Intelligence

The extraordinary days that changed the face of Europe

World news from The Times and the Sunday Times - Times Online

By Roger Boyes
THE Solidarity revolution that erupted in August 1980 was a mixture of carnival high spirits, faith, fear and pluck. Never in the history of communism had the police state been so openly mocked and the leaders so rudely snubbed.

Then, 16 months later, the system struck back — and closed down the nation. It proved the death knell of communism. For a foreign correspondent, the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981, was a throwback to the days of 19th-century journalism when articles were sent back to head office by pigeon or on horseback.

Telephone lines were cut. Telexes fell silent. Young soldiers clustered around braziers in the snow enforcing the night-time curfew. Men in uniforms drove the trams and read the television news, which was little more than a long catalogue of forbidden acts.

Our “pigeons” were travellers — contract teachers fleeing for Britain, charity workers, Westerners escaping before the frontiers were sealed.

We disguised our articles as letters, handwritten or typed, and addressed them, in my case, to Dear Uncle Harry (Sir Harold Evans, the Times Editor) or Cousin Ivan (Ivan Barnes, the foreign editor).

There was a line of fake family chitchat to mislead any inquisitive Customs officer, and the rest was news, analysis and reporting from a country that had suddenly been amputated from Europe. Some “pigeons” panicked and flushed the letters down train lavatories before they reached the East German border, lest they be strip-searched or arrested.

But many got through, collected in the West Berlin Zoo station, or at a Scandinavian quayside, or simply posted from Dover as newspapers waited to discover if Solidarity had really been crushed.

Once published, the smuggled articles were picked up by Western broadcasters, Radio Free Europe and the BBC Polish service, and transmitted back into Poland: it was the first chink in the armour.

The post-carnival hangover lasted for much of the decade. General Jaruzelski’s regime came to understand that communism — propped up by tanks — needed to find new sources of legitimacy and so, very cautiously, he tried to open up.

When a gang of secret policemen murdered Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the chain-smoking priest who was Solidarity’s champion, in 1984, they were tried publicly. Foreign correspondents were as shocked as the Poles by the killing. The shy but affable priest, now en route to sainthood, had been a guest at our party. And the trial showed both us — and the exhausted supporters of the Solidarity underground movement — that a power vacuum had opened up in Poland. Jaruzelski could no longer lead, but Solidarity was not yet in a position to take over power.

I remember seeing a politburo member visiting an electric light factory in Warsaw. He smiled — an innovation of the mid-1980s — and held out his hand to the assembled women workers. It was a Friday, they had just been paid and had manicured their nails for the weekend ahead.

No one responded. There was not a spark of goodwill, only icy contempt for their leader. The man’s hand fell to his side and panic flickered over his otherwise blurred features. It was the end of fear; the cement of communism was crumbling fast.

Soon enough the regime grasped that it had to share power with Solidarity and, amazingly, a consensus was reached among the rival Solidarity chieftains about what level of surrender could reasonably be demanded.

The deal struck in 1989 was reproduced in different forms across the disintegrating Soviet empire: communists bought immunity and access to personal wealth (taking up management positions in privatised companies) in return for surrendering their unchallenged right to run the country.

We correspondents, swept along by the 1989 revolution, should have looked more closely at the small print. The seed of much current unhappiness in Eastern Europe was sown in that year.

Solidarity unravelled and a somewhat ramshackle party system took its place. Lech Walesa became Poland’s President, then lost office and became briefly the star of a television programme about angling.

The peasant cunning and political intuition that had made him such a brilliant strike leader were not enough to sustain a career as a statesman.

His weakness, then as now, was that he was too easily bored. In one interview, I spotted — hidden behind heavy but obviously unopened volumes of statecraft — two collections of crossword puzzles. During our talk he had been trying to solve several puzzles simultaneously. Outside, courtiers were waiting for him to make yet another decision.

Next week Mr Walesa — the man who clambered over the Gdansk shipyard fence 25 years ago to lead a revolution — will formally resign his Solidarity membership. “It’s changed,” he said, “and so have I. And that’s a good thing.”

Roger Boyes is the author of The Naked President, a biography of Lech Walesa (Secker and Warburg)

August 26, 2005 at 06:29 PM in Europe | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home