Resistance to martial law in Poland continues. Inevitably the Polish workers are assessing the events of the last 18 months to prepare the next wave of struggle against the bureaucratic regime. In the introduction to a new Pluto Press book The Summer Before The Frost Jean-Yves Potel assesses the debates within the Solidarnosc leadership prior to the military crackdown.
Inexorably, the movement began increasingly to pose the question of power. In August, Jacek Kuron had noted: ‘One senses a terrible impatience, which is becoming more and more acute, a feeling that people can no longer tolerate what is going on. For a lot of people this means that the time has come to challenge and overturn the authorities’. And in September, Jan Litynski wrote: ‘At this moment, everybody is perfectly well aware that the authorities are not going to change by themselves, and that it is up to us to do it.’ However, at this moment the tactics adopted by the Solidarity leadership showed their inadequacy. Bujak, president of the union's Warsaw branch, pointed this out in August: ‘Our movement is growing weaker (...) Union members do not understand the tactics adopted by the leadership (....) I realised this when I went to a meeting in Ursus. It was only when I said that all this self-management activity was leading to taking power, that people understood and said OK (...) At the moment, people are waiting for a clear programme.’
In effect, the Solidarity leadership saw the building of self-management as their only means of winning economic power and enabling the country to emerge from the crisis. But the leadership was divided as to the concrete forms which, at a political level, an agreement with the government could take. Furthermore, the self-management movement was developing too slowly. Ten days before the coup d'état, Tygodnik Solidarnosc published a balance-sheet of the self-management experience. Jacek Merkel explained that the movement had affected only between 15 and 20 per cent of enterprises.
A confrontation became unavoidable, and Jaruzelski was thought more readily able to take it on than Solidarity. He anticipated a certain amount of support within the ‘silent majority’ and the mass of ‘don’t knows’, which had undeniably grown in number during those final weeks. A sizeable section of the population was worn out and fed up with the shortages of goods, as well as being disappointed in Solidarity and confused by government propaganda. Some began to look to the army for a restoration of order. For example, an opinion poll carried out by the union in Warsaw in mid-November, showed that 26 per cent of people supported the abolition of the right to strike being proposed by the central committee of the PUWP. And, compared with the previous opinion polls, this was an enormous number. Finally, Jaruzelski’s reservations (if reservations there were!) were quickly dispelled under the combined pressure of the hawks within the Party apparatus, and the Soviet Union.
According to official Soviet sources, the general had outlined his plan to representatives of the Warsaw Pact on the occasion of three meetings at the beginning of December. The first in Moscow, with Warsaw Pact defence ministers; the second in Bucharest, with ministers of Foreign Affairs; and the third in Prague, with the heads of the various press agencies.
‘Thus a three-tier military, diplomatic and ideological operation had been set in motion, as the first step towards martial law. Marshal Khulikov apparently had the twin tasks of overseeing the execution of the operation, and of giving orders to the two Soviet divisions stationed within Poland’s borders.’
At the political level, the military operation was conceived in two stages, with a view to aggravating dissension within the union. On 4 November, Jaruzelski began negotiations with the Church and with Solidarity, towards an agreement on national unity, but he insisted on putting forward positions that were unacceptable, and he used the mass media, of which he has a monopoly, to spread slanders. He had a precise objective: to make Solidarity publicly responsible for the breakdown of negotiations. On 22 November, as if to ally suspicions, he ended the deployment of the special military brigades which since October, had been testing the tension throughout the country. On 24 November Marshal Khulikov arrived in Warsaw, and on 27-28 November, the general announced to the plenary session of the central committee that the right to strike was to be suspended, and that he would be given exceptional powers. From that moment on, events moved very quickly, and the army went directly onto the offensive. The Solidarity leadership was caught up in the trap of negotiations on ‘national unity’, but they very soon realised the nature of the confrontation which was being prepared. On 3 December, in Radom, the union's presidium saw the coming clash as unavoidable, and on 11-12 December, the national commission adopted, virtually unanimously, a programme to counter it: an immediate general strike if parliament voted Jaruzelski exceptional powers; a referendum on self-management before 15 February; and free elections. But it was too late. In the night hours of Saturday-Sunday 12-13 December, the army began its wave of arrests and Jaruzelski proclaimed martial law...
So I would like to turn my attention to the question of the apparent disarray within the union’s leadership. I see its main cause in that extraordinary disjunction which has been revealed during the 16 months of struggle — between, on the one hand, the strength, the dynamism and the determination of this social movement, and on the other hand, the weakness and lack of strategic preparedness of its leadership. The two aspects of this paradox must be analysed as they interact with each other; so as to avoid false explanations, such as those which accuse the union of bureaucratisation, Catholicism or nationalism ...
The lack of political preparedness of the union’s leadership for the military clamp-down was recognised explicitly by one of Solidarity’s main leaders, Zbigniew Bujak, who has managed to go underground. In an interview with the New York Times, he says: ‘It was becoming clear that the authorities were preparing for a sizeable operation against the union (...) I would never have imagined that the whole national commission and Lech Walesa could be thrown into prison.’ Obviously, these illusions must be related to the power that Solidarity had acquired within society as a whole. No doubt, success had gone to the heads of the leadership. But, more importantly, these illusions were the result of the strategic orientation adopted by Solidarity. Consensus on this orientation was maintained up till the decisions taken in October 1981 by the Solidarity leadership to participate in a ‘social contract’ which was to compromise three inseparable elements: ‘an anti-crisis agreement’ which would be ‘the first proof of a cooperation between the authorities and society’; ‘an agreement on economic reform’, which would require a ‘cooperation in the direction of radical change’; and an agreement on the establishment of a self-managed republic which would outline ‘perspectives and means towards the democratisation of the institutions of public life’.
It was on this point, that the principal divergences emerged. The nub of the problem was how to define the precise content of the social contract. Given the level of people's mistrust of the PUWP, signed agreements tend to be seen in the same light as the peace treaties of yesteryear between white Americans and Indians. They are only put into force if the balance of power requires it. Furthermore, the choice of a number of priority objectives — economic reform, self-management, civil liberties, etc — increasingly led Solidarity's national leadership to seek to concentrate its forces and limit local conflicts. The latter far from being the work of undisciplined militants, were, most of the time, natural reactions to objective situations. Thus, ever since the Bydgoszcz events, the trade union leadership faced a permanent dilemma: either it took up an intransigent position in every single conflict, and in that event ran the risk of bringing about a national confrontation over quite minor issues; or it conserved its strength for dealing with those few basic points. In conditions such as these it is easy to understand the problems and difficulties which the union was experiencing in developing its policies, from the summer onwards. In a sense, the confrontational outcome initiated by Jaruzelski was unavoidable.
Discussions on the national commission and within the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee dwelt on the question of how to get out of this dilemma, and how, practically, to define the movement’s new objectives. People were more and more convinced that, without a firm position on the crucial question of power, it would not be possible to go forward and embark on an effective set of economic reforms. Two positions dominated this debate. The position of Jacek Kuron, supported by Lech Walesa, was conceived within a continuity of the union’s original orientation. It was a pragmatic conception. They should move forward step by step. The union should aim at reforming the system, and should remain within the framework of the Gdansk agreements. Poland’s geo-political situation could not be modified in the short term. Thus, the government would have to be forced into an agreement.
Concretely, Jacek Kuron envisaged the formation of a ‘Government of National Agreement’. During a debate in Warsaw in mid-September, he explained: ‘The problem is as follows: can we put forward a programme of gradual reform, and presume at the same time that power will remain in the same hands as at present? Is it not likely that such a reform would prove impossible? One has the impression that this is what life teaches us (...) Even if the realisation of a programme of reforms from the base were to prove impossible, we would have to gather the whole of society around this programme, because only in this way would everyone come to see the authorities as being responsible for the confrontation, and if it should come to conflict, the government would very soon lose, as happened at the time of the Bydgoszcz events. One could then set up a Government of National Agreement, which would set the date for elections, and would introduce reforms. (...) The USSR would be obliged to accept such an agreement. This government would be formed ‘‘in the heat of the moment’’ and would have the support of the Party, the church and the union.’...
The counter position, while not explicitly breaking with the general framework of pragmatism, felt that the only adequate response to the provocations and incompetence of the regime was to build the self-management movement, and to defend it by ‘active’ strike action. This tactic was included in the electoral platform of the leadership elected on the occasion of the Lodz regional congress, in July 1981. It contained a clearer vision of the government’s manoeuvres. Shortly after the coup d'état, one of the Lodz leaders, Zbigniew Kowalewski, outlined the position: ‘We were convinced that the regime was evolving in the direction of a military dictatorship, but we thought that it would be a long-term process. We thought that, as Solidarity went on growing and concentrating its forces, the regime would harden into the form of what we called a ‘‘military-police’’ dictatorship. Thus we did envisage the possibility of a coup d'état, but in a more distant future. We thought that the dictatorship would use every means in order to guarantee its legality, for example, by voting measures through parliament to support it: and in our view, any such voting in parliament would still be subject to the existing balance of forces. In short, we thought that we still had time left to prepare ourselves.’
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Finally, and this is probably the greatest weakness of this revolutionary process, the various political issues were governed by an overestimation of the extent of the regime’s crisis, and an overestimation of the movement’s strength. Following the army take-over of 13 December, any resurgence of the Polish revolution will require its leaders to undertake a clear reassessment of this question. The stakes here are high, inasmuch as this movement has raised hopes throughout the Socialist bloc, and any advance of democratic and self-managed socialism within those countries will depend, in large part, on the lessons that are drawn from the Polish experience.