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

General strikes are like swords—once you take them out of the scabbard and fail to use them, they are no more use than useless hunks of iron. Wałęsa in effect demobilized the union… It deprived us of our basic weapon and thus became the source of our subsequent defeat. The authorities counted on this when they prepared the martial law operation of December 13.⁴⁰

Kiszczak told Andropov that, though Wałęsa might use aggressive language to appeal to Solidarity “extremists,” his thinking was relatively moderate. The main danger now came from Bujak, who was both “anti-Socialist and anti-Soviet:” “He is cleverer than Wałęsa and is closely linked with [the KOR leaders] Kurón and Michnik. The task of the [SB] agencies is to discredit him.”

“AT THE PRESENT time,” Kiszczak told Andropov, “the Roman Catholic Church does not represent a threat to the PUWP.” Milewski had devoted “immense efforts” to the agent penetration of the Church, and the SB was now well-informed about its mood and intentions: “Out of seventy bishops, good contacts are maintained with fifty. This makes it possible to bring influence to bear on the Catholic Church and to prevent undesirable moves.”⁴¹ The recent death of the 80-year-old Primate, Cardinal Wyszýnski, a friend of Solidarity and for over a generation a courageous defender of religious freedom, had come as an immense relief to the SB (and doubtless to the KGB):

The new Primate, [Cardinal Józef] Glemp, is not as anti-Soviet as his predecessor. Wyszyński enjoyed immense authority; his word was law. He was the object of a personality cult and his cult exceeded anything imaginable. Glemp is a different kind of man and there are undoubtedly possibilities of exerting influence on him.

Two problems, however, remained in Church-state relations. The first was the Pope, who—according to Kiszczak—was cleverly exploiting the situation in Poland to advance his anti-Communist policies in eastern Europe. The second problem was the moral authority of the Polish Church. The people looked on the Church, not the Party, as the “standard-bearer of morality.” “In the immediate future,” Kiszczak admitted, “the Party will not be able to change the attitude towards the Catholic Church.”

Andropov seems to have hectored Kiszczak rather less than most other Polish leaders he had met over the previous few years. But he ended their meeting in somber mood:

The class enemy has repeatedly tried to challenge the people’s power in the Socialist countries… But the Polish crisis is the most long drawn out, and perhaps the most dangerous. The adversary’s creeping counter-revolution has long been preparing for the struggle with Socialism.⁴²

Solidarity’s first national congress (held in two sessions from September 5 to 10 and from September 26 to October 7) provided further evidence of “creeping counter-revolution.” Its appeal on September 8 “to the working people of eastern Europe… who have entered the difficult road to struggle for a free trade union movement” was denounced by the SB as “a brazen attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of Socialist countries.”⁴³

Pavlov now seemed satisfied that Jaruzelski was prepared for “decisive measures” to end “the threat from Solidarity.” On September 29 he reported to the Centre that he had “advised” Jaruzelski on the line to follow at the plenary meeting of the Central Committee on October 18.⁴⁴ The first priority was to get rid of Kania, who, Pavlov reported, continued to pursue “a policy of conciliation” towards Solidarity. Having failed to secure Kania’s dismissal at the July Party congress, Moscow was determined to succeed at the October Central Committee plenum. The Centre must have been particularly outraged by Pavlov’s account of a secret briefing on Kania’s policy given by his supporter, Deputy Prime Minister Kazimierz Barcikowski, on October 2, 1981. According to Barcikowski, Kania was “disenchanted with the Soviet model of Socialism”: