Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
no-agenda encounter, ‘without thousands of assistants hovering over our shoulders, without the ever-present briefing papers and certainly without the press yelling at us every 5 minutes about “who’s winning”’ and whether or not the meeting was a success or failure. In fact, Bush added firmly ‘it would be best to avoid the word “summit”’ altogether. He hoped they could meet very soon but he did not want to put Gorbachev under any undue pressure.
By early August, to Bush’s satisfaction, Gorbachev had replied affirmatively to his proposal. But it would still take several weeks to sort out schedules and location.[107]
*
Meanwhile, change in the once glacial Eastern Europe continued at an astonishing pace. As before, Poland was in the vanguard. The logjam over the new post of president suddenly broke. On 18 July Jaruzelski announced that he would actually be a candidate. Next day the combined houses of parliament met and voted in the general unopposed, albeit after a good deal of arm-twisting of recalcitrant Solidarity parliamentarians by their leaders. Jaruzelski promised to be a ‘president of consensus, a representative of all Poles’. It was, of course, bitterly ironic that this diehard communist and decade-long suppressor of the trade union movement was now appointed Poland’s president in the guise of a ‘reformer’ through a genuinely free vote essentially by those he had previously imprisoned. Many of the Solidarity rank and file were livid. But their political leadership argued that this was the best possible result in order to advance freedom while preserving stability. At the same time Jaruzelski’s narrowest of victories (he gained the necessary majority by one vote) showed who had the real legitimacy and political strength in the land: the freed workers, Solidarity.[108]
The next step was to replace the caretaker government under Prime Minister Rakowski. According to the round-table agreement, Solidarity was meant to stay in opposition while a new communist-led government ran the country. But the dramatic election results of 4 June had made a mockery of that original springtime arrangement. In consequence, the communists now sought a grand coalition with Solidarity (not least to try to shrug off some of the responsibility for the deepening economic crisis). But Solidarity was split over this course; most of their members did not want to participate in a government in which Communists would rule. And in any case, they believed that the June election results had actually given them the mandate to govern the country.
In the event, on 2 August Jaruzelski nominated his fellow communist General Czesław Kiszczak as prime minister. But the latter failed to form a Cabinet – because the Communist Party’s allies, the Peasant Party and Democratic Alliance, refused to cooperate. And so it was Lech Wałęsa who announced that he would put together a Cabinet under the Solidarity banner. With this daring move Wałęsa went way beyond the round-table agreement. What was now a highly volatile political situation was compounded by growing instability in the first weeks of August, amid a new wave of strikes against rampant inflation and food shortages in the industrial south around Katowice and in the Baltic shipyards.
Jaruzelski was in a bind. Should he cave in and accept the accelerating pace of the political transition? Or should he stand firm and dissolve the legislature? New and unconstrained elections would undoubtedly spell total disaster for the communists. The US ambassador in Warsaw warned that Poland was now ‘right on the brink’. If the situation escalated, how long would ‘the decaying power elite fail to defend itself’? How to prevent a conservative backlash? Or even civil war?[109]
Jaruzelski agonised for several days. What tipped him against a hard line was the prospect of political and economic chaos and also quiet but firm pressure from Gorbachev and the Kremlin. Wałęsa also made crucial concessions – promising that Poland would remain within the Warsaw Pact and offering the communists the key ministries of Defence and the Interior, in other words control of the army and the police. Both of these were important gestures to Moscow – or at least to the Moscow of 1956 and 1968, just in case that Cold War past was not as dead as Gorbachev claimed. Under these conditions Jaruzelski decided to take the step that would push Poland’s political system beyond anything being attempted elsewhere in the Eastern bloc – a ‘partnerlike cooperation’ between party and movement. The communist president accepted a Solidarity prime minister.[110]
The editor of the opposition newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – applying the ‘one for us and one for them’ rule – had a month earlier also proposed this solution in an opinion piece he entitled ‘Your president, our prime minister’. And so the chalice passed to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a journalist and prominent Catholic layman since the 1950s. From the early days of Solidarity he had been a vital link between the progressive intelligentsia and the militant workers, and had worked as editor of Tygodnik Solidarność, the new Solidarity weekly, before being interned for a year under martial law. In 1988–9 he helped negotiate the end of the mass strikes and the construction of the round-table accords.[111]
On 24 August, Mazowiecki was confirmed prime minister by the Sejm, including the votes of most of the communist deputies, who thus indicated their willingness in principle to serve under him. He had become the first non-communist head of government in Eastern Europe since the early post-war years, yet nobody in the West was too jubilant. ‘A historic step,’ said a US State Department official, but ‘there is no sense of gloating here’ considering the immense economic challenges Mazowiecki faced.[112] In fact, the new Polish leader did not deny this, admitting ‘Nobody has previously taken the road that leads from socialism to capitalism.’[113]
On the plus side, it took only three weeks for the new Polish PM to present his government to parliament – where it was approved unanimously by 402 votes to nil, with thirteen abstentions. Yet it was perhaps symbolic that the sixty-two-year-old Mazowiecki suffered a dizzy spell while delivering his opening speech on 12 September, which forced him to take a break for nearly an hour. When he returned to the stage, to thunderous applause, he joked: ‘Excuse me, but I have reached the same state as the Polish economy.’ After the laughter had died down, he added ‘I have recovered – and I hope the economy will recover too.’ At the end, Mazowiecki stood at the prime minister’s bench ‘as a man of Solidarity’, arms raised in triumph, flashing the two-fingered Solidarity victory sign.[114]
Having fought each other for nearly a decade, Solidarity and communists were now working in uneasy collaboration, while most of the government bureaucracy simply remained in situ, adapting, often eagerly, to new goals and a fresh ethos. In place of the deadlocked triangle of Party–Solidarity–Church the country was now run by a novel configuration of forces: government, parliament and president, with Solidarity’s leading figurehead and strategist Lech Wałęsa looking on – effectively as president-in-waiting.
Although Poland’s ravaged economy had hardly begun to move from the Plan to the market, the first and crucial phase of political transition – guided but not defined by the round-table pact – had been concluded without conflict. There had been no civil war and no Soviet military intervention. This peaceful ‘refolution’ had a dynamic effect not only in Poland but also in other communist-ruled countries, signalling that the once inconceivable was now possible.
As events in Poland unfolded, the superpowers looked on as bystanders. To be sure, the State Department favoured a more adventurous and openly supportive policy. But the White House remained more guarded – placing the onus firmly on Warsaw. ‘Only the Poles can see that they succeed,’ Scowcroft told CNN when asked why the president was not rushing to offer the Poles more aid. ‘We can help, but we can only help if money goes into structures which can make it used properly.’ His message was clear: let’s wait and see. Bush felt it ‘important to act carefully and to avoid pouring money down a rat-hole’.[115]
As for the USSR, Gorbachev appeared to cling to the illusion that the ‘democratising socialism’ of Poland