Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (36 page)

Of course, one can argue that the battles of 1979 gave little indication of the revolutionary scale of what was yet to come: the epic confrontation with the coal miners, the financial deregulation of the “Big Bang,” the far-reaching sell-off of state-owned corporations. Indeed, the word
privatization
, taken up by Joseph and his followers, was just on the verge of widespread acceptance, an evolution that underlined just how entrenched statist assumptions had become. (Thatcher originally preferred the less provocative
denationalization
, but it proved too unwieldy.) In 1979, though, Thatcher and her supporters spoke only of “selling shares” in the
nationalized industries. There was little talk, at the time, of returning them entirely to the private sector.

All true enough. Yet it was precisely her triumph in the 1979 general election that made the rest of her reforms possible. Her victory marked a decisive break with the postwar consensus and the principles that underlay it. Margaret Thatcher was the first British politician since 1945 to declare that the drift toward socialism had to be stopped and who won a clear majority after campaigning on just this basis. Her electoral win was not a random one-off; to a large extent it reflected a fundamental shift in British thinking. Public opinion surveys from the 1970s showed, for example, a striking rise in the belief that high taxes stifled entrepreneurship and job growth.
²⁸
A Gallup poll in 1979 showed that 77 percent of Britons surveyed favored some privatization of nationalized industries—an increase of 18 percent over the previous decade.
²⁹
A 1976 survey revealed that a majority of Britons believed that unions were a major factor in the country’s economic decline, and 74 percent believed that British unions had far too much power—a figure that rose to 82 percent by the year of Thatcher’s election. All these data help to explain why the 1979 election indeed amounted to a watershed. “Even if what was achieved in the short term was limited,” writes journalist Simon Jenkins, “there was no question that 1979 was a revolutionary moment.”
³⁰

For the thirty-four years before her rise to power, Britons had accepted a particular model for how British society ought to be run. In 1979 few understood that Thatcher’s upset was opening the way for eighteen straight years of Conservative rule and a fundamental reordering of the British political landscape. The consensus was over.

T
he negotiations between the Vatican and the Communist government in Warsaw had continued throughout the winter, through John Paul II’s visit to Mexico and into the weeks that followed.
¹
Finally, in February 1979, the Polish United Workers’ Party announced its decision: John Paul II was invited to return to his homeland. The government did what it could to make the best of a bad situation. The pontiff would not, it turned out, be allowed to commemorate the anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Stanisław in May. Instead, he was invited to make his trip in June, a date that officialdom regarded as somewhat less provocative.

This, however, was a face-saving exercise. The reality was that the newly elected Polish pope’s return to his home country represented an absolutely fundamental challenge to the official Communist version of life in the People’s Republic. According to this official picture, the socialist system was the best of all possible worlds, every material and spiritual problem had been solved, and the church represented the old, backward order, a pack of superstitions and obscurantism, that enlightened Communist rule had long since rendered irrelevant. Intellectuals did not need religion because they were too smart for it; workers did not need it because they already lived in a workers’ paradise. This was the image reinforced at every stage, from cradle to grave, by all the official institutions of the Communist state.

It was self-evident to the majority of Poles that John Paul’s visit was likely to defy this alternate reality in just about every way that mattered. The mere fact of a Polish pope evoked a national pride that stood in stark contrast to the spirit of
“proletarian internationalism” that the Communist regime constantly tried to instill in the people as a substitute. And this particular pope, as the former members of his Kraków flock recalled so well, was a figure of enormous intellectual gifts and human warmth who had a natural rapport with people from just about every section of society. He was, in short, the very embodiment of the qualities that were supposed to be reserved, in the official view, to the Communist avant-garde.

“The pope’s trip to Poland was such a unique event that it didn’t matter what the official media said or didn’t say,” recalls Catholic priest Adam Boniecki. “Everybody knew what to think about it.”
²
Boniecki was working as a journalist at the Catholic weekly paper
Tygodnik Powszechny
, and shortly after John Paul II’s election, the new pontiff had chosen him to come to Rome to edit the Polish edition of the Vatican newspaper,
L’Osservatore Romano
. But the Communist authorities hesitated for months to issue Boniecki a passport, ensuring that he was still around to witness the events before and during John Paul II’s pilgrimage. Boniecki didn’t mind about the postponement of his departure. He and his colleagues were in a state of “exultation” in the months that followed their compatriot’s assent to the head of the Holy See.

For Boniecki and many others, it was already clear that John Paul II’s election had “torn through the Iron Curtain.” No expert knowledge of Eastern Europe was needed to understand that the pope’s visit to his homeland represented a profound challenge to the Communist system there, and the world’s interest in the pope’s impending visit was correspondingly intense. Reporters from all over the world descended on
Tygodnik Powszechny’s
editorial offices, desperate for inside information about the new pope and his biography. At the same time, as it became clear that the government was intent on minimizing its own involvement with the pope during his trip, churchgoers all over the country began mobilizing. They welcomed the chance to organize the pilgrimage. In a world where everything was monopolized by the state, John Paul II’s admirers happily seized upon the chance to show that they, too, could manage a national event.

For its part, the Communist Party resorted to its characteristic coping strategy. It had two primary instruments: the security services and the propaganda apparatus. The Polish secret police, the SB, and its Politburo masters created a special operation called LATO ’79. (
Lato
means “summer.”) As archbishop of Kraków, Wojtyła had already spent nearly twenty years as the focus of a considerable intelligence-gathering effort by the SB as well as, intermittently, the KGB, the East German Stasi, and other East-bloc secret services. LATO ’79 drew most of its operational
intelligence from seven moles who had served in the archbishop’s immediate entourage over the years. They included both priests and laymen; one of them, code-named JUREK, was a member of the church organizing committee. Every possible measure to limit the effects of the pope’s visit was considered. Tens of thousands of police would be deployed in the course of the nine days. The SB informants who were involved in trip planning were advised, for example, to express worries about safety wherever possible (in the hope that this calculated disinformation would reduce the number of pilgrims). No effort was spared. In the event, 480 SB agents were deployed during the four days the pope spent in Kraków during the visit.

