tha,t the emancipation of the party is as Inne", anathema to the Kremlin as the abolition oi censorship 'or a threat to the alliance. That brings us back to the second hypothesis. A building-site placard was recently to.151,e. seen in Warsaw: No Entry'. It said 'Bullue ing in progress'. Underneath was a map Poland. military
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