From November 1980 until December 1981 Poland lived in an excited, uneasy limbo. Wałesa’s advisers—mindful of past mistakes and wary of provoking a backlash from the humiliated Communist leadership—urged caution. This was to be a ‘self-limiting revolution’. Jacek Kuroń, with the memory of 1956 and 1968 firmly in mind, insisted upon his continuing commitment to a ‘socialist system’ and reiterated Solidarity’s acceptance of the ‘Party’s leading role’—no-one wanted to give the authorities in Warsaw or Moscow an excuse to send in the tanks.
The self-imposed restraints paid off, up to a point. Overtly political issues—disarmament, or foreign policy—were kept off Solidarity’s public agenda, which focused instead upon KOR’s established strategy of ‘practicing society’: building links with the Catholic Church (of particular interest to Adam Michnik, who was determined to overcome the traditional anti-clericalism of the Polish Left and forge an alliance with the newly-energized Catholic leadership); forming local unions and factory councils; pressing for workplace self-management and social rights (the latter borrowed verbatim from the Conventions of the Geneva-based International Labour Organization).
But under Communism, even such cautiously ‘non-political’ tactics were bound to run up against the Party’s reluctance to concede
any
real authority or autonomy. Moreover, the economy continued to implode: industrial productivity collapsed in the course of 1981, as Poland’s newly unionized workers held meetings, protests and strikes to press their demands. Seen from Warsaw, and especially from Moscow, the country was adrift and the regime was losing control. It was also setting a bad example to its neighbors. Despite the best efforts of its cautious leaders, Solidarity was doomed to arouse the ghosts of Budapest and Prague.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski had risen from defense minister to prime minister in February 1981, replacing the now-disgraced Gierek. In October he succeeded Stanisław Kania as Party Secretary. Ensured of the support of the army, and with the Soviet leadership encouraging firm action to halt Poland’s drift out of control, he moved swiftly to put an end to a situation that both sides knew could not last indefinitely. On December 13th 1981—just as US-Soviet nuclear disarmament talks were getting under way in Geneva—Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, ostensibly to forestall a Soviet intervention. Solidarity’s leaders and advisers were swept up into prison (though the union itself was not formally banned until the following year, at which point it went ‘underground ’
273
) .
In post-’89 retrospect the rise of Solidarity appears as the opening fusillade in the final struggle against Communism. But the Polish ‘revolution’ of 1980-81 is better understood as the last in a rising crescendo of workers’ protests that began in 1970 and were directed against the Party’s repressive and incompetent management of the economy. Cynical incompetence, careerism and wasted lives; price increases, protest strikes and repression; the spontaneous emergence of local unions and the active engagement of dissident intellectuals; the sympathy and support of the Catholic Church: these were familiar staging posts in the re-birth of a civil society, movingly portrayed by Andrzej Wajda in
Man of Marble
(1977) and
Man of Iron
(1981), his didactic cinematic account of the betrayed illusions and reborn hopes of Communist Poland.
But that is all they were. They were not in themselves a harbinger of the downfall of Communist power. As Michnik, Kuroń and others continued to insist, before the imposition of martial law and after, Communism might be progressively eroded from within and from below, but it could not be overthrown. Open confrontation would be catastrophic, as history had convincingly demonstrated. Yes, martial law (which remained in force until July 1983) and the ensuing ‘state of war’ were an admission of a certain kind of failure on the part of the authorities—no other Communist state had ever been driven to such measures and Michnik himself called it ‘a disaster for the totalitarian state’ (while at the same time conceding that it was a serious ‘setback for the independent society’). But Communism was about power, and power lay not in Warsaw but in Moscow. The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow. The real story was elsewhere.
The clamp-down in Poland further contributed to the steady cooling of East-West relations that began in the late 1970s. The ‘second Cold War’, as it became known, should not be exaggerated: although at one point both Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan accused the other of contemplating and even planning for a nuclear war, neither the Soviet Union nor the US had any such intentions.
