Miklós Németh, the last Communist prime minister of Hungary, was to acknowledge as much a few years later. A loan of one billion Deutschmarks from Bonn, granted in October 1987 and portrayed by West German politicians as a contribution to Hungarian economic ‘reform’, was in reality disbursed thus: ‘we spent two thirds of it on interest and the remainder importing consumer goods to ease the impression of economic crisis.’ By 1986 Hungary’s
official
deficit on current account was $ 1.4 billion per annum. Between 1971 and 1980 Poland’s hard currency debt had risen from $1 billion to $20.5 billion, with worse to come. By its own reckoning the GDR in its last years was spending over 60 percent of its yearly export earnings just to cover the (very generously discounted) interest on its Western debts. Yugoslavia, always a favored client (from 1950 through 1964 the US had covered three-fifths of Belgrade’s annual deficits) received generous loans and stand-by arrangements on the basis of official data that bore not even a passing relationship to reality.
Taken as a whole, eastern Europe’s hard currency debt, which stood at $6.1 billion in 1971, grew to $66.1 billion in 1980. By 1988 it would reach $95.6 billion. These figures did not include Romania, where Ceauşescu had paid off his country’s foreignloans on the backs of his long-suffering subjects; and they might well have been even higher but for some latitude on price-setting introduced in Hungary over the course of the Seventies. But their message was clear: the Communist system was living not just on loans but on borrowed time. Sooner or later it would be necessary to make painful and socially disruptive economic adjustments.
In years to come Markus Wolf, the East German spymaster, would claim that by the late 1970s he had already concluded that the GDR ‘wouldn’t work’ and he was certainly not alone. Economists like Hungary’s Támás Bauer and his Polish contemporary Leszek Balcerowicz knew perfectly well how fragile the Communist house of cards had become. But so long as the capitalists would underwrite it, Communism could survive. Leonid Brezhnev’s ‘era of stagnation’ (Mikhail Gorbachev) fostered many illusions, and not only at home. In 1978, when a World Bank Report actually determined that the GDR had a higher standard of living than Great Britain, Prince Potemkin must surely have smiled in his far-off grave.
But Communists understood something that the bankers of the West had missed. Economic reform in the Soviet bloc had not merely been postponed. It was out of the question. As Amalrik had predicted in
Will the USSR Survive Until 1984?
, the Communist élite ‘look upon the regime as a lesser evil compared with the painful process of changing it.’ Economic reforms of even the most localized and micro-efficient kind would have immediate political ramifications. The economic arrangements of socialism were not an autonomous zone; they were thoroughly integrated into the political regime itself.
It was not by chance that the East European satellite states were all run by ageing, conservative time-servers. In a new age of realism Edward Gierek in Warsaw (born 1913), Gustav Husák in Prague (born 1913), Erich Honecker in Berlin (born 1912), János Kádár in Budapest (born 1912) and Todor Zhivkov in Sofia (born 1911)—not to speak of Enver Hoxha in Tirana (born 1908) and Josip Broz Tito in Belgrade (born 1892)—were the most realistic of all. Like Leonid Brezhnev—born 1906, Seven Orders of Lenin, four-time Hero Of The Soviet Union, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, General Secretary and, since 1977, Head of State—these men had grown old in the old ways. They had little incentive to pull the rug out from under themselves. They had every intention of dying in their beds.
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The fact that ‘real existing Socialism’ was dysfunctional and discredited did not in itself seal its fate. In his 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance speech (delivered in his absence), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had rousingly asserted that ‘once the lie has been dispersed, the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its repulsiveness, and then violence, become decrepit, will come crashing down.’ But this was not quite true. The nakedness of Soviet violence had long since been revealed—and would be exposedagain in the disastrous 1979 invasion of Afghanistan—and the lie of Communism was progressively dispersed and dispelled in the course of the years after 1968.
