Through the looking glass
Tim Garton Ash
Berlin `Will the Russians invade next week?' A German editor in Berlin asked me on my return from Warsaw, with the tortured look of a bookie smelling the tip of a lifetime. Clearly for him this was the only question about Poland. For six months now, he and thousands of his kind have been writing the story of the Soviet intervention. Rivers of blood have flowed across the feature pages, oceans of crocodile tears have poured from the gutters. Eyes are only dried to inspect the circulation figures. Now all that is needed is the tanks. The news magazines have prepared their black and white covers. The tipsters are urging the Red Army (68:1 on) past the post. Come in Mr Brezhnev, Your time is up.
Of course we do not know if the Soviet Union will invade, or if so when. I rather doubt if Mr Brezhnev himself does. The signs are that we came very close to an intervention in early December after the Warsaw Pact summit, when the Pact's troops were fully mobilised on their ally's frontiers and Tass spoke of 'counterrevolutionary elements seeking confrontation'. Alas, the fragile truce which followed over Christmas was soon shattered by the unnecessary and messy conflict about workfree Saturdays, The unavoidable and ultintately far more serious conflicts about access to the mass media and the private farmers' independent trades union are still Pending. Last week Tass spoke again of counter-revolution'. Yet in truth Warsaw is the worst place in the world from which to judge the prospects intervention. Seen from the West, Po'and has looked since July 1980 like a house in names— its inhabitants half dead already, s.weating in panic for their lives. But step Inside, and you find the inhabitants sitting aro at ease, engaged in spirited convund .ersation, drinking tea and making plans for next few years, only occasionally raising Ineir voices in the refrain of some patriotic nYmn. They look at you with politely concealed amusement when you inquire 4,,nXi°1-isly after their health. What curious, are!ur 'icotic creatures these Western visitors 0 The Poles regard the fixation of the West the tanks as pathological. In Poland, FeY saY, there have been the most proio„.1.ind changes in Eastern Europe since .1'45; there is this extraordinary social "rvernent, growing daily, throwing out of? roots and branches and exotic ,,,„ts11°0ts, whole ancient oaks like the rrvoas"ts' 'Rural Solidarity' springing up 11 i_ In nowhere; there has been a sea-change the lives of 35 million people, the unbridling of the common man. And yet Western commentators sit like rabbits caught in the headlights of an approaching car, asking 'where are the tanks?' It is like spending one's life talking about death. It is as misleading as it is to view the long, rich history of the Polish nation from the 10th to the 18th century simply as a prelude to the partitions.
So it may be worth sketching a few basic features of this extraordinary movement. At its best, Solidarity is the nearest thing to true communism that I have seen. The cramped and makeshift headquarters of its Warsaw branch are pervaded by a spirit of dedication, fraternity, and, yes, equality. Here the granddaughter of Marshal Pilsudski works on terms of unforced comradeship with the 13th son of an illiterate peasantfarmer, Zbigniew Bujak, the leader of the branch. This new quality of human solidarity was perceptively described by the Pope in his address in Rome to the leaders of Solidarity (rarely has an organisation been more aptly named). It is different from the kind of solidarity which is forged by persecution; the solidarity of the dissidents. For men like the underground publisher, Miroslaw Chojecki, who calculates° that in the four years before August 1980 he spent on average one day a week in police custody, and the historian Adam Michnik, harassed by the secret police almost without interruption since 1968, the freedom of speech and action won by Solidarity is, as Michnik says, 'a dream'. Indeed, one has the impression that the dissidents are still slightly bewildered by the novel situation, like men emerging into daylight after 12 years underground, of lone prophets who suddenly find themselves caught up in .a crusade of ten million people.
This brings us to the second, vital point about Solidarity — that it is a genuine popular movement. Its leaders are workers. It is just possible that the reams of East German, Czechoslovak, Soviet, and Polish communist propaganda suggesting that the movement is manipulated by the intellectual dissidents from the social self-defence committee, KOR, may reflect a genuine belief. It must, at any rate, be very difficult for communists to accept that Solidarity is genuinely representative of the very classes they, the communists, claim as their own. But if Mr Kania and his colleagues had witnessed a meeting of Solidarity's national coordinating commission, they would be left in no doubt that the dissident Jacek Kuron of KOR takes a back seat. Moreover, if they are still in touch with reality, they must realise that it is not Kuron they have most to fear; his is now more often a voice of moderation. Early in January, for example, he proposed a compromise on the issue of work-free Saturdays — and was outvoted by the workers' leaders. Altogether Kuron's conception of a gradual, piecemeal dismantling of the communist system behind the facade of Party power, like the front of a Potemkin village carefully painted and propped up for the eyes of the Tsar, is far less threatening than the chiliastic visions of the populace. • For this is a looking-glass revolution. If one asks, 'Where are the Jacobins?' the • answer is 'In the rank-and-file'. It is the militant workers in the shipyards of Szczecin and the coal mines of Silesia who are demanding the heads of the prefers and the blood of the First Estate. It is the conservative Catholic peasants of South-Eastern Poland who would overthrow communism at the drop of a Cardinal's hat. Here, if anywhere, are the 'anti-Socialist elements' which the party hacks untiringly denounce. The hard core of dissidents at whom such attacks are aimed, the members of KOR, described by a senior Politburo member at this week's plenum of the Communist Party's Central Committee as the old vanguard of the opposition — they are the Girondists now. The discussion of the National Commission a fortnight ago was led by two gentlemen well able to appreciate the comparison: Professor Boleslaw Geromek, a Warsaw historian best known for an absorbing book about the `marginals' (i.e. thieves, vagabonds, tramps, prostitutes) of Paris in the late Middle Ages, and Dr Karol Modzelewski, a mediaevalist from Wroclaw. You will have some idea of the spectacle if you try to imagine Professor Richard Cobb chairing a meeting of the National Executive of the TUC — with the difference that Solidarity's 52 regional representatives are still (with a few exceptions) actually workers, and still (again with a few exceptions) actually representatives. Zbigniew Bujak, for example, the Warsaw leader, is a 26-year-old worker from the Urus tractor factory. I met Bujak one evening travelling up to Gdansk for a Commission meeting. he queued like everyone else for a second-class seat on the night train, shivering while the ticket clerks worked at the snail's pace which is the norm throughout the Soviet bloc. His clothes were cheap, indistinguishable from those of the drab crowd around him. He had no chauffeurdriven car, no sidekick to carry his luggage, no entourage, no bodyguard. Only the shadow of a nark followed him down the platform. So far power has not corrupted Bujak, at least not visibly.
