The Darkness Descends

By William E. Smith

"Polish [is a] nationality [that is] not so much alive as surviving, which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking, hoping, and suffering in its grave, railed in by a million bayonets."

--Joseph Conrad, 1911

The silence of the bayonet fell on Poland last week. To a degree unprecedented in Europe since the end of World War II, a modern nation was sealed off from the outside world. In the icy cold of a savage winter, the country's telephone and telex lines were cut. What little news reached the West was smuggled out by travelers, or was broadcast over tightly censored Polish radio and television.

That news told an alarming story. At least seven people were killed in clashes with security forces, hundreds more were injured, as many as 50,000 were under arrest--and an entire nation of 36 million was being held virtually incommunicado by its own army. Every private telephone in the country was dead. Gas stations were closed to private cars. Flights were canceled. All travel, even within Poland, was banned. A 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew was in effect every night.

In Czechoslovakia 13 years earlier, communications had not been totally broken, so the world was able to watch and listen in horror as Soviet tanks rolled in to crush that country's brief flowering of freedom. This time, as the armed forces seized power in Poland, the Soviets were not visibly involved, at least not yet. But the Polish Communist government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski had taken a lesson from the Prague experience: the outside world would be given little chance to learn details of the takeover.

In the heady days of August 1980, the closed gate of the Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port city of Gdansk became a symbol of the spirit of Solidarity, the newly formed independent trade union movement. It was here that Lech Walesa, the movement's leader, first made his demands for economic and social reform. Months later, when Solidarity swept the country, a monument was erected at the gate to commemorate both the birth of the union in 1980 and the 45 Poles killed in the food riots of 1970. Last week, shortly after the army and police had broken a strike by shipworkers protesting martial law and the arrest of hundreds of Solidarity's leaders, the gate was closed again. In the shadow of the three soaring steel pillars of the new monument now stood an armored personnel carrier, a symbol of the million bayonets that seem forever poised against a surging nationalism. Jaruzelski had announced that the country would henceforth be run by a 21-member junta, the "military council for national salvation." He declared a "state of war" (or state of emergency) under which the trade union movement was suspended and civil liberties were curtailed. His army moved fast and effectively.

The first to be detained were hundreds of Solidarity activists, and virtually first among the first was Lech Walesa. Police knocked at his door at 3 a.m. Sunday. He refused to allow them in, demanding the presence of Gdansk Party Secretary Tadeusz Fiszbach, a noted liberal for whom Walesa had respect. As soon as Fiszbach arrived, Walesa gave himself up. He was then taken to the airport and flown to Warsaw, where, according to a government spokesman, "he is being treated with all the respect due the head of Solidarity." Out of his own choice or the government's, not a word has been heard from him publicly since he was seized.

The immediate pretext for Jaruzelski's action was Solidarity's growing support for rash proposals amounting to heresy in a Communist state, including a call for a national referendum on whether the government should remain in power. The union had also set Dec. 17, eleventh anniversary of the Gdansk food riots, as a day of national protest. But the government's massive military operation had been in preparation for a long time. Deployment of troops had begun at least a fortnight earlier. When authorities published a list of 57 dissidents who had been "detained," it was plain that the list had been drawn up in advance: three people on it were out of the country. (Not on the list but determined to protest the "flagrant and brutal" crackdown and to express his "solidarity" with Walesa: Poland's Ambassador to the U.S., Romuald Spasowski, who sought and was swiftly granted asylum along with his wife, daughter and son-in-law.) Last week, after the sudden crackdown, a Gdansk doctor said he realized at last why so many extra beds had been placed in the local military hospital the week before.

Many Poles had been fearing a violent reaction to Solidarity's growing militancy. "Operation Birdcage" is what they called the anticipated crackdown, in which the union's freer spirits would presumably be caged. Even Walesa, upon learning the crackdown had begun, angrily told Solidarity leaders in Gdansk: "Now you've got what you've been looking for."

In Jaruzelski's view, there was little choice but to impose martial law; he had to bring a halt to Solidarity's increasing demands. If the government failed to do so, he could see no way to stave off the final collapse of Poland's mismanaged, strike-hobbled economy. At the same time, he had to reassure the Soviets, who, no matter how reluctant they might be to intervene directly in Polish affairs, let it be known that they would do so if Solidarity was on the verge of seizing control of the state. Yet, by moving so forcefully against the union, whose 10 million members represent 28% of the Polish population, Jaruzelski could only have deepened the resentments that fueled Solidarity's growth and brought his country to the brink of civil war. Poland's Catholic bishops declared last week that "an entire nation" had been "terrorized by military force," and demanded the release of the Solidarity leaders. The army appeared loyal, but its ranks include large numbers of draftees who are sympathetic to Solidarity and sensitive to the country's problems. Only two months ago, just after Jaruzelski took over as Communist Party boss, Gdansk Party Secretary Fiszbach insisted to visiting TIME editors in Warsaw that a declaration of martial law was too dangerous even to contemplate. "I cannot imagine the aftereffects of such a course of events," he said. "Whoever even considers martial law does not take into account his responsibility for the destiny of the nation and the price that would have to be paid." In the weeks that followed, his colleagues evidently concluded that the price would have to be paid.

