Revolution 1989 (49 page)

Some of the leaders who had been influential figures from the start in 1980 were opposed to Solidarity forming a government. They were championed by the mild-mannered, intense, thoughtful Catholic intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki. A widower now aged sixty-two, he shared a small and untidy Warsaw flat with his two sons. He had hardly slept since the election campaign had begun in May, living on cigarettes and adrenaline. He was convinced the time was not yet right for Solidarity. They should stay in opposition, learn the parliamentary ropes and prepare themselves to take over after elections in four years. He believed it would be a mistake to enter into a government in which ‘the police and the army are still in the hands of the ruling Party’, and he thought that if Solidarity joined an administration now it would be blamed for the mess of the Polish economy. ‘We had clever people with us, lots of them, intellectuals who knew a great deal about history, philosophy, literature, theology,’ he said. ‘But we didn’t have people who knew how to run anything, how to organise things, run local governments, departments of state. We needed time to learn how to do this. I thought we were not prepared.’ Always a moderate, sensible voice, he argued the case in the newspaper he edited,
Tygodnik Solidarno
(
Solidarity Weekly
) under the headline ‘Make haste, slowly.’
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Adam Michnik, one of the most creative voices of opposition in Poland, profoundly disagreed. He thought Solidarity should grab what they could while they had the opportunity. The Polish people, who for years had wanted to see the back of Communists in government, would expect no less. Inflation was now out of control at nearly 500 per cent and no decisions were being taken while the constitutional crisis continued. He knew Solidarity had some bright young economists, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, who said that urgent, radical and painful measures - ‘shock therapy’ - had to be taken immediately, within days, to stave off economic collapse. Michnik came up with a formula put simply in a headline - ‘Your President, our Prime Minister’. Solidarity should try to take the lead in a coalition and work with Jaruzelski as President. Wałesa finally came down on Michnik’s side. He knew too that the Pope was in favour of Solidarity taking the power they could. Pope John Paul thought it would send a message throughout Eastern Europe if the Soviet empire was defeated by peaceful, democratic means.

Wałsa resolved the problem by looking at the parliamentary arith metic. He acted in typically bold, unilateral fashion away from his advisers and aides, who he said sometimes confused him. He returned to his flat in Gdask and on the evening of 7 August made a statement to the Polish news agency inviting the two junior partners of the Communists, the Peasant Party and the Democratic Party, to break with forty years of slavish support for the Communists and to join Solidarity in forming a new government. Together, they would constitute 55 per cent of the Sejm. Wałsa’s announcement was a shock to the rest of the Solidarity leadership. He had talked the idea through with almost nobody in his entourage, but the dramatic coup worked. At first the Peasants’ leader, Roman Malinowski, and Jerzy Jozwiak of the Democratic Party were highly dubious. Two grey old bureaucrats, they had been puppets of the Communists for years, obeying orders out of habit. They were unused to thinking independently. But their members persuaded them to accept the arrangement. They realised they would soon be sidelined entirely if they turned the offer down.

Jaruzelski did not like the deal. Rakowski, now Communist Party chief, advised him to reject it. The General’s spokesman for years, the unpopular Jerzy Urban, told him that if the Communists went into opposition they would lose power ‘altogether and forever’. But the General, a realist, knew he had no choice. ‘Solidarity has burst over our life like a typhoon,’ he had told the other Warsaw Pact leaders barely a fortnight earlier.

On the afternoon of Friday 18 August he told Wałsa that he would agree to a Solidarity government on two conditions. ‘Our anxiety, and that of the Soviets and the other Warsaw Pact countries, is that . . . you will leave the socialist bloc and then we don’t know what may happen,’ he said. The General also insisted that Communists must retain the Interior and Defence Ministries. Wałsa agreed. That evening on tele vision he declared, in a message directed at Moscow: ‘Poland cannot forget where it is situated and to whom it has obligations. We are in the Warsaw Pact. That cannot be changed.’ It was not the most ringing endorsement, but he had been assured by Jaruzelski that it would be enough to assure him of the Kremlin’s blessing.

Wałesa then dropped a bombshell. It had been assumed, during most of these negotiations, that he would become head of the new government. Mazowiecki, Kuro and most of the Solidarity leadership urged him to become Prime Minister. When Solidarity legislators met to approve the new coalition, they thought they were voting to anoint him as Premier. But he announced he had no intention of taking the job. ‘I wish to remain a worker . . . a man of the people. I stay with the masses, I am one of them,’ he said with
faux naïveté.
The principal reason was probably that he knew that whoever led the new government was unlikely to be thanked or remain popular within a year or two. He did not wish to be directly associated with the pain that would inevitably be accompanied by ‘shock therapy’, which he could foresee would be closed factories and unemployment for many already badly-off Polish workers. Even the Lenin Shipyard was scheduled for partial closure under an austerity package being discussed by economists from Solidarity and the Communists. He would handpick a Prime Minister to take the difficult decisions in the first non-Communist government in the Soviet bloc for forty years. Then he could pretend to be above politics. He did not need a formal title. Lech Wałsa was now the most powerful man in Poland - and everybody knew it.
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At around midnight on the day Jaruzelski agreed to allow a Solidarity government, the Soviet Foreign Ministry received an urgent telex from Bucharest. Nicolae Ceauescu had been frantically cabling Warsaw Pact capitals urging them to intervene ‘to rescue socialism in Poland’. He denounced Solidarity as ‘the hireling of international imperialism’. The note to the Poles called on Jaruzelski to form ‘a government of national salvation’. In the message to the Soviets, the man who twenty-one years earlier had denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as interference in a sovereign state’s affairs now urged ‘collective military action’ against Poland. He demanded the presence of Eduard Shevardnadze in Bucharest for talks about a crisis in the ‘camp’ and wanted an immediate Warsaw Pact summit to plan an intervention in Poland.

