Down with Big Brother (7 page)

The two party bosses took their winter vacations together at Pitsunda. During a long walk through the pine woods Shevardnadze described his attempts to increase agricultural production in Georgia by offering peasants financial incentives. The experiment had horrified doctrinaire Marxists, who feared the reemergence of the so-called kulak class, the prosperous, stubbornly independent peasantry destroyed by Stalin. Shevardnadze had taken Gorbachev to meet one of the new kulaks, who kept ten dairy cows at his farmstead. The question now was what to do with this ideological monstrosity.

“If you like, we can de-kulakize him,” said Shevardnadze in his thick Georgian accent. “Then there won’t be any farm, milk, or livestock.”

The party’s new agriculture secretary laughed. “We could de-kulakize him, of course, so that your theoreticians won’t get angry. But how are we going to improve rural life without this kind of kulak?” he replied.
⁵⁶

On another occasion Shevardnadze blurted out that everything was “rotten” in the Soviet Union. “We cannot go on living like this. We must think what we can do to salvage the country,” he told Gorbachev.
⁵⁷

Both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were experienced apparatchiks, adept in the ways of Soviet politics. They knew how to camouflage their “experiments” behind innocuous-sounding names. In return for occasional flashes of personal honesty, they joined the rest of the Soviet leadership in ritualistic displays of public hypocrisy.

Gorbachev had honed his sycophantic skills on the important visitors who passed through Stavropol. With its warm weather and mountain spas, the Stavropol region was a favorite vacation destination for the “big pine cones” from Moscow. The local Communist Party chief was responsible for humoring the big shots and helping them unwind from the burdens of office. Party bosses from places like Stavropol were even occasionally referred to as resort secretaries. The opportunities for corruption were immense. The party secretary in the neighboring Krasnodar region, Sergei Medunov, was a notorious bribe taker with close links to the local mob. Gorbachev, by contrast, had a reputation for relative honesty. All the same, for his own political survival, he was obliged to ply his visitors with gifts and cater to their various whims.
⁵⁸

An amateur actor in his youth, Gorbachev was particularly good at feigning sincerity. When he praised Brezhnev or spoke about the glorious future awaiting the next generation of Soviet citizens, his deep brown eyes seemed to light up with enthusiasm and conviction. At Politburo meetings he always deferred to his elders. When his turn came to speak, he would invariably support the leader’s position, however absurd or hard-line. When the entire country was called upon to critique Brezhnev’s memoir positively, Gorbachev displayed the required enthusiasm. At an ideological conference in Stavropol he praised the decrepit general secretary for his “titanic daily work,” “deep philosophical penetration,” and “talent for leadership of the Leninist type.” “Communists, and all the workers of Stavropol, are boundlessly grateful to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for this truly party-spirited literary work,” Gorbachev declared. He ordered all local newspapers to serialize the turgid volume “in response to the innumerable requests of the workers of Stavropol.”
⁵⁹

If Gorbachev was a talented flatterer, Shevardnadze was a virtuoso. In
the Georgian tradition, he groveled at the feet of the powerful. At the Twenty-fifth Communist Party Congress in 1976, he lauded Brezhnev’s “high competence, breadth of vision, concreteness, humanity, uncompromising class position, loyalty, principled position, skill at penetrating the soul of his interlocutor, and ability to create an atmosphere of trust between people.” He expressed his nation’s undying loyalty to its big Russian brother in unctuous tones. “They call Georgia a sunny land. But for us, comrades, the real sun rises not in the East, but in the North, in Russia, the sun of Leninist ideas.”
⁶⁰

While resting at Pitsunda the future general secretary and his future foreign minister heard an announcement that was to cast a long shadow over their efforts to chart a new course for the Communist superpower. On the morning of December 28 Radio Moscow began retransmitting the speech by Babrak Karmal proclaiming the dawn of a new “day of freedom.” A few hours later the radio reported that the Afghan government had sent an urgent request to the Soviet Union for “immediate political, moral, and economic aid, including military aid.” “The government of the Soviet Union has met the request of Afghanistan,” the announcer added, without elaboration.
⁶¹

As candidate, or nonvoting, members of the Politburo, neither Gorbachev nor Shevardnadze had been informed about the plans to invade Afghanistan. Both men later claimed that they were shocked by the decision, which they described as a “fatal error” and a “crime against humanity.”
⁶²
In June 1980, however, they joined other Central Committee members in unanimously endorsing a resolution claiming that the Red Army had foiled “imperialist” plans to turn Afghanistan into a “bridgehead for military aggression” against the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze went out of his way to praise Brezhnev once again for his far-sighted leadership, hailing the invasion as “a brave, uniquely loyal, uniquely courageous step … that has been received with approval by every Soviet citizen.”
⁶³

By sending troops to Afghanistan, Kremlin leaders imagined that they had bought a few years’ peace and quiet, just as they had with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They could not have been more wrong. While Gorbachev and the other Central Committee members were raising their hands to approve the provision of “fraternal assistance” to Afghanistan, even more serious trouble was brewing at the opposite end of their empire: in Poland.

GDAŃSK
August 15, 1980

T
HE GATES OF THE
L
ENIN
S
HIPYARD
were locked shut when I arrived on the second day of the strike that was to foreshadow the downfall of communism. A portrait of John Paul II, the Polish pope, had been attached to the front of the gate, like a talisman protecting the strikers from the fury of the Communist regime. The white and red Polish flag hung limply from the top of the gate. S
TRAJK
O
KUPACIJNY
, “Occupation Strike,” proclaimed a nearby placard. Workers in grimy overalls clutched the gray metal railings with their fists, gazing out at a crowd of several hundred sympathizers and relatives. The gate was adorned with freshly cut red and white flowers.

