Keys of This Blood (74 page)

The headlines about Poland were “quite unbelievable,” commented the
Frankfurter Zeitung
. For those with memories, they were:

[April] Solidarity Gets Full Legal Status … Polish Parliament Agrees to Talks with Solidarity … “Poland Has Joined Europe,” Says Lech Walesa …

[May] Communist Poland Acknowledges Soviet-Nazi Pact on Its Fate … “Poland now has a new possibility allowing for transformation in the social, political, economic and moral life of the entire society” [John Paul II] …

[June]
Gazeta
, First Independently Published Newspaper in the Soviet Bloc … Solidarity's Overwhelming Victory [in national elections] … Communists Call for Coalition with Solidarity … Warsaw Accepts Solidarity's Sweep [in elections] and Humiliating Losses by the Party … Polish Communist Official Admits the Massacres of Polish Officers by Stalin's Direct Orders [4,254 at Katyn; 3,841 at Degachi; 6,376 at Bolugaye] in June 1940 … Solidarity Seeking $10 Billion in Relief for Poland … Solidarity Has Accepted Responsibility for the Country … France to Give a New Bank Loan to Poland [$1.15 billion for reconstruction, $110 million in further loans] … “Solidarity doesn't need to rule, only to exercise control and to broaden democracy” [Lech Walesa] … Walesa to Back Any Communist President …

All of these quick-fire happenings, besides evoking wonderment, satisified a certain hunger in the West, where governments, commentators
and the ordinary public desired to see changes in the Soviet empire, changes that would reassure them the East-West tension was truly gone. But all of what had happened so far in 1989 turned out to be a mere prelude to the heady wine the Soviet president was about to proffer his hoped-for cohabitants in the House of the New Order in “a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.” John Paul could already write the geopolitical script of the forthcoming Gorbachev menu for the remaining months of 1989 and into the decade of the 1990s.

Beginning in August and ending in December, all six satellite nations are convulsed in change. On August 19, strongman Wojciech Jaruzelski designates senior Solidarity official Tadeusz Mazowiecki as the first non-Communist prime minister of Poland since 1948. On September 10, Hungary opens its borders with Austria to allow hordes of East Germans access to West Germany (almost 200,000 crossed over by early November). On October 17, the Hungarian Communist Party disbands and drops the name Communist from its self-description. János Kádár, old-time Stalinist, had departed from the leadership on May 22. On October 17, the new Hungarian parliament rewrites the Constitution, allowing a multiparty system and free elections.

That August, too, Wojtyla-Gorbachev contacts and signals multiplied. On August 24, Yuri E. Karlov, personal representative of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, hand-carried a message from Gorbachev, declaring his “readiness for further development” of Vatican-Kremlin relations. He also mentioned “drastic issues”—the environment, nuclear war, world hunger—that needed airing between the two leaders. John Paul responded that he was going to send Archbishop Sodano to Moscow for discussions.

The next day, three Russian Orthodox metropolitans arrived at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer home fifteen miles south of Rome, to discuss the problems existing between Russian Orthodox prelates and the Catholics of the Ukraine. In 1946, the Russian Orthodox Church had acquiesced in the massacre or deportation of all Catholic prelates, had also taken over Catholic churches and institutions. What was going to happen now? Already the Orthodox could see from afar that a reckoning day was drawing near. But the price: to hand back their ill-gotten gains? Negotiation, replied John Paul, and, of course, some restitution.

Conversation and contacts and good-will gestures—with an occasional rough passage—ensued. That same August, John Paul received in private audience Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the new non-Communist prime minister of Poland—an old friend and ally in his Krakow days—together with Communist Commerce Minister Marcin Swiecicki and Foreign
Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski and Solidarity's parliamentary leader, Bronislaw Geremek. Clearly, if you wanted to know what was going to happen next Monday in Central Europe and the USSR you could learn that the previous Saturday, if you had an entrée to John Paul's Vatican.

