The following is an account published in Le Monde by Zbigniew Kowalewski of the situation in Poland and the discussions taking place within the union just prior to the imposition of martial law. Kowalewski was in Paris at the time of the military crackdown.
On the afternoon of 2 December the Solidarnosc leadership [illegible] just before the cutting of the telephone lines of the Mazowsze regional leadership. The police and the army had attacked the firefighters' college and had thrown out the striking students. The vice president of the regional branch of the union was arrested. In all the factories in our region the Solidarnosc [illegible]. A meeting of the national commission was called at short notice by [illegible]. If there really was to be a frontal attack on the union by the authorities then we had to counter-attack. In Warsaw, Slowik [illegible] therefore put forward an action proposal to the union: an active strike combined with the creation of workers' guards. In the hours which followed the political tension tended to recede at national level. We nevertheless came to the conclusion in the following days that the crisis already had a revolutionary character. We had maintained our action programme, in [illegible] of national accord. [illegible] vice-president Jerzy Kropiwnicki — a doctor of economics, and [a member] of the nine-person presidium — [illegible]. For [some time] the leaders of the PUWP (Polish United Workers Party) were carrying out a campaign for the creation of a Front of National Unity, an institution totally controlled by the party in power, which had no existence outside of electoral periods to present a single list of candidates and to sort out the problem of the [composition] of the [representative] bodies. The conception of the Front varied according to the leading [group, and implied differences] on the content of any possible agreement. For them the first thing was to set up the Front; there would be time later to work out the basis of the accord between the different forces taking part in it. We foresaw the trap. It was to deprive Solidarnosc of [illegible]. Other forces were to undertake to support the agreement whose fundamentals could [only be] the propositions adopted by the Solidarnosc congress. Concretely the agreement was to contain three points: the struggle against the crisis, [illegible], a self-governing republic.
For free elections
Kropiwnicki and myself were to take part in a discussion on this question with representatives of the PUWP in a broadcast televised nationwide. The political bureau of the PUWP — we knew from an official source — had agreed to this debate, insisting that we should not pull out. We were on the point of leaving for the studio when the director general of Lodz television phoned us to say that the broadcast was cancelled, the PUWP refusing to participate.
The day before, on 3 December, during the presidium meeting of the national commission at Radom, Lech Walesa and numerous other leaders, convinced as we were in Lodz of the revolutionary character of the situation, had for the first time posed the question: who should rule? A bureaucratic minority or the working masses? For several months this question had been ripening within the working class, posing at the same time the fundamental problem of the Polish revolution. That is what the workers told us during the factory meetings, demanding that we struggle for free elections.
For the regional leadership of Solidarnosc the most urgent problem was the struggle for supplies for the population. For several months the built-up industrial area of Lodz was threatened by hunger. The system of regulating the basic necessities had more or less broken down for the two months since July, the time when the famous hunger march of thirty thousand women had taken place at the initiative of the union. But we were not satisfied with protest actions.
After having examined the working of the regulations we were sure that the disorganisation was absolutely scandalous. The provincial administration was incapable of determining the exact number of people entitled to ration cards. The cards were secretly distributed to people belonging to a group with links with the apparatus of [illegible]. [illegible] the destruction of the cards once used; some of them were coming back into circulation. The [illegible] in exchange for the cards. One had to queue for two or three days. For workers in particular the situation was tragic.
In October the leadership of Lodz Solidarnosc had demanded that the printing of the ration cards in our region be decentralised. Social tensions and the risks of an outbreak of strikes were such that the town hall obtained such authorisation from central government. We are the only region in the country where the ration cards were from then on printed by Solidarnosc according to a system determined by us and controlled by a joint commission of the union and the town hall. At last the number of cards printed corresponded to [illegible] established in a precise fashion.
At the same time we controlled the distribution of the cards, which put an end to privileges. And we won another success too. The central government had refused Solidarnosc the right to control the distribution of basic necessities, arguing that it would constitute an interference in the prerogatives of the government. (As vice-premier Rakowski said to Lech Walesa: 'In our country he who controls food distribution, thereby holds the power.') In our region we already had such control! The mayor of Lodz had given us the authorisation. Special teams of workers controlled the situation in collection centres in the countryside, in the slaughterhouses, in the warehouses, and in the wholesale and retail trades. The union had not been authorised to control the warehouses of the State reserves. But that did not prevent us from knowing exactly the type and quantity of goods there. We could also give the mayor the information which he said himself he did not know. [illegible] state of the economic situation. Thanks to our activity the supplies to the population improved and the queues shortened. We had already prepared a plan setting up control of industrial production in the region.