As Poland's week of darkness began, Jaruzelski set out to reassure his frightened countrymen. He spoke of law and order as his first objective, and he promised that the process of renewal that had marked the past 16 months would not be reversed. He insisted that Solidarity had merely been suspended, not abolished, and he declared that there would be "no return to the pre-August 1980 system of rule." To underscore that assertion, he ordered the detention of 32 members of the incompetent and scandal-ridden former regime, including deposed Communist Party Chief Edward Gierek. State television was filled with patriotic World War II films and other uplifting programming, such as an interview with a bemedaled old general who said he had known Jaruzelski since the Battle of Monte Cassino in World War II. (The man was mistaken; Jaruzelski fought in the Soviet army as it marched through Poland and on to Berlin. See box.) He sang the leader's praises and assured viewers that Jaruzelski was an honest soldier who did not have it in his nature to be a dictator.

Were the Polish people reassured? On the contrary, they were in shock and mourning. The queues at food shops, a familiar sight in contemporary Poland, had resumed. But the shoppers, their cheeks red from the deep cold (5DEG F in many places), were sullen. In the countryside, the only visible evidence of the nation's changed circumstances was the snow-muffled rumble of tanks and military trucks along the roads. But inside their houses, people were praying--and cursing. "I have lived through two wars," said a farmer north of Warsaw, "and now I am on my third. Just let them come get my family or my land!" One elderly woman in Warsaw observed, "I thought from the beginning that the Russians would do this. They hate Poles. They cannot bear to give us a little bit of freedom, a little bit of what's our own. They will starve us." Her husband replied, "It's a generational thing. The young went too far. It had to finish this way. When you're young, you don't see the dangers. I fought in the Warsaw Uprising, but I don't know what I would have done if I had been an old man at the time."

Some Poles went into hiding, moving every night from one place to another. A university professor who lives with a woman in Warsaw was hiking six miles back and forth every day to his own unoccupied house on the outskirts of town to keep the snow shoveled from his sidewalk. "If I don't do it, they'll think I'm hiding, and so they will start looking for me." Intellectuals have been particularly hard hit, arrested by the thousands. Some 40 Warsaw scientists narrowly escaped the roundup when one of them managed to alert a network of taxi drivers known to be Solidarity members. The cabbies picked up the scientists at their homes, according to a prearranged plan, and drove them to hiding places. On the streets, friends talked to one another while looking over their shoulders for soldiers. In their homes, people once again began to panic when someone knocked on the door at night. "We are back to 1951," lamented one Pole. "It will take us 20 years to rebuild."

The ban on travel and communications imposed special hardships. Rumors flourished--that Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Primate of Poland, had been arrested, that a top Solidarity leader had committed suicide--and could not be checked. Messages about sicknesses and funerals could not be sent. "I will die now," said a woman in Warsaw matter-of-factly. She had been scheduled for brain surgery in the U.S. this week, and now could not leave. At her side, her doctor sadly agreed. Because of the curfew, nurses and doctors could keep their hospitals open 24 hours a day only by taking up residence inside. Said one doctor: "This is worse than the German occupation. At least then we had telephones."

Partly because of the prevailing uncertainty and partly because of the communications blackout, public response to the crackdown seemed muted. The population was depressed and weary from the crises that had beset the country in recent months. Poles were also disillusioned by the disunity within Solidarity, traumatized by the newly imposed military rule, anxious over the lingering possibility of Soviet intervention and fearful for the fate of their national hero, Lech Walesa.

The government said that Walesa was not under arrest and was being well treated. It was widely believed he was in detention in a government guesthouse in Chylice, just south of Warsaw. The government spread stories that he was broken psychologically and weeping uncontrollably; Solidarity passed the word that he was "psychologically strong." One reason the government flew Walesa to Warsaw was to have him discuss the emergency with government officials. Reportedly, he refused to negotiate, on the grounds that he could not do so as long as his advisers were not at his side. On Monday he was visited by a church representative, Archbishop Bronislaw Dabrowski, who brought him a change of clothes. According to Solidarity, Walesa told Dabrowski that workers should avoid strikes, should use only nonviolent methods of protest and should "not allow the spirit of the nation to be crushed." Archbishop Glemp was said to have refused a request to meet with Jaruzelski unless Walesa was also present.

From underground, Solidarity called for a general strike. There was none, though it was known from the beginning that there were pockets of protest and resistance. As the shock of the crackdown began to ease, it became apparent that there were strikes and sit-ins throughout the country and that the government was determined to stamp them out before they spread. To the chant of "Fascists! Fascists!" from an angry crowd, soldiers removed a group of professors and students from the Polish Institute of Science. Grayuniformed police entered the Church of the Holy Cross, where Frederic Chopin's heart is buried, and confiscated antigovernment posters and leaflets. As they removed a picture of the late leader of the Polish church, Stefan Cardinal Wysznski, the taunts of spectators appeared to embarrass the soldiers.