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With the conclusion of the Helsinki Accords it seemed to Washington
and
Moscow that the Cold War was ending to their own advantage. Indeed, the situation in Europe suited both great powers, with the US now comporting itself rather like czarist Russia in the decades following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815: i.e. as a sort of continental policeman whose presence guaranteed that there would be no further disruption of the status quo by an unruly revolutionary power.
Nevertheless, East-West relations
were
deteriorating. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, undertaken largely at the instigation of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in order to restore a stable and compliant regime on the Soviet Union’s sensitive southern borders, prompted a US boycott of the upcoming 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow (a compliment duly repaid when the Soviet bloc spurned the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984) and caused President Jimmy Carter publicly to revise ‘my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are’ (
The New York Times
, January 1st 1980). The invasion also confirmed Western leaders in the wisdom of their decision, taken at a NATO summit just two weeks earlier, to install 108 new Pershing II and 464 Cruise missiles in Western Europe—itself a response to Moscow’s deployment in Ukraine of a new generation of SS20 medium-range missiles. A new arms race appeared to be gathering speed.
No-one, least of all the leaders of Western Europe whose countries would have been the first to suffer in a nuclear exchange, had any illusions about the value of nuclear missiles. As instruments of war such weapons were uniquely unhelpful—in contrast to spears, they really were only good for sitting on. Nonetheless, as a deterrent device a nuclear arsenal had its uses—if your opponent could be convinced that it might, ultimately, be used. There was, in any case, no other way to defend Western Europe against a Warsaw Pact that by the early 1980s boasted more than fifty infantry and armored divisions, 16,000 tanks, 26,000 fighting vehicles and 4,000 combat aircraft.
That is why British Prime Ministers (both Margaret Thatcher and before her James Callaghan), West German Chancellors and the leaders of Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands all welcomed the new battlefield missiles and authorized them to be stationed on their soil. In his new-found enthusiasm for the Western alliance, French President François Mitterrand was especially keen: in a dramatic speech to a somewhat bemused Bundestag in January 1983 he impressed upon West Germans the urgent need to hold firm and adopt the latest American missiles.
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The ‘new’ Cold War re-opened a prospect of terror out of all apparent proportion to the issues at stake—or the intentions of most of the participants. In Western Europe the anti-nuclear peace movement underwent a revival, strengthened by a new generation of ‘green’ activists. In Britain an enthusiastic and decidedly English assortment of feminists, environmentalists and anarchists, together with their assembled friends and relations, mounted a prolonged siege of the cruise missile site at Greenham Common—to the bewilderment of its long-suffering American garrison.
The opposition was greatest in West Germany, where the Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was forced to step down after the left wing of his own party voted against the new missiles—which were then approved and installed by his Christian Democratic successor Helmut Kohl.
6
The mirage of a de-nuclearized, neutral zone in central Europe was still dear to many Germans, and prominent West German Greens and Social Democrats added their voices to official East German appeals against nuclear weapons—at a demonstration in Bonn in October 1983 former Chancellor Willy Brandt urged a sympathetic crowd of 300,000 people to demand that their government unilaterally renounce any new missiles. The so-called ‘Krefeld Appeal’ against the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in the Federal Republic gathered 2.7 million signatures.
Neither the invasion of Afghanistan nor the ‘state of war’ in Poland aroused comparable concern in Western Europe even in official circles (indeed, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s first response to Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law was to send a high-level personal representative to Warsaw in February 1982 to help overcome Polish ‘isolation’
7
). As for the ‘peaceniks’, they were far less troubled by repression in Warsaw than by the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Washington. Although NATO’s decision to deploy new missiles had been accompanied by the offer of negotiations to reduce such weapons (the so-called ‘twin track’ approach), it seemed increasingly obvious that the US under its new president had adopted a new and aggressive strategy.