But the system had not yet come crashing down. Lenin’s distinctive contribution to European history had been to kidnap the centrifugal political heritage of European radicalism and channel it into power through an innovative system of monopolized control: unhesitatingly gathered and forcefully retained in one place. The Communist system might corrode indefinitely at the periphery; but the initiative for its final collapse could only come from the centre. In the story of Communism’s demise, the remarkable flowering in Prague or Warsaw of a new kind of opposition was only the end of the beginning. The emergence of a new kind of leadership in Moscow itself, however, was to be the beginning of the end.
XIX
The End of the Old Order
‘We cannot go on living like this’.
Mikhail Gorbachev (to his wife, March 1985)
‘The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to
reform itself’.
Alexis De Tocqueville
‘We have no intention of harming or destabilizing the GDR’.
Heinrich Windelen, West-German Minister for inter-German relations
‘Historical experience shows that Communists were sometimes forced by
circumstances to behave rationally and agree to compromises’.
Adam Michnik
‘People, your government has returned to you’.
Václav Havel, Presidential Address, January 1st 1990
The conventional narrative of Communism’s final collapse begins with Poland. On October 16th 1978, Karol Wojtyła, Cardinal of Craków, was elected to the Papacy as John Paul II, the first Pole to hold the office. The expectations aroused by his election were unprecedented in modern times. Some in the Catholic Church regarded him as a likely radical—he was young (just fifty-eight when elected pope in 1978, having been appointed Archbishop of Craków while still in his thirties) but already a veteran of the Second Vatican Council. Energetic and charismatic, this was the man who would complete the work of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and who would lead the Church into a new era, a pastor rather than a Curial bureaucrat.
Conservative Catholics, meanwhile, took comfort in Wojtyła’s reputation for unbending theological firmness and the moral and political absolutism born of his experience as a priest and prelate under communism. This was a man who, for all his reputation as a ‘pope of ideas’, open to intellectual exchange and scholarly debate, would not compromise with the Church’s enemies. Like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the powerful head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and his successor as Pope), Wojtyła had been startled out of his early reforming enthusiasm by the radical aftershock of John XXIII’s reforms. By the time of his election he was already an administrative as well as a doctrinal conservative.
Karol Wojtyła’s Polish origins and his tragic early life help to explain the unusual strength of his convictions and the distinctive quality of his papacy. He lost his mother when he was eight (he would lose his only sibling, his older brother Edmund, three years later; his last surviving close relative, his father, died during the war when Wojtyła was nineteen). Following his mother’s death he was taken by his father to the Marian sanctuary at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and made frequent pilgrimages there in following years—Zebrzydowska, like Częstochowa, is an important center of the cult of the Virgin Mary in modern Poland. By the age of fifteen Wojtyła was already the president of the Marian sodality in Wadowice, his home town, an early hint of his inclination to Mariolatry (which in turn contributed to his obsession with marriage and abortion).
The new Pope’s Christian vision was rooted in the peculiarly messianic style of Polish Catholicism. In modern Poland he saw not only the embattled eastern frontier of the True Faith, but also a land and a people chosen to serve as the example and sword of the Church in the struggle against Eastern atheism and Western materialism alike.
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Together with his long service in Craków, isolated from Western theological and political currents, this probably explained his tendency to embrace a parochial and sometimes troubling Polish-Christian vision.
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But it also explains the unprecedented enthusiasm for him in the country of his birth. From the outset, the pope broke with his predecessors’ cosmopolitan Roman acquiescence in modernity, secularism, and compromise. His campaign of international appearances—complete with carefully staged performances in huge open arenas, accompanied by oversized crucifixes and a paraphernalia of light, sound, and theatrical timing—was not undertaken without design. This was a Big Pope, taking himself and his Faith to the world: to Brazil, Mexico, the US, and the Philippines; to Italy, France, and Spain; but above all to Poland itself.
Abandoning the cautious ‘Ostpolitik’ of his predecessors, John Paul II arrived in Warsaw on June 2nd 1979 for the first of three dramatic ‘pilgrimages’ to Communist Poland. He was met with huge, adoring crowds. His presence affirmed and reinforced the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland; but the Pope was not interested in merely endorsing Christianity’s passive survival under Communism. To the occasional discomfort of his own bishops he began explicitly discouraging Catholics in Poland and everywhere else in Eastern Europe from any compromise with Marxism, and offered his Church not merely as a silent sanctuary but as an alternative pole of moral and social authority.