During his October 6–7 overflight in USSR airspace on his way to the Far East, John Paul relayed a radio message to Gorbachev, asking God to bless him and the Soviet people, and sending his blessing to them all. In the same month, Sodano returned to Moscow with a request concerning peace in Lebanon, meeting both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze. With Gorbachev's permission, too, a Russian Orthodox Mass was celebrated in the Cathedral of Michael the Archangel in the Kremlin on October 13. This was a direct appeal to John Paul's religious heart, for October 13 was the seventy-second anniversary of the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. John Paul's whole foreign policy is built on the meaning of that heavenly appearance, and he also ascribes to the Virgin of Fatima the fact that, on May 13, 1981, the bullets fired at his head by assassin Mehmet Ali Agca missed him. In addition, another Russian Orthodox Mass was celebrated on October 22 in the Cathedral of the Assumption, also in the Kremlin, in honor of the Virgin of Tenderness—Mary as portrayed in a very old icon preserved in the Cathedral. Without the knowledge of the Soviet authorities, an expatriate Czech bishop walked into the same cathedral at about the same time and quietly celebrated a Roman Catholic Mass, concealing what he was doing behind the ample folds of the Pope's own newspaper, the
Osservatore Romano
.

With the blessing of John Paul and the permission of Gorbachev, ten Christians and eight Soviets sat down at a U-shaped table in a seventeenth-century château at Klingenthal, outside Strasbourg, France, and for two days (October 19–21)—beneath a portrait of Charlemagne, the ninth-century emperor who has been called the original father of Europe—discussed the possibility of Christians and Marxists being able to build a new Europe together.

“We want to create a new Europe,” declared Nikolai Kowalski, Gorbachev's top expert on religious matters, “for the good of man, for his political and spiritual freedom.” With Cardinal Poupard, president of the Pontifical Institute for Culture, listening, Viktor Garadja, director of the Soviet Institute for Scientific Atheism, asserted: “Marxism's opposition to religion is a thing of the past.” But, warned Mikhail Narinsky, Soviet historian, “Christians must help … or our present
perestroika
could turn into
perestrelka
.”

To them, to jurist Aleksandr Berkov and the other Soviet delegates,
the Christians present emphasized that “freedom of conscience is now regarded in the West as a basic human right that requires legal guarantees.” Yes, the Soviets responded, a new law, now in its second revision, was being debated in the Soviet parliament. “We need time,” said Aleksandr Berkov, “time and your patient understanding.”

Meanwhile, on October 18, Erich Honecker, Communist leader of East Germany, is replaced by Egon Krenz and imprisoned to await trial. Krenz will last only a few weeks. Down in Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, Stalinist leader since 1954, is forced to resign on November 10. The previous day, the East German government announced the opening of the Berlin Wall at all points. Within a month, the Wall will effectively be no more. By mid-December, slabs and portions of it will be on sale in Bonn, Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles.

By mid-November, amid the echoes of what was happening around the Berlin Wall, in Czechoslovakia, in Bulgaria and Romania, all arrangements had been made for the Vatican meeting. Gorbachev had removed the contentious and chauvinist Metropolitan Filaret from his post as chief-in-charge of the Russian Orthodox Church's “External Office” (it handles all meetings and dealings with the Vatican), replacing him with the very pro-Roman Archbishop Kirill of Smolensk. It was a move obviously desired by John Paul, a delicately intimated wish of his, which the Soviet strongman had no scruples about satisfying. That was what these Orthodox prelates were for—to assist the Soviet government.

On November 27, Metropolitan Juvenali of Kolomna came, with a mixture of pleading and complaining, to tell John Paul that “we cannot conduct Christian brotherly negotiations under the muzzle of a gun.” Juvenali, who wanted John Paul to halt the now triumphant Catholics taking back the Transfiguration Cathedral of Lwów, was reminded that back in the 1940s, his Church had done nothing when Soviet muzzles spat bullets at the Lwów and Ukrainian Catholics. But all can be negotiated, he was told—in the shadow of President Gorbachev's policy of glasnost!

On November 29, Czechoslovak Communist leader Milos Jakes will step down. Alexander Dubcek—hero of the ill-fated 1968 “Prague Spring,” since disgraced and demoted—and Vaclav Havel, once imprisoned for his anti-Marxist views, will become the national leaders. It will be December's end before the last holdout of the old Stalinists, the “Pig of Romania,” Nicolae Ceauşescu, will be tried, summarily found guilty and—still not believing that it is all over—will be executed with his wife, Elena, already nicknamed bitterly, “Lady Macbeth.”

