Down with Big Brother (18 page)

T
HE POPE’S FIRST VISIT
had provided the spiritual boost that had paved the way for the rise of Solidarity. By turning out to greet their countryman, and becoming part of the millions-strong crowd that followed his every move, Poles acquired a sense of solidarity with one another. Never again would they feel alone and isolated, as they had during the dark days of totalitarianism. If anyone was isolated, it was Poland’s Communist rulers.

During the 1979 pilgrimage John Paul had spoken in a voice that was simple and direct, quite unlike the voice of the Communist regime. He talked of the thirty-five-year Communist experience as a transitory phenomenon, insignificant in comparison with Poland’s thousand-year devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. It was a message that came across clearly on the first day of the visit, in Warsaw’s Victory Square, when the pope attacked the state for attempting to create an atheistic society. “Christ
cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe,” he had thundered. The crowd greeted his words with a ten-minute burst of applause, ending with rhythmic chants of “We want God, we want God.”
¹⁸²

From that moment onward, Karol Wojtyła became the uncrowned king of Poland.

During his weeklong tour of Poland the pope had elaborated on one of his favorite themes, the spiritual unity of Europe. He saw his beloved Kraków as part of a European-wide civilization, in which political boundaries were more or less irrelevant. In Wojtyła’s Europe, the Europe of 966, when Poland was first converted to Christianity, there was no Iron Curtain and no Berlin Wall. Priests, scholars, and ideas traveled freely from one town to another. The pope was convinced that his election was God’s way of reminding Western Europe that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Bulgars, and even Russians were also part of a much broader Christian civilization.

Born in 1920, the year Poland defeated Soviet Russia in the “Miracle on the Vistula,” Karol Wojtyła had firsthand experience of family tragedy, backbreaking labor, and political oppression. He had scarcely known his mother, a schoolteacher, who died when he was only six, while giving birth to a stillborn girl. His father, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army, was killed in the opening year of World War II. “At the age of twenty,” Wojtyła later recalled, “I had already lost all the people I loved and even the ones I might have loved, such as my big sister who had died, I was told, six years before my birth.”
¹⁸³
Psychologists have speculated that the future pope sought compensation for the maternal love he never received in the Marian cult of the Black Madonna.

As a theological student in Kraków Wojtyła experienced the terror of German occupation. A particularly brutal Nazi gauleiter, Hans Frank, installed himself in the royal Wawel Castle with orders from Hitler to treat the Poles as a slave race. “The standard of living in Poland must be kept low,” Hitler instructed. “The priests will preach what we want them to preach. Their task is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted.”
¹⁸⁴
Wojtyła saw Kraków Jews being taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, just a few miles down the road. Polish intellectuals were disposed of in a similar fashion. The Germans put Wojtyła to work, first in a stone quarry and later carrying buckets of lime in a water purification plant. On the night of August 6, 1944, the Gestapo arrested all Polish males between the age of fifteen and fifty in retaliation for the Warsaw uprising. Had they found Wojtyła, they would probably have killed him. Fortunately for the young theologian, he was given shelter by the archbishop of Kraków, Prince Adam Sapieha.

Wojtyła lived in the residence on Franciscan Street, off and on, for nearly
fifteen years, as both student and archbishop. When he returned in June 1983, as pope, it was as if he were coming home. He greeted the nuns by name and sang and joked with the thousands of young people who waited to greet him in the street outside. “Holy Father, we trust you,” they chanted. “Save Poland.”

On the last full day of his visit the pope said mass on the Błonie, the vast meadow in front of Wawel Castle. Banners reading “Solidarity Lives” and “There Is No Freedom Without Solidarity” fluttered above the crowd of two million people. Alluding to Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law, the pope urged his listeners never to give up. The nation had been “called to victory,” he declared.

As he said these words, two million people raised their hands silently in the air in the V for victory sign. An underground Solidarity leader, Eugeniusz Szumiejko, who had managed to escape the police roundup, was standing at the back of the huge throng, on top of an embankment. All of a sudden he saw a sea of black heads submerged in a wave of white fists.
¹⁸⁵
It was an awe-inspiring sight, proof that Jaruzelski had been unable to crush the spirit that had given birth to Solidarity. At the end of the mass a large chunk of the crowd set off on foot for Nowa Huta, beneath their Solidarity banners, to see the pope consecrate a new church.

“
Khodz z namy,
” they chanted, the battle cry of 1970 and 1980. “Come with us. There will be no beatings today.”

When they reached the site of the new church, they joined a congregation of a quarter of a million people. The entire population of the “city without God” had turned out to greet the pope. Here was proof that history could not be reversed by tanks, internment camps, and corrugated iron fences, that martial law too would pass, and that Nowa Huta’s two-story monument to the founder of world communism would one day come down.

T
HE
K
REMLIN GREETED THE NEWS
of Pope John Paul’s triumphant return to his homeland with ill-concealed fury. The Soviet mass media accused Polish priests of inciting parishioners to acts of “political hooliganism” and inspiring “counterrevolutionary disturbances.” Soviet leaders urged their Polish counterparts to crack down hard on the “reactionary” wing of the Catholic Church.