Boleslaw Geromek has great hopes of the younger generation of workers' leaders like Bujak. Far from being 'anti-Socialist', they are people who have taken socialism at its word. Solidarity is not merely the organised self-expression of a tightly knit, traditional, Catholic Western (yes, Western) society. It is also the product of 35 years of socialist rhetoric, propaganda, education. You can not go on for ever telling the workers they are the masters and treating them as (wage) slaves. In fairness, it must be said that Mr Gierek's regime treated its workers con siderably better than, for instance, the Soviet Union is wont to do. There is a sense in which Poland has seen a revolution of lrising expectations over the last decade. It is perhaps worth emphaising once again that Solidarity is at best a highly constructive movement. It has plans for social and economic improvement — and, what is more, for something which it is not too much to call moral regeneration.
For example, the People's Republic of Poland has a chronic problem of alcoholism. In 1939 the average annual consumption of alcohol was just one litre per head.
In 1977 it was 8.2 litres. In 1980 the production of spirits consumed some four million tonnes of potatoes, that is roughly 120 kilos per inhabitant (at a time when even the British Embassy was asking for a sack of potatoes to be flown in with the Foreign Secretary). Significantly, these figures come from an expert member of the. KOR opposition, while the government acknowledges the problem, it has so far been loth to tackle it for a very simple reason: alcohol is a major source of income. So it is Solidarity which has set up a committee to lead the fight against alcoholism, with powerful support from the Catholic Church. During the workers' occupation of the Baltic ports all alcohol was strictly forbidden. In Rzeszow there was scarcely a drop to be had in the city. According to figures from the Episcopate, the consumption of alcohol has been reduced by between 30 and 40 per cent since the summer.
To be sure, there are also negative sides. Solidarity has become an umbrella under which all the accumulated grievances of Polish society are expressed. Unreal demands are made, and reinforced by wildcat strikes, at short notice. Fantastic stories circulate about the palaces, mistresses and bank accounts of the Party functionaries. In the extreme south-eastern tip of the country, at the point where Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union meet, there is a vast government recreation area which the peasants call the 'red principate'. It boasts superb game-hunting, enjoyed by President Giscard d'Estaing on a visit to his friend Gierek (there is no news of diamonds — yet). Fabulous are the tales told about the elaborate perversions which take place behind the well-guarded fences of the 'red principate'. The place, following sound oriental precedent, is said to be presided over by a eunuch. He is said to be a former bodyguard of the Stalinist leader Bierut, and his present unfortunate condition to have been caused by valiant and, alas, successful lunge to save his boss from the bullet of a would-be assassin.
Well, as Herodotus wisely remarked, my business is to record what people say — but I am by no means bound to believe it. The point is that such a fantastic story has acquired a symbolic importance in the eyes of the local population, and they are prepared to strike about it. And the same situation, albeit with less exotic symbols (more often just common or garden crooked officials), prevails in many parts of Poland: in Bielsko-Biala, for example, or Jelenia-Gora, where there was a general strike on the first day of the vital Plenum of the Central Committee. Solidarity's leaders spend their time dashing from place to place, trying to dampen down the bush fires wherever they can. But they can nowhere be too conciliatory, lest they find themselves leading from the rear. Meanwhile, the hand of the hard-liners in the party is strengthened by every outbreak of disorder, and the tone of Soviet commentaries becomes increasingly strident. We are back to the volume and pitch of early December.
Quite apart from the rumour that in the event of an intervention the Pope would fly in to lead the resistance from Cracow (a story firmly denied by the Vatican), it is distressing to find people in Poland convinced that 'the West' would do something, It is yet more distressing to have to acknowledge that Western Europe, to which the Polish nation belongs quite as much as Britain, would most probably do nothing. No doubt the eloquent protests, the token reprisals have already been prepared in the chancelleries of Paris and Bonn. Privately the \wink has already been given to Moscow: east-west trade, so far as Germany and France are concerned, will go on as soon as possible and as much as before. That, after all, is in the national interest of France and divided Germany, And what else but national interest ultv mately determines the foreign policy of the French and West German governments, for all their fine phrases about the common interest of Europe? Perhaps Britain might for once react more decisively. More important, the reaction of an America with President Reagan at the helm and the Polish community behind him, could be tougher still. But then, would that not leave us,. 05 after the invasion of Afghanistan, licking, the re-opened wounds of the strained Western alliance?
History does not repeat itself, exactly, But when three weeks ago I heard Adarn Michnik lecturing to the peasants of Rzes: zow about the January uprising of 1863, could not help recalling that in that year the, Poles hoped for the intervention of Englad°_, and France. In the event, England and France contented themselves with sending strongly worded notes of protest: to the Tsar.
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