Down with Big Brother (9 page)

A group of about thirty workers agreed to follow him. Beneath a makeshift banner announcing their two demands, they marched back across the drawbridge to the main section of the yard. Everywhere knots of curious workers formed to watch them pass, a lonely band of determined men dwarfed by the towering cranes and red propaganda posters hailing the glorious Communist future. “Come with us,” they chanted.
Khodz z namy
. It was the same cry that had reverberated around the shipyard a decade before. In little groups of three and four, workers clambered down from the half-finished ships to join the swelling procession. Someone switched on the shipyard warning sirens, the agreed signal for the beginning of the strike.

Wearing their blue-gray overalls and yellow hard hats, the workers
skirted the back of the electricians’ hall, W-4, where Wałęsa had worked four years previously. They headed for the K-3 department at the far end of the shipyard, near gate number three. A crowd of several hundred workers had gathered outside K-3, reading the posters hung up by Ludwik Pradzynski. The effect of the two groups coming together was electric. “Hurrah, hurrah,” they cheered. Suddenly they no longer felt alone.

By now they were several thousand strong. Growing more confident, they marched very slowly around the entire shipyard once again, attracting supporters as they went. They ended up at gate number two, where the tragedy of December 1970 had occurred. But this time, instead of surging out onto the streets, they halted. A minute’s silence was declared in memory of the fallen. Then, their throats sore with emotion, they sang the national anthem, “
Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, Póki my żyjemy
” “Poland has not perished yet / So long as we live.”

L
ECH
W
AŁĘSA HEARD THE WAILING
of the shipyard sirens at home in Stogi, a drab working-class suburb of crumbling prefabricated apartment blocks on the eastern outskirts of Gdańsk. He knew exactly what it meant. The shipyard named for the founder of the world’s first socialist state was on strike.

Family problems had prevented him from getting away any sooner. His trade union activities had caused him to miss the birth of his daughter Ania a few days before. Police had knocked on the door of their two-room apartment with an arrest warrant just as his wife, Danuta, was about to go into labor. Detaining opposition activists for forty-eight-hour stints, without bringing formal charges, was a standard form of official harassment. By the time he was released, baby Ania had already been born. The trauma of the birth, in a crowded, unsanitary hospital, had left Danuta exhausted and barely able to stand. She insisted that Lech get the older kids dressed and take them to school before rushing off to change the world.

As he rode the tramway to the shipyard, dressed in his most respectable clothes, a shabby gray suit that looked as if it needed a good dry cleaning, Wałęsa wondered why he had not been arrested again. He could see a Polish Fiat trailing the tram: the secret police were keeping a close eye on him. The authorities were expecting trouble in Gdańsk. A few days previously the party’s top ideologist had boasted that the police knew the names and addresses of twelve thousand opposition activists in Poland. Rounding up potential troublemakers in a city like Gdańsk was a relatively simple affair.
A dark thought flashed across Wałęsa’s mind:
Perhaps they actually want us to go on strike, so they can gun us all down once again
.
⁷³

By the time he arrived at the shipyard thirty-five minutes later, he had overcome his doubts. He thought of baby Ania and the life that awaited her in the People’s Poland. There was no going back. It was up to ordinary Poles to assume responsibility for their own destiny, regardless of the Machiavellian calculations of Communist Party apparatchiks.

A crowd of people was milling around gate number two, the main entrance to the shipyard. Wałęsa could see that the guards were checking every pass. In order to get back into the yard, from which he had been banished four years previously, he climbed over a nearby brick wall.

A meeting was under way in the main square of the shipyard, just outside the red-brick hospital building. The shipyard director, Klemens Gniech, was attempting to persuade the workers to end the strike. He appeared to be having some success. There were boos and catcalls, but some people were drifting back to work. Wałęsa climbed up on the excavator. “Do you know who I am?” he asked angrily, tapping Gniech rudely on the shoulder. “I worked in this shipyard for ten years, and still feel myself to be a shipyard worker. I have the confidence of the workforce. It’s been four years since I lost my job.”
⁷⁴

The director was so astonished that he found it difficult to speak. The workers cheered one of their own. Sensing that he had got the upper hand, the quarrelsome electrician threw in several more demands for good measure. These included his own reinstatement and the construction of a monument to the fallen shipyard workers. He upped the demand for a pay raise to two thousand zlotys. The cheers grew even louder. Feeling the crowd behind him, Wałęsa announced an “occupation strike” and promised the workers that he would be the “last one” to leave the shipyard.

“I landed a straight left and put him down so quickly that he almost fell out of the ring,” Wałęsa recalled later. “I shouted at him that the workers wouldn’t go anywhere if they weren’t sure that they had obtained what they wanted. So they felt strong, and I became their leader.”
⁷⁵

WARSAW
August 15, 1980

E
DWARD
G
IEREK WAS ON HOLIDAY
in the Soviet Union when he heard about the strike at the Lenin Shipyard. Vacations by the Black Sea had become an annual ritual for the men who served as Moscow’s proconsuls in Eastern Europe. Every August, at Brezhnev’s invitation, the first secretaries of the ruling Communist parties assembled at a nineteenth-century palace on the southern tip of the Crimea. Luxuriating in tsarist splendor, they inhaled the sea air, gloated over the misfortunes afflicting the capitalist world, and issued self-congratulatory communiqués.

The trips to the Crimea gave Gierek an opportunity to demonstrate his good standing with Brezhnev. The obligatory television pictures of the two Communist Party chiefs embracing each other on the cheeks sent a message to political rivals back home. That was one reason why he had gone ahead with his vacation at a time when labor unrest was sweeping the country. His Politburo colleagues might grumble about his economic policies and engage in the endless game of bureaucratic intrigue behind his back. But there was little chance that they would make any serious move against him as long as he appeared to enjoy the confidence of the Kremlin.

