Buying the Night Flight (29 page)

I was utterly fascinated by this -- but how, indeed, do you express these spiritual and abstract ideas in the very hard language of journalism? How do you insert them into the genre? And if you do not, are you really telling your readers what
is
going on? I certainly think not.

Trying to put together the entire Polish picture was, for a journalist, a constantly complex and engrossing but an endlessly difficult job. Who was where? What was really happening? How could you find out? How would you be treated at any minute?
What in all hell was really going on inside this magnificent gray land?
No one knew. You lived from moment to moment, but the sheer richness of the intellectual analysis and stimuli was enough to excite you and keep you at it.

Lech Walesa, for instance -- one just had to see Lech Walesa, the "Man of Iron" who had led the working men and women of Poland from a kind of totalitarian slavery to the beginnings of a representative form of government. But Walesa was not in Gdansk, nee Danzig, he was in Warsaw for the negotiating talks with the government. This was bad because it meant that neither the Gdansk Solidarity nor the Solidarity chapters could reach him.

My "man" at Interpress and I sat in the Interpress coffee shop overlooking the square in Warsaw and talked it over.

"There's only one solution," he said. "They always stay at the Solec Hotel when they're here. It's kind of the Solidarity headquarters.

Why don't you just go on over there?"

I did. I walked over to the Inter-Continental Hotel, which was one of the few places you could get a cab with any ease, and took off for the Solec. There I found another of the anomalies of Poland: a modern, Swedish-built hotel that reminded one of, say, Grand Rapids. It was neat, clean, clean-cut, and utilitarian in that special Scandinavian way. It didn't look any more like the old fluted and romantic and gray Old Warsaw that I had imagined than it looked like the Bangkok riverways. I had, once again, to readjust my thinking. Here I was, in a "Communist" country, watching a free trade union organization meet to discuss its negotiations on restructuring that "Communist" country, in a modern, Swedish-built hotel, with labor leaders who looked like they belonged in Detroit.

Behind some glass doors, in a spare little room, I found Walesa and his men. Walesa, wearing a dark blue corduroy jacket, with his rakish mustache and his sensuous eyes, was obviously exhausted. But the discussion among them was by turns serious, animated, and deadly serious. Walesa cajoled, he laughed, he wrung his hands; and when he came running out (he always seemed to run, not walk), it struck me for some reason with surprise that he was very short. I was (and am, I suppose) five feet six inches--he must have been five feet three. He reminded me, in his size and in his perpetual motion, of a kind of hyperactive bantam rooster.

I never did quite catch him, I have to admit it; for he dashed away then to Gdansk, then back to Warsaw, then back to Gdansk. We kept missing each other.

I tried to work my way into knowing Solidarity better, and I did have a splendid talk with Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a charming young blond man who spoke philosophically about the whole situation, which was indeed deteriorating. Was Solidarity having serious divisions? "No question about it," this pleasant young man with the Norseman's face said. "Until recently our program was pretty negative. It criticized the government and everyone was unified. Now we are forced to take a positive attitude to get out of that. If you want to make a positive program, you must choose between values because one value limits the choices. From a moral point of view, things are not quite clear."

Then he went on to say, again thoughtfully, "We can ask people to make sacrifices if we can tell them that we are on a definite path. The problem is timing -- that's the main game. What comes first? To do so, we must say we are on the path, that the institutions are established, that they operate, that future development is secured...."

And Poland didn't have that -- that was the problem. There was no assured path as yet, no new institutions. In fact the country was in total chaos. Theories and new terminology abounded. It was a "self-limiting" revolution. There was a dangerous "paralysis of authority." Events were creating "a real socialization of economy, an anarchization of life." In spite of all this it was still a wholly unprecedented attempt to build into a totalitarian society, from within and nonviolently, pluralism and checks and balances and the mechanisms of people's control.

But I soon came to see, too, the all-too-real and new potential danger. The Polish revolution also could become a "zero-sum game," in effect a situation in which all the forces canceled the other ones out. That was the real danger of Poland's winter, which always comes after every August no matter what in life you do, and that was what the Soviets cunningly were watching, were banking on and planning around.

Next to the question of what the romantic, sad-eyed, dramatic, suicidal, wonderful Poles were doing, lay the question of what the Russians were doing with the Poles -- and, most of all, why they hadn't done anything after months and months of the once-unimaginable "Polish revolution."

I finally filed the following column about the Russian policy in Poland. I was and am convinced that it was an entirely different and new policy that we were seeing, and that we were missing it at our own loss:

Warsaw, Poland -- In these last 16 months of the "Polish revolution," not one Western embassy reported from Warsaw that there would ever be a Soviet invasion. Yet almost every one of their home capitals nevertheless insisted there would be. Therein lie some crucial and unanswered questions:

Where are you Russkis? Why haven't you come yet, despite all of Washington's public warnings not to (and many, too many cynical private hopes there that you would)? Are you too busy in Afghanistan and Aden? What the devil are you doing?

The grand and potentially tragic situation in Poland is not something to joke about; but the predictions from Washington, coming almost exactly every three months, that Moscow was about to invade have become a truly bad joke here.

Poles returning from trips to Washington are uniformly angered by American hopes that the Russians will invade and thus "show the world what they really are." One now-out American official, General Bobby Schweitzer, last August even predicted the invasion date: Sept. 22.

This is not only naturally deeply offensive to the Poles, it has also turned out to be a superficial and dangerous misreading of Russian actions and intent in Poland. For the Soviets have used a wholly new tactic in Poland from their all-out invasions of the past. Basically, the new policy is one of tolerating inner reforms in Poland so long as they do not affect the Soviet Union's system of alliances or strategic communications across Poland and -- less certain to observers here--the predominance of the Communist Party.