As Poland’s Communists well understood, such a change in the position of the Catholic Church—from compromise to resistance—could have a destabilizing local impact, posing an open challenge to the Party’s monopoly of authority. In part this was because Poles remained overwhelmingly and enthusiastically Catholic; in large measure it was because of the man himself. But there was very little they could do—to forbid the Pope to visit Poland or to speak there would only have strengthened his appeal and further alienated millions of his admirers. Even after the imposition of martial law, when the Pope returned to Poland in June 1983 and spoke to his ‘compatriots’ in St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw of their ‘disappointment and humiliation, their suffering and loss of freedom’, the Communist leaders could only stand and listen. ‘Poland’, he told an uncomfortable General Jaruzelski in a televised speech, ‘must take her proper place among the nations of Europe, between East and West.’
The Pope, as Stalin once observed, has no divisions. But God is not always on the side of the big battalions: what John Paul II lacked in soldiers he made up in visibility—and timing. Poland in 1978 was already on the edge of social upheaval. Ever since the workers’ revolts of 1970, and again in 1976, both prompted by sharp increases in the price of food, First Secretary Edvard Gierek had tried hard to avert domestic discontent—mostly, as we have seen, by borrowing heavily abroad and using the loans to supply Poles with subsidized food and other consumer goods. But the strategy was failing.
Thanks to the emergence of Jacek Kuroń’s KOR, the intellectual opposition and workers’ leaders now cooperated far more than in the past. In response to the cautious appearance of ‘free’ (i.e. illegal) trade unions in a number of industrial and coastal towns, beginning in Katowice and Gdansk, the leaders of KOR drew up a ‘Charter of Workers’ Rights’ in December 1979: its demands included the right to autonomous, non-Party unions and the right to strike. The predictable response of the authorities was to arrest intellectual activists and sack the offending workers—among them the then-unknown electrician Lech Wałesa and fourteen other employees at Elektromontaz in Gdansk.
Whether the semi-clandestine movement for workers’ rights would have continued to grow is not clear. Its spokesmen were certainly emboldened by the Pope’s recent visit and their sense that the regime would be reluctant to strike back violently for fear of international disapproval. But theirs was still a tiny and haphazard network of activists. What triggered mass backing was the Communist Party’s attempt—for the third time in a decade—to resolve its economic difficulties by announcing, on July 1st 1980, an immediate increase in the price of meat.
The day after the announcement, KOR declared itself a ‘strike information agency’. In the next three weeks protest strikes spread from the Ursus tractor plant (scene of the 1976 protests) to every major industrial city in the country, reaching Gdansk and its Lenin Shipyard on August 2nd. There the shipbuilders occupied the yard and formed themselves into an unofficial trade union,
Solidarnošč
(‘Solidarity’) —led by Wałesa, who on August 14th 1980 climbed over the shipyard wall and into the leadership of a national strike movement.
The authorities’ instinctive response—to arrest ‘ringleaders’ and isolate the strikers—having failed, they opted instead to buy time and divide their opponents. In an unprecedented move, representatives of the Politburo were sent to Gdansk to negotiate with ‘reasonable’ workers’ leaders, even as Kuroń, Adam Michnik and other KOR leaders were temporarily detained for questioning. But other intellectuals—the historian Bronisław Geremek, the Catholic lawyer Tadeusz Mazowiecki—arrived in Gdansk to help the strikers negotiate, and the strikers themselves insisted that they be represented by their own choice of spokesmen: notably the increasingly prominent Wałesa.
The regime was forced to relent. On September 1st the police released all remaining detainees, and two weeks later the Polish Council of State officially conceded the strikers’ chief demand, the right to form and register free labor unions. Within eight weeks the informal network of strikes and
ad hoc
unions that now criss-crossed Poland had coalesced into a single organization whose existence the authorities could no longer pretend to deny: on November 10th 1980, Solidarity became the first officially registered independent trade union in a Communist country, with an estimated ten million members. At its founding national Congress the following September Wałesa was elected president.