Hundreds of strikes had taken place around Poland over the previous few weeks to protest a rise in meat prices, but they had always been settled behind closed doors. Strike leaders calculated that the presence of journalists, particularly foreign journalists, would only complicate their negotiations with the regime. Communist ideologists regarded factories, coal mines, and shipyards as proletarian fortresses, built to withstand the assaults of class enemies. In years of wandering around the Soviet bloc, I had never once been permitted to visit a factory without being chaperoned by government officials.

To my amazement, the shipyard gates suddenly opened a crack, and I was ushered into the forbidden world. Marxist ideologists would never be able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for the scene that now confronted me: workers rebelling against the “workers’ state.” Strikers were lounging around on the grass, sitting on torn-up pieces of asbestos. Heated discussions were going on everywhere, as if people had just been released from a lifetime vow of silence. Some workers had scrambled on top of the shipyard walls, to honks of support from passing motorists. An incongruous touch was provided by several dozen patients from the shipyard hospital, who were wandering around in striped pajamas and red dressing gowns. When the strikers found out that I represented a Western newspaper, they came up and hugged me excitedly. Cries of “
Amerika, Amerika
” rippled around the shipyard.

I was led to a large hall, decorated with a statue of Vladimir Lenin at one end and a model sailing ship at the other. Negotiations were already under way between the strike committee and the shipyard director, Klemens Gniech. The man sitting opposite Gniech caught my attention immediately. A shortish figure, about five feet seven, he was dressed in a crumpled dark suit and a checkered, open-neck shirt. Apart from his oversize mustache, the first things I noticed were his quick, darting eyes, impish smile, and cheeky, rasping voice. He had the air of a born rabble-rouser.

“That’s our leader. His name is Lech Wałęsa,” whispered my guide, Gregorz Obernicowicz. “He’s the person who decided to let you in.”

Wałęsa understood, almost instinctively, that the ability to command public attention was his most valuable asset. He also realized that he could use the Western media to circumvent the information blockade imposed by the Communist authorities. Since childhood he had secretly listened to the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and the BBC. He knew that any reports filed by a Western journalist about the shipyard strike would immediately be broadcast back to Poland by Western radio stations—and heard by millions of Poles.

Speaking the truth openly was Wałęsa’s trump card. It was what distinguished him from the despised apparatchiks and gave him his authority. When I asked him that first day why he had decided to allow a foreign journalist into the shipyard—when other strike leaders had kept us out—he replied: “We want to show people that they do not have to be afraid.”

Later on the strike in the Lenin Shipyard became an international media event. Negotiations were conducted under the glare of television arc lights. During the first few days, however, the atmosphere was extraordinarily intimate.
I felt as if I had wandered behind the scenes of an elaborate theater production. For years the Communist authorities had forced Western journalists to watch the show from the balcony. We suspected that what we were seeing on the other side of the proscenium arch was false but could never be sure. The actors had become thoroughly accustomed to the lines written for them by the party ideologists. Yet here they were, rebelling against the director and rewriting the script. The make-believe world created by Communist propaganda had been shattered.

Watching the workers gain confidence in one another, I understood why the authorities attached so much importance to walls and fences. In order to preserve and consolidate their power, the Communists had taken the strategy of “divide and rule” to its logical extreme. The most obvious wall was the one that divided Communist countries from the outside world: the Iron Curtain. But equally important were the internal walls that divided workers from intellectuals, crane operators from welders, Poles from Jews. Some of these barriers were real. They took the form of censorship, restrictions on freedom of movement, and a ban on independent organizations of any kind. But many were psychological, the legacy of decades of arbitrary rule and a climate of ingrained fear. Freedom of association was a mortal threat to the totalitarian regime. As the self-appointed instrument of historical progress, the Communist Party controlled an atomized and defeated society.

When I think back to the shipyard strike, what sticks in my mind most of all was the extraordinary lightness of spirit. There were many tense moments, particularly at the beginning, but the predominant mood was one of infectious gaiety. The warm August sunshine helped create a holiday atmosphere. But mostly it was the smiles on people’s faces, the sense of walls coming down, the sheer irreverence and improbability of it all. When the workers were discussing what material to use for a monument to commemorate the victims of Communist repression, someone pointed to the life-size Lenin on the podium. “We won’t be needing him anymore. Let’s use that,” he suggested, to ironic cheers.

There was a quality of self-liberation about the conversations that took place at the shipyard in August 1980. After years of lies, people were at last looking one another in the eye and telling the truth. They were learning not to be afraid, as Wałęsa had hoped. In the process they helped liberate the rest of us from our own preconceptions. We discovered that people we had previously dismissed as representatives of Marx’s lumpen proletariat were individuals with hopes, worries, and diverse points of view.

I also remember the sight of the crowd standing outside the shipyard gate, stretching back as far as the eye could see. It was crowds like this—good-humored, self-disciplined, incredibly patient—that had greeted the pope on his return to Poland the previous summer. There were people in the crowd from all walks of life: factory workers; office employees; students. As they waited for a glimpse of Wałęsa, they held impromptu discussions. I was reminded of John Reed’s account of the Russian Revolution. “For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere,” wrote Reed in
Ten Days That Shook the World
.

Over the next decade I was to witness such scenes many times over as Poles—followed by Baits, Czechs, Ukrainians, Germans, and finally Russians—unmade the revolution that Reed had chronicled.

L
ECH
W
AŁĘSA WAS
a child of postwar Poland. He had taken part in the great social upheavals that spawned the Communist world’s first free trade union movement: the massive migration from the impoverished countryside; the struggle of the Catholic Church against an atheistic regime; the strikes and demonstrations along the Baltic coast in 1970. His life could almost be a symbol of Poland’s postwar history, with its cycles of soaring hopes and bitter disappointments.