Did Solidarity Push Too Hard?

By Thomas A. Sancton

Exiles and experts say no and blame the party's intransigence

"We protest the brutal breaking of workers' strikes by the police and army, the shooting of people, beatings, the internment of many thousands of people in prisons and camps." With those searing words, more than 100 prominent Polish intellectuals and artists last week denounced the martial law regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski in a petition sent to the nation's parliament and Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate.

In an open letter that circulated in Warsaw last week, ex-Communist Party Member Stefan Bratkowski, the former head of the Association of Polish Journalists, called for a "ceasefire" in the "civil war" launched by "the authorities against their own population."

Poland's Catholic bishops, meanwhile, drafted a strongly worded message of their own, to be read from 12,300 pulpits. Demanding an end to the military crackdown, and the liberation of some 5,000 Solidarity union members and sympathizers, the bishops warned the authorities that "infringement on the right of freedom leads to protests, rebellion and even to civil war."

It remains to be seen what effect such admonitions can have on a regime that cited protests, rebellion and impending civil war as its reasons for declaring martial law in the first place on Dec. 13. That argument could easily be dismissed as the rationalization of a cynical and brutal Communist regime. But the view that Solidarity went too far has been echoed by some respected Western observers and commentators.

"Change, too, has its limits," charged Bundestag Member Freimut Duve, a member of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democratic Party. "Lech Walesa should have recognized them long ago." Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stated that martial law "isn't bad" if it prevents civil war. George Kennan, a former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, suggested that Poland's latest tragedy might have been avoided if only Solidarity had been content "to rest for a while on its laurels" instead of pushing the "semiparalyzed Communist government" to the wall.

Even in Poland, some Solidarity sympathizers have expressed doubts about the wisdom of the union's course. Sitting in a comfortable country house near Warsaw, a group of affluent Polish farmers last week discussed the union's fate with a mixture of pity and reproach. "We are still for Solidarity," said one man, "but unfortunately they should have had more patience." His wife agreed: "It was too much, too fast."

Last week, as the martial law regime decreed the biggest consumer price hikes in Poland's postwar history and Jaruzelski prepared to outline his future programs before parliament, Solidarity activists operating abroad angrily defended the union from charges of extremism. Said Severin Blumstein, 35, a member of a Paris-based group of Solidarity exiles: "It's amazing! To have democratic countries question the right of other countries to that very same democracy they take for granted strikes me as a cynical viewpoint."

No one could deny that the union had made some tactical mistakes. The open letter that encouraged free union movements throughout the Soviet bloc last Sept. 9 was unnecessarily provocative. The hotheaded statements on "confrontation" by union leaders gathered in Radom on Dec. 3, including Walesa, proved to be a propaganda gold mine when authorities broadcast carefully edited tapes of the bugged meeting. Even more useful to the government was the resolution adopted at Solidarity's last session in Gdansk on Dec. 12, calling for a referendum on the competence of the Communist regime and a redefinition of Poland's military ties with Moscow.

Yet Solidarity's defenders insist, and most Western experts agree, that the preparations to declare martial law had been occurring long before these events. British diplomats and intelligence analysts believe that Jaruzelski decided to declare martial law within a week after he became party leader last October. Poland's former Ambassador to Tokyo, Zdzislaw Rurarz, said after defecting to the U.S. last month that he had been instructed in March 1981 to prepare for a declaration of martial law. That was just about the time of the Bydgoszcz incident, when police beatings of some union members threatened to spark a general strike until Walesa engineered a last-minute compromise. Says Piotr Naimski, a founder of the KOR dissident group and now a spokesman for the New York City-based Committee in Support of Solidarity: "The government decided after Bydgoszcz that there was no way to compromise with Solidarity and that the union represented a direct threat to its power."

Some analysts speculate that the government may even have infiltrated agents into Solidarity to encourage provocative actions and thus create an alibi for declaring martial law. But that theory is discounted by Piotr Gmaj, who heads a Solidarity exile organization in Zurich. Gmaj notes that Solidarity's leaders were all elected at the grass-roots level, where "everybody knows everybody else and knows who is to be trusted."

Even if no specific union action brought on martial law, it could still be argued that Solidarity's overall evolution made the crackdown inevitable. There is no question that as the months wore on, Solidarity took on a much more political role than the government or its own leaders originally envisaged. But that was not necessarily the result of union excesses.

Walesa and his fellow labor leaders had no intention of interfering with the government in the wake of the Gdansk accords that first recognized the union's rights in August 1980. Solidarity saw itself as a mass movement that represented Polish society and sought to make the authorities accountable to the people--particularly in the economic domain, where the government's failure was so spectacular.

What contributed most to the rising political tensions was not Solidarity's excessive ambition but the rapidly deteriorating economic crisis. Although the regime blamed that on the strikes, they in fact accounted for only 1.7% of all lost workdays in the first three-quarters of 1981. The main problem was that the government, alarmed by the near collapse of Communist Party authority, resisted all economic reform and refused to yield any real power during the stonewalling negotiations with Solidarity.

One sign of the government's bad faith was that it waited until after the crackdown to carry out its first significant economic "reform": price hikes of up to 400% on food and other necessities. Solidarity had previously agreed that subsidized food prices would have to rise, but the government had refused to grant what the union was asking in exchange: the right to monitor economic data. Says Andrzej Wolowski, who formerly directed Solidarity's international relations and now lives in Paris: "Things would not have got so tense politically if the government had accepted our practical suggestions. But they took them as a threat."

Could Solidarity have survived by being more moderate, consolidating its initial gains and accepting half a loaf? Probably not. There was no way a Marxist-Leninist regime could have tolerated an independent entity whose very existence challenged the party's monopoly of power. Accepting even a moderate Solidarity meant ceasing to be a Communist state. At the same time, Solidarity's creation unleashed aspirations in Polish society that were beyond anyone's control. Conflict was unavoidable.

The party's increasing disarray prevented it from either smashing Solidarity or reaching an understanding with the union. Finally the regime's only stable and disciplined institution--the military--had to step in and do what the party itself could not. As one West European diplomat in Warsaw puts it, "Solidarity had become the country, and the country had said, 'Enough!' There was no way to dominate it except through martial law."

"The only way to save the union," says Solidarity's Gmaj, "would have been to allow it to fall under Communist Party control, but that would have destroyed the essence of Solidarity." In the end, Solidarity remained true to its democratic values. And so, in the name of very different values, the regime had to strangle it.

--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Warsaw and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington with other bureaus

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Gregory H. Wierzynski, other bureaus

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