The Solidarnosc union in Lodz was the first in Poland to enthusiastically support the idea of workers' self-management in January 1981 and to put forward the slogan: power to the workers in the factories. We had supported the establishment of regional co-ordinating committees of the workers' councils — already in existence in 26 regions — as well as the activity of the national federation of self-management bodies set up last October.
On the evening we met with Solidarnosc representatives from the neighbouring regions. The meeting took place outside the offices of the regional leadership as we feared being overheard. We told them that our region would probably go on active strike on a wide scale from 21 December and we asked them to support our action, above all by assuring the supplies to the population of Lodz.
That's when I discussed with Andrzej Slowik for the last time. He was to go to Gdansk during the night to ask the national union leadership to authorise the organisation of an active strike in our region. This bus driver, a leader of the Lodz strike in August 1980 and for a long time one of the most combative and radical of the national leaders of Solidarnosc, had always shown a great capacity to grasp the sentiment of his class. As I was to leave the next day for France for ten days by the request of the presidium, I told him as I left that he should supervise in my absence the preparation of the active strike.
On the morning of 10 December on the train to Warsaw I noticed that the paper of the provincial committee of the PUWP — which is more liberal than the central press of the party — had published my article polemicising with Trybuna Ludu over the active strike. I argued there that Solidarnosc, in preparing for an active strike — that is in fighting for everyone's right to food, clothes and heating — and in struggling to safeguard the instruments of work, had a clear moral superiority over a government, incapable of doing anything other than preparing for war against society.
In Lodz, we could clearly see that as the crisis of the bureaucracy deepened so it increasingly turned to its own apparatus of repression as the only force on which it could rely. The militarisation of the government was obvious. Nevertheless we placed our confidence in the struggle of the masses to block this process. In March throughout the country Solidarnosc was very well prepared for a general strike. The government thus had a choice: to be overturned or to convince the union leaderships to accept a compromise.
In December the government was ready to launch a war against society — it had been preparing it for at least ten months — but it knew that its strongest card was surprise. It was to prevent Solidarnosc from preparing for a general strike. In a region like Lodz, which had decided to go on active strike, Solidarnosc was able to choose the terrain and the moment for the confrontation with the government. The events of 13 December have shown that the bureaucracy was so afraid of such a possibility that it took the initiative.
Freezing of the economic reform
All the independent economists in the country were agreed in saying that Poland would be unable to get out of the crisis without liquidating the system of bureaucratic centralisation of the economy. This view was widely shared by the working class. The government had promised to put the economic reform into motion by 1 January 1982. This had aroused great expectations among the workers. But in November the government admitted that it was impossible to embark on the reform during 1982. It thus renounced its own project, itself very limited in scope.
The government intended that parliament should pass a law on a system of economic reform. But the Bill was subject to such attacks that the government was not certain that it would be adopted. And, to everyone's surprise, it was replaced by a decree from the council of ministers on the matter, without Solidarnosc being consulted. The old system of management was to remain in place for the year to come, with an even greater centralisation in some respects. A special body of the state apparatus was to retain the monopoly on the distribution of raw materials and all the important materials for production.
The decision of the government stirred up agitation and extreme discontent in the factories. 'We should put the economic reform into motion ourselves, without and against the authorities if necessary.' That was the increasingly widespread view among the Lodz workers in their factory meetings and in the regional meetings of the self-management movement militants. In the regional leadership of the union we were convinced that the only way out for the working class was the active strike.
An active strike is putting production under the control of the strike committees according to a plan elaborated by the workers themselves according to social need. It would allow not only the control of distribution by revolutionary methods but also would deprive the central bureaucracy of its economic power, it would start the economic reform being put into practice and also the socialisation of the means of production. On 23 October the national commission recommended to the whole union to prepare for an active strike.
This warning caused a panic within the state apparatus. First General Jaruzelski, then Trybuna Ludu, the paper of the PUWP, and finally the secretary to the Central Committee Olszowski, took part in a campaign against the tactic of an active strike. They announced that the government would use every means at its disposal to prevent it taking place. However the slogan of the strike became increasingly popular in the rank and file of the union. In the Lodz region a survey showed that 65 per cent of the union members — and more than 85 per cent in certain big factories — supported this form of struggle. Nevertheless some of the members and of the experts of the national commission opposed it, or at least had doubts. One of the principal experts went so far as to say that it was an idea originating from leftist elements. The differences on this were very similar to those some months earlier which affected Solidarnosc over workers' self-management.
On 9 December, six presidium members of the Lodz regional leadership met with the workers in the twelve principle factories in mass meetings. They discussed there the active strike, the formation of workers' guards and measures to struggle against the sabotage of production. The overwhelming majority of the workers supported the adoption of such forms of action.