The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

In our view, so long as our friends [the SB] remain fearful of damaging the development of relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the Vatican and between state and Church, they will not display great initiative in implementing the measures which we propose. Officers in our Centre and in the [Warsaw KGB] mission will need to display some tact and flexibility in order to find ways of solving the task before them.³⁵

Moscow’s fears that the Polish Politburo lacked the nerve to confront the challenge to its authority were heightened by its apparent capitulation to working-class discontent. Sudden rises in food prices in the summer of 1980 sparked off a strike wave which gave birth to the Solidarity trade union movement under the charismatic leadership of a hitherto unknown 37-year-old electrician from Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa. The interior ministry informed the KGB mission in Warsaw that it had established an operations center, headed by Stachura, the deputy minister, to direct police and SB operations against the strikers, monitor the situation and produce daily reports. To judge from a report forwarded to Moscow, the Center was remarkably pleased with its own performance: “The operational staff displayed a high degree of conscientiousness and discipline, and an understanding of their duties; combat-readiness was introduced; leave was canceled; and round-the-clock work was introduced.” While not claiming “complete success,” the operations center claimed to have limited the scale of the strike movement by “eliminating” their printing presses and breaking links between protesters in different parts of the country. In addition, “Attempts by anti-Socialist forces to establish contacts with the artistic, scientific and cultural intelligentsia, in order to enlist their support for the demands of the strikers, were cut short.”³⁶

The reality, however, was somewhat different. The strikers succeeded in creating inter-factory strike committees to coordinate the protest and dissident intellectuals played an important part in advising them. The final judgment of the KGB mission in Warsaw was in stark contrast to the efforts by the Interior Ministry to defend its performance. The SB, it reported, “did not recognize the extent of the danger in time or the hidden discontent of the working class.” And when the strike movement began, both the SB and the police were unable to control it:

The blame lay chiefly with the leadership of the Interior Ministry, and in particular with Minister Kowalczyk and his deputy Stachura… When the strikes intensified in the coastal region, Kowalczyk simply lost his head… In the opinion of the KGB mission, it is time to replace Kowalczyk and Stachura with other officers.³⁷

On August 24 Aristov sent Moscow the alarming news that the deputy prime minister, Mieczysław Jagielski, was negotiating with Wałęsa and the strike leaders.³⁸ Next day, the Soviet Politburo set up a commission headed by Suslov, its chief ideologist, to monitor the Polish crisis and propose remedies.³⁹ On August 27, at the Pope’s instigation, the Polish bishops approved a document that explicitly claimed “the right to independence both of organizations representing the workers and of organizations of self-government.” Confident of the Pope’s backing, Wałęsa was now convinced that the government had little choice but to give in.⁴⁰

The Polish government privately agreed. On August 27 the leading members of the Polish Politburo met Aristov to try to persuade him that the partial disintegration of the PUWP and the hostility to it of much of the Polish people had created “a new situation:”