Down with Big Brother (16 page)

The most serious casualties occurred at the Wujek coal mine in Silesia, where Solidarity supporters armed themselves with axes, chains, and iron rods. The miners had vowed to defend themselves after hearing of beatings and mass arrests elsewhere in Silesia. Fierce hand-to-hand combat broke
out after ZOMO units attacked the mine with tanks and helicopters, three days after the imposition of martial law. Encircled by the enraged miners in a narrow courtyard, the riot police opened fire. Nine protesters were killed. The wall where the miners died became a makeshift shrine. The victims’ helmets lay on the top of the wall for months afterward, along with mounds of fresh flowers and messages of support for the banned trade union.
¹⁷⁰

With his massive blow against Solidarity, Jaruzelski succeeded in reversing the movement’s principal accomplishment: overcoming the fear that had divided Pole from Pole. As was the case before August 1980, the Communist regime now controlled an atomized and defeated society. The psychological walls that Solidarity had succeeded in smashing went up again practically overnight. Ordinary people began to mistrust one another once more. Anyone could be a police informer. The desperate economic situation also helped the general. The priority for most families in the exceptionally cold winter of 1981 was not politics, but keeping warm and finding enough to eat.

It was enough to look at the faces of people in the streets the day after martial law was declared to see that Jaruzelski had won his gamble. The exuberance and sense of pride that had been the hallmark of the Solidarity period disappeared overnight. The people themselves were different. Millions of rank-and-file Solidarity supporters retreated to the safety of their apartments. Their place on the streets was taken by hundreds of thousands of people connected in some way with the Communist regime. They immediately began ripping down Solidarity posters, guarding public buildings, and issuing permits of one kind or another. Their cynical, dissolute faces wore expressions of immense relief. Such people had been around all along; they had just lain low, waiting for better times.

I
N THE SHORT TERM
Jaruzelski won his “war” with the Polish people. Operation X was a model of its kind, one that will be studied by would-be military dictators for a long time to come. The coup showed that it is possible to turn back the information revolution. The most sophisticated communications technology in the world is no protection against a totalitarian regime. A sufficiently determined dictator can lock up the photocopy machines, unplug the automatic telephone exchanges, and hunt down the typewriters and computers.

The cost of doing all this, however, was immense. In order to reimpose Communist Party control over Poland, Jaruzelski had to take the country
back into the Middle Ages. He turned an industrialized country in the heart of Europe into a land cut off from the outside world, a country without telephones and telex machines. He locked up ten thousand of the best and the brightest. He imposed a stifling censorship on the mass media, closing down hundreds of newspapers and obliging television news readers to wear military uniforms. The martial law decrees covered everything from the introduction of compulsory labor and political loyalty tests for millions of state employees to bans on recreational sailing and sales of gasoline. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was introduced. Poland’s borders with the outside world were sealed. In order to prevent information from flowing freely around the country, travel without a permit was banned. Even savings accounts were frozen to prevent money from reaching Solidarity activists who had managed to avoid arrest.

There was no way a country burdened by such regulations could compete in the modern world. The restrictions were relaxed gradually, but Jaruzelski found that he had to rely on the support of Communist Party reactionaries to stay in power. That meant abandoning all hope of economic reform and condemning Poland to another decade of stagnation.

That was not all. For the Communist Party to be rescued by its own army was a humiliating admission of failure. During the period immediately after World War II, Polish Communists had felt a kind of revolutionary élan. Their success in rebuilding a war-ravaged country and incorporating the “western territories” acquired from Germany had won them popular support. By December 1981 it was clear that communism could maintain itself in Poland only with the aid of machine guns and internment camps. In order to save the system, Jaruzelski had to wage war against the working class. He replaced trade union leaders with military commissars and ordered tanks to smash their way into factories.

Paradoxically martial law may have been a blessing in disguise for Solidarity. After sixteen months of bruising struggles with the government, the movement was displaying the symptoms of a split personality. Some Solidarity leaders wanted the union to champion the cause of national independence; others wanted to put the emphasis on social matters. Some Solidarity activists saw themselves as spokesmen for workers in the huge industrial plants that were threatened by the free market; others regarded economic reform as a first step toward the junking of communism. Had history been allowed to take its normal course, these divisions would have led to an open split. The military crackdown had the effect of uniting the warring factions and preserving the Solidarity myth intact.

Packed off to internment camps by Jaruzelski, Solidarity leaders
regarded themselves as the modern-day equivalents of the Polish officers murdered by the Soviets at Katyn in World War II or the antitsarist insurrectionaries of 1830 and 1863. Like their forefathers, they felt they were suffering for a just cause, Poland’s national independence. They were determined to live up to Piłsudski’s motto: “To be conquered and not to surrender—that is victory.” The battery of Polish national feeling, which had run down in the sixties and seventies, was once again fully charged.

In the end martial law was a Pyrrhic victory for Jaruzelski. Even in the darkest days of December 1981, when the nation was completely demoralized, it was clear that the wheel of Polish history would turn again. The people had been conquered, but they had not surrendered. There were limits to the restoration of the old order. Poles had changed as a result of the Solidarity experience, and Communist ideology had lost its power to motivate. The system of central planning had proved hopelessly inefficient and would have to be dismantled if Poland were to have any chance of escaping from the seemingly never-ending cycle of economic crises and political explosions. Jaruzelski and his advisers understood the need for sweeping changes, but were afraid to relax political controls because it would undermine the very basis of Communist Party power. The dilemma was irresolvable.

The crackdown in Poland was also a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets. Once again, as in 1956 and 1968, they managed to stuff the genie of freedom back into the bottle. Eastern Europe had been made safe for “socialist democracy.” Soviet tanks would continue to have the run of the vast strategic plain between Russia and Germany. On the other hand, Soviet leaders now bore the burden of helping Poland survive an economic blockade imposed by Western countries. They could not afford to be saddled with another international basket case, at a time of growing economic problems at home. Brezhnev complained to his Politburo colleagues that “we are stretched to the limit in our capacity to help the Poles, and they are making still more requests.” He suggested that economic assistance be confined to prestige projects, “which should not impose great strains on our economy.”
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Soviet economic planners had great difficulty persuading Brezhnev to make hard economic choices. Surrounded by sycophants and completely dependent on his doctors and bodyguards, the general secretary had lost touch with political reality. His political program consisted of trying to please everybody and accepting artificial tributes as his rightful due. Trapped in grandiose illusions, he imagined himself both infallible and irreplaceable.
¹⁷²

But he too was mortal.

MOSCOW
November 10, 1982

O
N
N
OVEMBER 7
L
EONID
B
REZHNEV
presided over the annual Revolution Day parade in Red Square, an obligatory annual ritual for Soviet leaders. He stood for several hours on top of the Lenin Mausoleum in bitterly cold weather, waving feebly as T-72 battle tanks and nuclear missiles trundled across the ancient cobblestones. Immediately after the parade he was driven to his hunting lodge at Zavidovo for the holiday. On November 9 he returned to his dacha at Zareche. His personal barber got blind drunk and was unable to give him his regular afternoon shave, but Brezhnev was too sick to care very much.

“What a useless fellow,” he murmured indulgently. “He’s smashed again.”
¹⁷³

As the general secretary fell into his dotage, he had become increasingly estranged from his unruly family and dependent on the KGB guards who looked after his every physical need. They were like wet nurses to him. They helped the seventy-five-year-old leader out of bed in the morning, changed his clothes, fed him his meals, played dominoes with him, put up with his moods, and worried about his health. It was like dealing with a small child.

On the evening of November 9 Brezhnev retired to bed early. He usually stayed up to watch the 9:00 p.m. television news program
Vremya
, but he was tired by the hundred-mile drive from Zavidovo. He complained that his
throat was hurting him. The following morning his bodyguards waited for his wife, Viktoria Petrovna, to emerge from his bedroom before going in to wake him up. It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. Brezhnev was lying on his side, apparently asleep.

“Leonid Ilyich, it’s time to get up,” said Vladimir Medvedev, the head of the night shift, as he gently shook the
gensek
.

There was no reaction. Medvedev began shaking Brezhnev more vigorously, but his eyes did not open. His body seemed cold. The bodyguards did what they were trained to do in such a situation: They pumped the old man’s heart and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. They also called the chief Kremlin doctor, Yevgeny Chazov, who arrived on the scene twelve minutes later. Soon afterward an emergency medical team rushed into the room and started full-scale resuscitation procedures. It was clear to Chazov that all this frenetic activity was just for show. Brezhnev had been dead for several hours.
¹⁷⁴

The first Politburo member on the scene was the former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the heir apparent. He gave an involuntary gasp as he looked at the lifeless corpse of the man who had led the Soviet Union for the past eighteen years. He stared intently at the dead leader’s puffed-up face, which had turned a pale blue. Suddenly the reverie was over. Andropov said his good-byes and left.

T
HE
S
OVIET PEOPLE HEARD
the news twenty-six hours later. The man chosen to make the death announcement on behalf of the grieving Politburo was Igor Kirillov, senior news reader for central television, who had served as the voice and face of Big Brother for almost two decades. A master of intonation and inflection, Kirillov had a knack for conveying Kremlin propaganda to the masses. His voice would drip with treacly pride as he announced the fulfillment of five-year plans. He read Politburo communiqués as if they were self-evident truths with which no honest person could possibly argue. Turning to news from capitalist countries—unemployment and crime were favorite topics—Kirillov switched instantly to moral indignation. For Brezhnev’s death, he adopted a tone of voice that was both somber and reassuring.

“Dear comrades,” Kirillov announced, pausing for effect. “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the whole Soviet people [pause] have suffered a grave loss [pause]. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev [reverential inflection, long pause], loyal perpetuator of the great cause of Lenin [pause], ardent patriot [pause], outstanding revolutionary and fighter for peace and communism
[pause], an outstanding politician and statesman of our time [pause], has departed this life [long, mournful pause].”

But wait, comrades. All is not lost. “The people have learned from experience that whatever the turn of events and whatever the trials [pause], our party remains capable of carrying out its historic mission. [Voice assumes growing confidence.] The home and foreign policies of the CPSU elaborated under the leadership of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev [reverential pause] will continue to be applied consistently and purposefully [final note of triumph before funeral music surges in the background].”

Years later, after the collapse of communism, Kirillov explained that he had been trained in the famous Stanislavsky school of acting, the Method.
¹⁷⁵
In order to seem sincere, the actor must completely live the part. If he can convince himself that he is hopelessly in love, he can convince others. Like anyone else his age—he was born in 1932, at the height of Stalin’s great terror—Kirillov knew about the gulag and the man-made famine that killed millions of people, but he put them out of his mind. He convinced himself that the party was right. Eventually, as the personality cult surrounding Brezhnev reached absurdist proportions, even Kirillov began to have doubts. But he still behaved
as if
he believed. He was the epitome of the system of doublethink that held a nation of 287 million people in its grasp.

K
IRILLOV’S SIMULATION
of ideological conviction was an apt analogy for the Brezhnev era. By and large, ordinary Soviets had ceased to believe in socialist ideology, but they continued to go through the motions. The whole country was engaged in a mass deceit. In the privacy of their kitchens people laughed at their doddering leader. In public they kept straight faces.