“The Polish Communist Party isn’t putting much effort into the struggle with the church,” Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, complained to his Politburo colleagues. “Things have reached the point when thousands
upon thousands of people are crawling on their knees before the Roman pope.”
¹⁸⁶

Jaruzelski resisted Moscow’s advice to crack down on the church. He tried to explain that he needed the church as an “ally” in his campaign to ensure peace and quiet in Poland and regain respectability at home and abroad. The Kremlin potentates remained hostile. Their suspicions were voiced by the youngest member of the Politburo, who presented himself as an ardent believer in the monotheistic faith of communism. “Jaruzelski is trying to paint the situation in rosy colors,” he told his colleagues. “We must clarify his real intentions. We must find out whether he wants to introduce a pluralistic system of government in Poland.”
¹⁸⁷

Such were the views of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev a year before he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

II

REVOLT
OF THE MACHINES

In Poland, in August 1980, it was human beings who went on strike. In the Soviet Union, we are witnessing a strike of inanimate objects
.

Adam Michnik

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance
.

Edward Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

SAKHALIN ISLAND
September 1, 1983

A
FTER
R
ONALD
R
EAGAN’S ELECTION
as fortieth president of the United States, the Pentagon began publishing annual reports on the Soviet military threat. Packed with color illustrations of missiles that could hit New York and Los Angeles, charts depicting the growing Warsaw Pact advantage in tanks and men under arms, and grainy photographs of nuclear submarines, the glossy brochures portrayed a world in which the balance of power was shifting inexorably in favor of the Communist superpower. With each edition of
Soviet Military Power
, an ever greater proportion of the earth’s surface was daubed in red. Sinister red arrows reached out across the world’s major sea-lanes, showing the Kremlin straining to achieve the goal of a thousand-ship navy. Much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was covered with blotches and symbols denoting the presence of Soviet, Cuban, or East German military advisers. No part of the globe, not even the United States, seemed entirely safe from the encroaching Red menace.

Thanks to satellite technology, American military planners were able to observe a Soviet arms buildup that was unprecedented for peacetime. If anything, they underestimated the extent of the buildup, failing to detect many of the nuclear warheads that were rolling off Soviet production lines. There was something missing, however, from this bird’s-eye view: an understanding of ground-level reality.

Viewed up close, the Soviet military machine was neither as awesome nor as efficient as it appeared from the sky. The military-industrial complex suffered from the same weaknesses as the rest of the Soviet economy: incompetence, waste, technological backwardness, bureaucracy. Despite devoting an ever-increasing proportion of their country’s economic resources to the military, Soviet leaders still felt insecure.

Several years later, when the Cold War was already winding down, Soviet military chiefs presented their American counterparts with a map that reflected their view of the world. In sharp contrast with American maps, the Soviet map depicted a vast country encircled by enemies. To the east there were the Chinese, waiting for a chance to expand into the underpopulated vastness of Siberia. To the south, the Muslims, with whom Russia had waged war for five hundred years. To the west, the ideologically irreconcilable forces of imperialism. And all around, the rival superpower, with its military bases, electronic listening posts, subversive radio “voices,” and all-conquering consumer culture.

To defend themselves against these multiple threats, Kremlin leaders propagated the doctrine of a “sacred” border. The frontiers of the Soviet state had been consecrated with the blood of millions of soldiers and could never be altered. It was the patriotic duty of every citizen to defend these borders to the end. Half a million soldiers were assigned to patrol the frontier. Soviet air defenses alone consisted of some twenty-five hundred interceptor aircraft, five thousand early warning radar systems, and ten thousand surface-to-air-missiles, deployed along a five-thousand-mile arc from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad.
¹

The orders were clear: “Use weapons and combat equipment” to destroy any intruder. When the test finally came, the border guards almost fluffed it.

G
ENNADY
O
SIPOVICH CLIMBED
into the cockpit of his Su-15 interceptor jet an hour before dawn on September 1, 1983. He was given the coordinates of an unidentified “military” target approaching the island of Sakhalin from the direction of Kamchatka, a volcanic peninsula that juts down from the eastern tip of Russia. His mission was to destroy the target if and when it crossed back into Soviet airspace. At 5:42 a.m., Sakhalin time, he received the order to take off.

By the time Osipovich was finally airborne, the “intruder” plane had been wandering across Soviet territory for almost an hour. Four fighter planes had been scrambled over Kamchatka to bring it down, but they had lost touch with their target as it headed out over the Sea of Okhotsk. It later
turned out that eight out of the eleven tracking stations on Kamchatka and Sakhalin were not functioning properly.
²

A veteran pilot with ten years’ experience in the Far East, Osipovich knew that the boastful talk about the Soviet Union’s impenetrable borders was a myth. In fact, there were gaping holes in the system. The Americans seemed to delight in testing the mettle of Soviet pilots. U.S. fighter aircraft would head directly for the border, only to veer away at the last moment. American RC-135 intelligence-gathering planes were constantly buzzing around. The war of nerves was taking its toll. Six months previously a squadron of planes from the U.S. Pacific fleet had brazenly violated Soviet airspace over the Kurile Islands, an archipelago seized from Japan at the end of World War II. A high-level commission had berated the Soviet pilots for their lack of vigilance.
³

Personal initiative was not a quality that was prized in the Air Defense Force (PVO). The Soviet top guns who flew high-performance combat planes sometimes dismissed their PVO colleagues as “robots” controlled from the ground. Osipovich’s Sukhoi-15 was a typical PVO plane, a cumbersome gas guzzler, fast-climbing but difficult to maneuver. One Soviet defector described it as little more than “a high-altitude missile platform.”
⁴
The range of PVO planes was limited. After a Soviet fighter pilot flew a state-of-the-art MiG-25 to Japan, orders were issued to ensure that PVO planes never had enough fuel to reach a foreign airfield. That meant a maximum flying time of forty to fifty minutes, barely enough to complete a mission.
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