By November's end, all was in place for the Vatican summit. Raisa
Gorbachev, dubbed the “Queen of Kremlin chic” by Italian newspapers, performed her solo engagement in Messina on November 30, evoking cries of “Viva Raisa!” from crowds of Sicilians and groups of Catholic nuns waving red flags. She was there to lay a wreath at the memorial honoring the Russian sailors of four of the Imperial Russian Navy's warships who came ashore and saved the lives of a thousand Sicilians who had been buried by the three-day earthquake of December 1908.

If ever the Western onlookers needed a sign that Mr. Gorbachev intended vast and peaceful changes in view of democratic egalitarianism, surely they had that sign in the gloom that swallowed up all those faithful stalwarts of the Party-State—János Kádár of Hungary, Milos Jakes of Czechoslovakia, Erich Honecker of East Germany, Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland. All of them departed because the Party-State decided they should, because the Soviet troops garrisoned on their territories would, they were assured, no longer cow the masses. In a sense, those onetime Party bosses were victims of the “new thinking”—only if they consented to their own demise could they now, by self-immolation, serve the Party-State. In any case, they had no choice. In the face of Ceauşescu's refusal to so serve the cause and depart, together with his hated Securitate bully boys, there were threats both from Warsaw Pact authorities and from NATO people that they would, if necessary, back up those rebelling crowds with arms and ammunition. The connivance was at work even there. George Bush's administration had consulted its NATO allies and the Warsaw Pact nations about a “coordinated response” to Ceauşescu within the framework of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the CSCE of the 1975 Helsinki accords), should Ceauşescu prove to be an intractable problem. In the event, he did not.

“New thinking” is hardly an adequate term to describe the overall reactions among the Western onlookers of these events. It was a veritable wonderment, punctuated with that hopeful sigh of relief: “The Cold War is really over!” For many governments, those changes chased away any lingering doubts, about Gorbachev's being an honest broker. Ludicrously but tellingly, the beleaguered dictator of Cuba, faced with a severe reduction in his annual alms from the Soviet Union, and fearful that his number was up next, used a mild understatement to complain in early December that “it is getting very difficult to build a Communist state” while “the reformers are slandering socialism, destroying its value, discrediting the Party, and liquidating its leading role … sowing chaos and
anarchy everywhere.” But John Paul delivered a scathing postmortem on the Marxist ideology of these erstwhile Communist regimes, describing that ideology as a “myth” and a “tragic Utopia.”

Now, for the West, the Soviet president—like the maître d' praised by the bridegroom at the marriage feast of Cana—had reserved the good wine until the end of a banner year that was to usher in the new decade. In retrospect now, Gorbachev's timing—and luck—was perfectly adapted to his personal situation within the USSR and out front, in the eyes of contemporary leaders. He would have his “new thinking.”

“The Soviet leader's difficult task,” John Paul had stated, “is that he must introduce changes without destroying the Party-State.” It was a pithy summary of the major danger Papa Wojtyla saw threatening Gorbachev's internal situation in the USSR. The danger was a total loss of support for his geopolitical aims among those who alone made him viable as General Secretary and now must make him viable as the Soviet president with czarlike powers. Only in that guise had he a realistic chance of holding together the ungainly USSR, already straining under the impulse of centrifugal forces, and to salvage from it a reduced core of territory.

For within the very structure of the USSR, huge and vicious strains were beginning to appear. Wildfires of ethnic conflict and economic woes were suddenly blazing throughout the six Muslim republics—Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Nakhichevan—challenging Moscow's central control in an area covering the Soviet Union's southern flank, a strategically sensitive area. In Kirghizia, Moldavia, Armenia, Georgia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the winds of opposition and local autonomy were setting off high-decibel alarms in the USSR's very top-secret Defense Council.

The three Baltic States, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, gazing hungrily at the successive “liberations” of the Eastern European satellites, said quite bluntly that they wanted out of the USSR. Already in 1988, the Lithuanian parliament declared it was sovereign and not subordinate to the USSR. The Lithuanian national movement, Sajudis, had the backing of a majority of Lithuanians, including—in a very Catholic population—the support of the non-Catholic minority represented by, for example, the Jewish writer Grigorijus Jakovas Kandvivius, who was elected to parliament. Estonia's elected representatives have made the same assertion of independence. The Latvians celebrated Independence Day on November 18, 1988, with public demonstrations lit up by thousands of maroon-and-white national Latvian flags.