Presumably because a large number of East German Catholics also expressed a desire to see the pope, the East German secret police, the Stasi, deployed hundreds of its own agents to cover the event. The East Germans even set up a special headquarters post on the Polish border to coordinate their operations. The famous Stasi master spy Markus Wolf had planted his own mole inside the Vatican, a German Benedictine monk whose identity was not even known to the Stasi man in charge of the operation.
³

The apparatchiks were especially intent on managing the media coverage. In the weeks leading up to the visit, official media issued a stream of warnings. People should stay away from the pope’s events, the government urged: chaos and hysteria were sure to reign, and spectators could almost certainly count on being trampled to death. Foreign reporters were charged exorbitant accreditation fees, which excited a great deal of angry complaint and undoubtedly boosted the country’s desperately needed hard-currency reserves. But it doesn’t seem to have kept many journalists away. Domestic reporters were easier to deal with. The party issued reams of carefully considered guidelines and talking points. TV cameramen attended special training sessions. Their instructors told them to avoid shots of large crowds. Instead, they were supposed to point their cameras toward the sky while leaving a few people at the bottom of the frame. Shots of elderly people, nuns, and priests were to be preferred; young people, families, and laypeople should be avoided. The idea was to make it appear as though the pope’s supporters were a marginal, backward bunch, and certainly nothing like a cross-section of society.
⁴

Meanwhile, the party was taking no chances. In the weeks before John Paul II’s arrival, the Polish police arrested 150 dissidents—including Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, one of the founders of KOR. (A few weeks earlier a gang of toughs had attacked Kuron on the street and beaten him badly. No one was charged in the assault—a fact that suggested the complicity of the security services.) Another one
of those detained was a Catholic activist named Kazimierz Switon, who was sentenced to a year in jail for the peculiar crime of attempting to set up an independent trade union.
⁵
This was an intolerable offense in a country that claimed to be run with the interests of the workers at its heart. Surely, the dictatorship of the proletariat obviated the need for any new labor movements outside of the state.

But appearances were deceptive. In fact, by the end of the 1970s, the essential schizophrenia of life was firmly established. Publicly, officially, there was the Poland of Communist Party rule: a place of grandiose slogans, lockstep marches, and central planning. This nation coexisted with an alternative Poland defined by opposition-organized “flying universities,” underground publications from dissident groups like KOR, and the parallel moral universe embodied by the Catholic Church, long linked with the struggle to assert Polish nationhood. Poles of this era had grown up in a society were life was split into two parallel realms, the public and the private, each with its own versions of language and history. As in so many other authoritarian states, citizens of the People’s Republic of Poland learned from early on to parrot their allegiance to official ideology in public while keeping their real opinions to themselves and their families.
⁶
Communist rule depended on ensuring that people persisted in paying public tribute to the official version of truth, thus preventing them from seeing how many of them actually rejected it. But what would happen when they were allowed to make their private feelings manifest, on a mass scale?

Even before his return, it was clear that John Paul II’s visit was going to be an extraordinary event. There were the special trains arriving every few minutes at Warsaw’s stations, crammed with pilgrims. There was the sudden ubiquity of church orderlies, immediately identifiable by their yellow hats, who had the job of managing the expected crowds—a task that would have normally been left to the security forces of the state. There was the presence of Czech, Hungarian, and East German visitors who had made the journey to Poland to share in an experience of genuine fraternal significance that had nothing to do with proletarian internationalism. There were the word-of-mouth reports that Ukrainians, Belarusian, and Lithuanians—Catholic believers in parts of the Soviet Union adjacent to Poland—were moving closer to the border in order to catch TV or radio broadcasts of the visit.

At 10:02 on the morning of June 2, 1979, John Paul’s chartered Al Italia flight landed at the Warsaw Airport and taxied to its berth adorned with the flags of the Holy See and the People’s Republic of Poland.
⁷
At the bottom of the gangway, the pontiff knelt and kissed the ground—a gesture that became a trademark for him
in the years of travel that followed. He was met by the country’s president and a high-ranking official visiting committee; he was, after all, a head of state. Then he stepped into a truck that had been converted into a mobile viewing stand, painted in the yellow and white colors of the Holy See and adorned with the emblems of the Vatican and Poland. As he entered Warsaw, it became apparent that hundreds of thousands of Poles and foreign visitors had gathered to welcome him. Multitudes lined the streets. (The Polish government itself was compelled to provide two thousand buses to transport the six hundred thousand people who were expected to arrive overnight.)

An enormous cross had been erected in the center of Victory Square—the heart of a country where the public display of Christian symbols had been officially discouraged for the previous forty years. There the pope celebrated an open-air mass with an estimated one million congregants.
⁸
His homily was an event that remained in the minds of those who experienced it decades later. John Paul II invoked the memory of the great martyr Stanisław, the man who had put the good news of Christ above the dictates of the king, and elucidated the theme of Christian redemption as the central key to understanding the human drama. And he spoke of Poland’s unique historical experience of suffering, describing it as “the land of a particularly responsible witness.” Christ, he explained, “cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography.” People in the congregation began to clap, and the applause swelled and spread. John Paul II had to wait for several minutes before he could go on: