Those Solidarność leaders who had slipped through the net on 13 December 1981 had organised an underground leadership, and gradually dissident life resumed in time-honoured ways. Radio Solidarność went on the air from clandestine studios, and underground presses went into action all over the country. They would publish at least 1,700 different papers and periodicals and about 1,800 books, often in large print runs, between 1982 and 1985. Literary and artistic activity flourished, often under the umbrella of the Church, which provided venues, facilities, means of communication and even cash. It also provided a vital link with individuals and organisations abroad which were sending aid of every kind and materials such as paper and printers’ ink and machines.
Most of those detained, including Wałęsa, had been released by the beginning of 1983, and in July of that year a general amnesty was announced. Those, like Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik, held on charges of attempting to overthrow the state, were not brought to trial. But this did not reflect any change of attitude. Soon after being released, Wałęsa was accused of fraud and tax evasion, and he was harassed by the police. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October of that year, he was forbidden to collect it and the Polish government sent a note of protest to the Norwegian government.
The security services had been expanded, and by 1983 employed more people than they had in Stalinist times. In November 1985 up to a hundred senior academics were dismissed in a purge of the educational system. Lesser mortals were bullied, beaten up or murdered. The security services also vastly expanded their pool of collaborators, putting pressure on people who had been caught committing some minor offence, or who simply had a past, to spy and report.
Life under these conditions became unbearable for many, and increasing numbers escaped to the West, in stolen planes, in boats and a multitude of other means. The suicide rate rose by nearly 40 per cent.
In June 1983 the Pope paid a second visit to his homeland. He reproved Jaruzelski, and at an open-air mass outside Katowice he told a crowd more than one million strong that to form a trade union was a fundamental human right. The security services responded with a campaign of low-level harassment of the Church. Crucifixes were removed from public places and priests roughly handled. Several were murdered. Only in one case was the murder pinned on the security services, and on 27 December 1984 three militiamen were tried for killing Father Jerzy Popieluszko.
That it should have come to this was a symptom of changes taking place outside Poland. Jaruzelski had done everything to bring Poland back under the control of Moscow, and to normalise the situation, a process he hoped would be concluded with elections to the Sejm in October 1985 and the release of all political prisoners the following year. But by then things had moved on in Russia, in an unexpected direction.
Leonid Brezhnev, on whose behalf Jaruzelski had conducted his clampdown, had died in November 1982. He had been succeeded by the KGB chief Yurii Andropov and then, briefly, by the hard-line Konstantin Chernenko. But in March 1985 the reins of power in the Kremlin were taken up by Mikhail Gorbachev, who, faced with a collapsing economy, a losing position in the arms race and a vigorous anti-Soviet alliance led by Ronald Reagan, initiated a twin policy of
In short, Jaruzelski’s boss had gone soft, and this undermined his own position in Poland. He had always justified his actions by presenting them as the lesser of two evils, since they supposedly prevented a Soviet invasion and serious bloodshed. But with reforms being implemented in Russia, the bottom dropped out of this argument and with it the only pillar of his legitimacy.
Jaruzelski, now head of state, controlled not only the army, but also, through his Interior Minister General Czesław Kiszczak, the security apparatus. He had elbowed aside the Party in 1981 in order to carry out his clampdown and ruled through a Military Council of National Defence (WRON) while the Party set about purging unreliable and revisionist elements and reordering its ranks. But the Party had been so thoroughly demoralised that it was in no position to reassume its ’leading role’, even if Jaruzelski had allowed it to.