He was not the only worried dictator in Eastern Europe. At the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest the previous month, Honecker, Ceauescu and Milo Jake, had formed a united front to urge Gor bachev to halt the drift in Poland and in Hungary. Honecker warned that there was a ‘grave danger to communism - and to all of us here’. Gorbachev’s response was: ‘The fears that socialism is threatened . . . are not founded. And those who are afraid had better hold on because perestroika has only just begun . . . We are going from one international order to another.’ The response left them indignant.

Most of the Soviet leaders were on holiday when the latest Polish crisis brewed. Gorbachev was at his seaside villa at Foros in the Crimea. He was more concerned with domestic issues than foreign ones, even developments as dramatic and revolutionary as were happening in Poland. He had given his blessing to Jaruzelski to do what he thought was best and was determined not to interfere. The policy was simply put by one of its architects, Alexander Yakovlev, and Gorbachev was essentially true to its spirit and letter. ‘There never was a formal decision to refrain from using force in Eastern Europe,’ he said. ‘We simply stopped being hypocritical. For years we had told the entire world that these countries were free and independent, even though this was obviously not the case. There was no need to take a formal decision. We just had to implement what was formal policy.’ When Gorbachev heard of the Ceausescu demand he simply told his aides, ‘Don’t worry. Ceausescu is just worried for his own skin’, and then concentrated his mind on Soviet matters. Those were consuming him throughout the year, not events in the satellite states.
¹⁴

Shevardnadze was holidaying in Georgia. His chief adviser, Sergei Tarasenko, showed him the cable while the Foreign Minister was sun-bathing on the beach.

FORTY

Sopron, western Hungary, 19 August 1989

 

THE IDEA ORIGINALLY BELONGED to Otto von Habsburg, eldest son of the last Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary, Karl I. The seventy-seven-year-old von Habsburg was a staunchly conservative member of the European Parliament, who had fought the Cold War for decades with much passion and some flair for propaganda. He saw a way to publicise the plight of the East German refugees who were flooding into Hungary, and to embarrass the regimes which would not let them freely enter Austria. There were around 85,000 of them now, on top of the 35,000 or so Romanians fleeing the rigours of life under Ceausescu. The swelling numbers were causing a humanitarian crisis within Hungary, and a political dilemma for the government. They could not decide what to do with the refugees and continued to dither for weeks. The Hungarian authorities hoped the problem would go away and they could avoid a more serious confrontation with their supposed fraternal socialist allies in Berlin. Clearly that was wishful thinking.

Von Habsburg had been barred from visiting Hungary until the autumn of the previous year. There were a few royalist supporters in the country. Their Habsburg flags and insignia could occasionally be spotted at demonstrations against the Danube dams and for better treatment of the Transylvanian refugees. It was a minuscule movement but the regime had taken no chances and kept him out of the country, for decades. Now von Habsburg could come and go as he pleased. Along with Hungarian human rights groups, and the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum, he planned a ‘day of celebration to say farewell to the Iron Curtain’. There was to be a giant symbolic gate built at the border near the baroque town of Sopron, attended by delegations from Hungary and Austria. At 3 p.m. the delegations would cross sides, to represent freedom of movement. The public would be encouraged to watch the ceremony, eat a meal and raise a glass to celebrate. The event was billed as the Pan-European Picnic where, on a sunny day in Central Europe, people could commemorate freedom near the spot where a few months earlier border guards began dismantling the electrified fence that had separated East and West. At that point it was a small-scale event that might receive some publicity in Austria and Hungary. But the stakes were raised when Imre Pozsgay became involved as the co-sponsor of the picnic. He came up with the suggestion that turned a modest, though interesting, commemoration into a worldwide media event that had profound effects on the entire Soviet empire.
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Pozsgay was the acknowledged leader of the reform Communists. It was in his political interests to be seen to support the refugees wholeheartedly. His boldness and compassion, or so he thought, would shame his erstwhile Party comrades in Budapest who displayed indecision and weakness. He negotiated a deal with the government that would keep the ‘symbolic gate’ open for four hours in the afternoon. He made an informal deal with his old friend and reformist soulmate, the Interior Minister István Horváth, that the border guards should turn a blind eye to East Germans trying to cross illegally - at least for a few hours during the day. It was not planned as a mass breakout from Hungary. Von Habsburg believed that if even just a few score refugees arrived safely in Austria his point would have been made and thousands would soon follow.

The Trabis were on the road again, from Lake Balaton to western Hungary near the border areas. With an entrepreneurial spirit not quite suppressed over the past four decades, garages throughout the country had specially stocked up on the fuel their inefficient 2-stroke engines used. More refugees were arriving each day now on trains and buses, carrying bedding, camping equipment, cooking utensils. Leaflets publicising the ‘picnic’ were printed in German telling the refugees where to go so they could ‘clip off part of the iron curtain’. A convenient map guided them to the spot. In the few days before the picnic, large numbers - estimated at nearly 9,000 - began to appear in campsites and bed and breakfast guest houses around Sopron, said the head of the Hungarian border guard, Gyula Kovács. ‘The whole town appeared to be filled with East Germans . . . It was also a serious sign when the Austrian Red Cross and other Austrian officials put up tents on the other side of the border . . . They were obviously expecting a large number of East Germans to cross.’
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