It had not been a restful vacation. Shortly after his arrival in the Crimea, at the end of July, Gierek had had an unpleasant interview with Brezhnev.
The
gensek
was greatly alarmed by a strike in the eastern Polish city of Lublin that had paralyzed the main Moscow-Berlin railway line.
⁷⁶
For four days the Soviet Union had been without rail communications with its frontline troops in East Germany. Such a state of affairs was intolerable, Brezhnev made clear. Gierek had tried to reassure the old man. For a few days the strike wave appeared to subside. Then came the shattering news from Gdańsk.

A special plane was dispatched from Warsaw to bring the first secretary back home. From the airport he drove to Communist Party headquarters. As he walked through the oak doors of the Politburo conference room, his colleagues rose respectfully from their seats.
⁷⁷

The Politburo had been in emergency sessions since the previous day, when the Lenin Shipyard had gone on strike. The party secretary responsible for national security, Stanislaw Kania, reported that the strike had already paralyzed most of the Gdańsk region. A wave of panic buying had been observed along the Baltic coast. There were signs of trouble spreading to other parts of the country. A state of alert had been ordered in the armed forces, and army and police reserves dispatched to Gdańsk.

“And where are all the party members?” demanded Gierek, seated at the head of the oval conference table, in the place of honor, directly beneath an oil portrait of Lenin.
⁷⁸

The question was directed at Kania, a thick-jowled apparatchik with a square peasant’s face. During Gierek’s absence in the Crimea he had been left in charge in Warsaw. He had paid a series of visits to trouble spots around the country, including Gdańsk, and understood something that Gierek had not yet grasped: The party had lost its authority.

“The party members are not strong enough to oppose what is now going on,” he replied. “There were no signals that a strike was about to start in the shipyard. They were taken unawares. There is now a real danger that the situation could get out of control.”
⁷⁹

Other Politburo members supported Kania. During the two weeks Gierek had been away, not a single day had gone by without a strike. Deteriorating standards of living had left rank-and-file party members demoralized. “Antisocialist elements” were exploiting the legitimate discontent of the workers. Economic demands were being transformed into political demands, including the establishment of free trade unions. Despite rigid censorship and the resolutely upbeat tone of the official media, news about fresh outbreaks of labor unrest traveled fast. Foreign radio stations, particularly Radio Free Europe, were devoting blanket coverage to the crisis.

The news from Gdańsk was politically devastating for Gierek. A former coal miner with a reputation for caring about workers, he had come to power on the wave of labor unrest in December 1970 that had sealed the fate of his predecessor, the autocratic Władysław Gomułka. Several weeks after his appointment, Gierek had visited the Lenin Shipyard to appeal to the workers for their “help.” “We will help you, Comrade Gierek,” the workers had shouted back. “
Pomożemy, Towarysz Gierek.” Pomożemy
had become the slogan of the Gierek regime.
⁸⁰

The first secretary understood the cutthroat world of party politics better than anyone else in the room. He suspected that his enemies in the Politburo were exploiting the latest outbreak of strikes to move against him.
⁸¹
He asked himself the question that Communist Party bosses usually ask themselves in such circumstances: Who stood to gain from his overthrow?

The answer seemed obvious: the security apparatus. During a period of social upheaval the armed forces and the Interior Ministry became the guarantors of political stability in the country. There could be no major shakeup in either institution until the strikes were over. With their vast network of agents and informers around the country, the security chiefs were also best placed to manipulate the unrest to their own advantage.

Kania seemed harmless enough. He was known to be fond of alcohol and was frequently incapable of serious work after lunch. In Communist Party circles such a weakness was not generally considered an obstacle to high office: It made a man more pliable, more dependent on his Politburo colleagues. Recently, however, Kania had been displaying some worrying signs of independence. Furthermore, he had a powerful ally in the defense minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.
⁸²

Like many high-ranking Polish Communists, Gierek could not understand why the security chiefs had allowed the labor unrest to grow and grow without taking elementary countermeasures. Had they wanted to put a stop to the strikes, he reasoned, it would have been a simple enough matter to isolate the principal troublemakers and prevent information reaching Western correspondents in Warsaw. But Kania had said repeatedly that the situation was under control and that Gierek should go ahead with his Crimean holiday. Now that the strikes were spreading along the Baltic coast, the task of restoring order was more difficult.

Gierek’s first instinct was to counterattack. Obviously, he told the Politburo, the strikers were inspired by “outside forces.”

“This is not something we need to discuss today, but we do need to think about it,” said Gierek, suggesting he might favor an armed crackdown. “It
is clear that this period of tension cannot go on indefinitely. It may take a more dangerous form—and that would compel us to use force.”
⁸³

Within hours of Gierek’s return to Warsaw, the machinery of repression had moved into high gear, and columns of riot troops were moving in the direction of Gdańsk. The Polish government placed three army regiments stationed in the Gdańsk region on a state of alert. Soviet naval ships appeared off the Baltic coast. Warsaw Pact troops in East Germany and the western Soviet Union were called up for what the Soviet news agency Tass euphemistically described as “routine maneuvers.”
⁸⁴
Telephone communications with Gdańsk were cut. A task force was established in the Ministry of Interior to prepare a plan to crush the rebellion and normalize “the country’s social and political situation.” The plan, code-named Summer ’80, envisaged the storming of the Lenin Shipyard by helicopter, the arrest of Wałęsa and other strike leaders, and twenty-four-hour surveillance of “antisocialist forces.”
⁸⁵