Much of the belligerence in Washington was just rhetoric—when Ronald Reagandemanded that ‘Poland be Poland’, or dubbed Moscow an ‘evil empire’ (in March 1983) he was playing to a domestic audience. The same president, after all, was initiating talks on nuclear arms reduction and offering to withdraw his own intermediate-range missiles if the Soviets dismantled theirs. But the United States was indeed embarking upon a major program of rearmament. In August 1981 Reagan announced that the US would stockpile neutron bombs. The MX missile system, in breach of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, was announced in November 1982, followed five months later by the Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’), prompting a Soviet protest on the credible grounds that it breached the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Official military aid and clandestine support to Afghanistan and Central America was steadily augmented. In 1985 US defense spending rose by 6 percent, an unprecedented peacetime increase.
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Back in September 1981 Reagan had warned that without a verifiable nuclear arms agreement there would be an arms race and that if there were an arms race the US would win it. And so it proved. In retrospect, the American defense build-up would come to be seen as the cunningly crafted lever that bankrupted and ultimately broke the Soviet system. This, however, is not quite accurate. The Soviet Union could ill afford the armaments race upon which it had begun to embark as early as 1974. But bankruptcy alone would not have brought Communism to its knees.
The Second Cold War, and America’s public belligerence, undoubtedly increased the strains on a creaking and dysfunctional system. The Soviet Union had built a military machine that defeated Hitler, occupied half of Europe and matched the West weapon for weapon for forty years—but at a terrible price. At their peak, somewhere between 30-40 percent of Soviet resources were diverted to military spending, four to five times the American share. It was already obvious to many Soviet experts that their country could not indefinitely maintain such a burden. In the long run the economic bill for this generations-long military build-up must come due.
But in the short run at least, foreign tensions probably helped shore up the regime. The Soviet Union might be a continent-size Potemkin village—‘Upper Volta with missiles’ in Helmut Schmidt’s pithy description—but it did, after all, have those missiles and they conferred a certain status and respect upon their owners. Moreover the ageing Soviet leaders, KGB director Yuri Andropov in particular, took the American threat very seriously. Like their counterparts in Washington they really believed the other side was contemplating pre-emptive nuclear war. Reagan’s hard line, and in particular his Strategic Defense Initiative, made the old Soviet leadership even less disposed to compromise.
The real military dilemma facing the Soviet leaders was neither in Europe nor in Washington, but rather in Kabul.
Pace
Jimmy Carter’s late-found sensitivity to Soviet strategic ambitions, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan did not open a new front in Communism’s strategic struggle with the free world. It was born, rather, of domestic anxiety. The 1979 Soviet census revealed an unprecedented increase in the (largely Muslim) population of Soviet Central Asia. In Soviet Kazakhstan and the republics abutting the Afghan frontier—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—the numbers were up by over 25 percent since 1970. Over the course of the following decade, whereas the Ukrainian population would grow by just 4 percent, that of Tajikistan increased by nearly half. European Russia, as it seemed to its leaders, was under demographic threat from its internal minorities: as the ailing Leonid Brezhnev acknowledged to his Party’s 26th Congress in February 1981, there were still ‘nationality questions’ that needed addressing.
Had the occupation of Afghanistan succeeded in installing a secure, friendly regime in Kabul, the Soviet leaders could have chalked up a double success. They would have re-affirmed Moscow’s faltering presence in the Middle East while sending a ‘clear message’ to a new generation of Soviet Muslims tempted by dreams of independence. But the Soviets, of course, failed in Afghanistan. Brezhnev, Gromyko and their generals ignored not just the lessons of Vietnam, repeating many of the Americans’ errors; they also forgot czarist Russia’s own failures in the same region eighty years earlier. Instead, the USSR’s disastrous attempt to sustain a puppet regime in unfamiliar, hostile territory aroused an intransigent opposition of guerrillas and zealots (
mujahidin
), armed and financed from abroad. And rather than ‘addressing’ the empire’s own nationality questions, it served only to inflame them: the Soviet-backed ‘Marxist’ authorities in Kabul did little for Moscow’s standing in the Islamic world, at home or abroad.