On its more subtle and sophisticated and cynical level, I call it the Russians' "Wait for winter" policy. For centuries the Russians have been absorbing everyone from Napoleon to Hitler to the Golden Hordes in their vastnesses and in their murderously debilitating winters. Now they are applying that same policy of patient absorption to the Poles' gallant experiment; and if it destroys itself from lack of internal cohesion and degenerates into Civil War, well then nobody in the world will really blame the Russians for invading.

As unknowable as the Kremlin remains, there are a number of indicators to back up this analysis:

--In his recent and unusual interview with the German magazine,
Der Stern,
Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, asked about the preservation of peace in Europe, very pointedly said, "And I would add, the place of socialist Poland in Europe."

This shows that detente -- the relations between East and West pushed since the early 70s and now abandoned by President Reagan -- was the policy that really opened up Poland and gave it the possibility of changing. But it also shows that the Soviets want Eastern-isolated Poland to play a new role in linking both East and West.

--Well-informed participants here like government spokesman Jerzy Urban stress that in the last 16 months, the Soviets "never expressed any negative attitudes toward the reforms going on here. The Soviet Union never said we were not to have an independent trade union in Poland, but only that we should never attack the system."

Is this a new and different response? "Yes, entirely," Urban went on. "And it might be that the prospectus toward Poland could indicate a crucial change in Soviet attitudes toward all of Eastern Europe. The future of the political experiments going on in these socialist countries depends upon Solidarity's (temperate) responses."

--Solidarity leaders tend to agree with this. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Solidarity national spokesman, pointed out that the Hungarian trade unions actually answered Solidarity's recent letter to them urging cooperation. "Two of three sentences were important," he said, "those in which they indicated we should talk. We were not totally rejected -- and that answer had to be approved by the Soviets."

--On Nov. 21, for the first time, open questions such as "Does Poland lose or win in commercial contacts with the Soviet Union?" have been asked publicly. These were posed, even more extraordinary, in the government paper,
Polityka.

While all of this is going on, then, for the United States to talk about the desirability of a Soviet invasion is not only cynical in the extreme, it
is
completely missing the major new points here. Instead of only a singular policy of obsessively trying to embarrass the Soviets (and condemning the Poles to a new hell), we should be working to help the Poles truly develop the first pluralistic society within the Eastern bloc. Without question, that -- and not the freezing of the bloc that would follow a civil war and an invasion -- is the most effective and even apocalyptic way to change that bloc.

Now, as anyone familiar at all with the Russian policy and inten tions toward Eastern Europe could see, there was a very new and far more sophisticated policy emerging here. Months passed, and yet the Soviets--despite all the dire predictions from Washington -- did not invade.

The problem for me was how, in the midst of all that mystery and alchemy and dissimulation, to get enough information to make this interpretation believable to others. How did I satisfy myself that my analysis was correct? When you are dealing with will-o'-the-wisps and with lightning bugs, where do you as a journalist begin to start catching them?

Fortunately I had a long background of working in and studying of the Soviet Union. My Russian, though rusty, could still be called upon. Without this -- for Russian policies are a little like reading Sanskrit -- I could never have told what had changed; could never have recognized the new signals and realities; could never do what journalists in these situations must do, which is taking all the signals and putting them gradually together.

But I was doing about others only what the Poles were doing about themselves: they were turning inward in the most moving way to discover their own history. It was the history that I had seen in the catacombs of Wawel Castle one Saturday morning in Cracow, where I found the tombs of archbishops and generals all lying together. After World War II the Russians had attempted to wipe out Polish history. It was not taught in the schools; its great heroes were not publicly mentioned. And yet now, thirty years later, after all those years of silence they were rediscovering themselves; or perhaps not so much rediscovering themselves as revealing publicly for the first time in three decades what they had always known inside. And they were doing this in different ways. Small intellectual and university salons studied Polish history, filling in the blanks the Russians had created with their historic lobotomy on the Poles. Solidarity ran history programs. On anniversaries they marched to the formerly unknown graves of national military heroes. Youth groups like the Democratic Youth in Cracow sought out war heroes and graves. I was seeing before me the kind of shining reawakening not only of nationality and of faith but of what I dealt in and lived for -- true information -- that alone keeps people sane in this world.

Just before I left, I had an appointment with Jerzy Urban, a former popular commentator turned government spokesman. He was a small, round man with an almost all-bald pate and he looked very much like the hard line incarnate. But like so much else in Poland then, he wasn't quite what he appeared. Within ten minutes I found myself again deeply involved in one of those Polish paradoxes. For there I was, speaking to the
official government spokesman
for an hour and a half--rationally, systematically, analytically --about why communism had failed in Poland!

"The reasons were both political and economic," Urban said as we sat in the little room that was colored in the historic Polish colors of dark green and a dark, deep rose. "The Polish economy in the seventies was based on very expensive imports from the Western economy. But we could never produce exports for hard currency. Polish society simply consumed too much of the credits. So the fault with our politicians was that power was exercised in a very arbitrary way and by very few people. There was no control over them, and they got rich at the cost of the people. They became divided from the people. Arrogant. The problem, in one sentence, was that we didn't introduce slow political reforms."

As to the "Why?" of the new Soviet response, Urban gave three other fascinating reasons: "(1) You could really feel the social struggle behind the changes occurring. They were obviously not per formed by small groups. (2) Events in Poland occurred gradually. It was not a sudden uprising endangering the balance of forces in Europe. (3) The Polish character was always different. There was always private property. And the Church. The Soviet Union got used to our differences. It was impossible to change us."