On Monday and Tuesday nights, taking advantage of the prevailing curfew, military authorities broke up strikes at three big industrial plants in Warsaw. Some 60 armored cars carrying troops and riot police armed with fixed bayonets and tear gas entered the grounds of the huge Urus tractor factory, shooting into the air and quickly ending an occupation of the plant by workers. The next target was the Huta Warszawa steel mill, which had been occupied by 7,000 workers. On Tuesday the assembled throng had issued a statement demanding an end to martial law. "We are workers," the group declared. "We shall never be slaves." The document, signed only by "the strike committee," ended with the opening words of the national anthem: "Poland is not yet lost." That night the steelworkers got their answer. Troops stormed the plant, arrested a score of union leaders and told the rest of the hungry and frightened workers to go home.

A sit-in was also under way at the famous Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity. On Tuesday night a few friendly soldiers had shared coal fires with some of the workers, trying to stay warm in the bitter Baltic winter. But early the next day, special armored units and elite Red Beret forces arrived to seize the plant. As six helicopters circled overhead, troops attacked the occupied buildings. They met with only passive resistance from the workers inside. A crowd of spectators was kept to a distance of 500 yards and tear gas was sprayed in the area. At one point leaflets fluttered down from a window somewhere overhead, declaring: "If we give up, we shall bury our hopes for freedom for many years to come. Several thousand people cannot destroy 10 million."

By Thursday, the anniversary day that Solidarity had set for a national protest, Warsaw was generally calm, but military forces were again seen everywhere. Helmeted police using shields and batons dispersed crowds that gathered in Warsaw's Old Town and on the steps of the Church of the Holy Cross to talk and to sing the national anthem. By 7 p.m. the streets were empty. That night, in its first admission of casualties, Warsaw radio reported in somber tones that seven Poles had been killed and hundreds wounded in a clash between miners, fighting with picks and axes, and troops at a coal mine near Katowice, in southern Poland. In addition, it acknowledged, 160 militiamen and 164 civilians had been injured during continuing disturbances in Gdansk.

In the first days after the military takeover, Poles were surprised to find grocery shelves stocked with certain items, such as smoked fish and tomato juice, that had scarcely been seen for six months. "Where has it all been?" asked a woman shopper in Warsaw. A clue to that mystery was supplied by a Dutch truck driver, who had taken part in a 150-vehicle convoy to deliver donated food from Western Europe. He was directed to a Polish warehouse that he said contained "more butter than I've seen in my entire life." Poles generally welcomed the government's sudden bounty, which disappeared in a flash in widespread hoarding, but many considered the new supplies a cynical effort to win support.

In the meantime, Jaruzelski's efforts to impose authority were welcomed with restrained enthusiasm by the Soviet Union. According to some Polish government sources, Jaruzelski was pressed by the Soviets to make the move. About a month ago, according to these accounts, he was given an ultimatum by the Kremlin. Soviet representatives told him--and him alone--that the Polish party was no longer in control, that the Sejm (parliament) was running wild, and that if he did not act to restore order, the Warsaw Pact would do it for him. Though Jaruzelski emphasized last week that Poland remained a sovereign state, many people regarded the crackdown as a Soviet invasion by proxy. On Tuesday, some 30 ranking Soviet officers were observed disembarking from a military plane. Nonetheless, insofar as Western journalists could tell, the two Soviet armored divisions based in Poland were not involved and remained in their garrisons.

Indeed, some Western diplomats believe Jaruzelski acted strictly on his own when he declared martial law. The reasoning: Jaruzelski anticipated a strong Soviet reaction if he did not move decisively against Solidarity's increasing demands. In this view, Jaruzelski is essentially a Polish nationalist still striving to achieve a historic compromise acceptable to the moderates in Solidarity, the liberals in the Politburo, the church and the army.

In any case, the declaration of martial law neatly fitted Moscow's immediate needs. On the one hand, the Soviets have been alarmed at the dramatic rise of Solidarity and at the aspirations of freedom that it has encouraged. On the other, they have no wish to intervene themselves, lest this cause trouble elsewhere in Eastern Europe, alienate the governments and Communist parties of Western Europe, break the Soviet-U.S. arms negotiations, and lead to a cancellation of Western trade. They are well aware, for example, that the multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline deal they signed with West Germany this fall probably could not survive a Soviet invasion of Poland.

Last week the Soviet government quickly supplied Poland with badly needed food, though the Kremlin refrained from telling its own people of the action. Soviet citizens are anticipating their third disastrous harvest in a row and might respond ungraciously to news that Poland, which they consider to have overstepped the bounds of socialism, is almost literally being given bread from Soviet mouths. As one Soviet worker groused: "We send them our meat, we send them our oil, and all they want is more."

In the conventional view, Moscow will intervene in Poland only in the event of a general breakdown of law-and-order, or of a direct threat to the Warsaw Pact. If they should ever do so, in the opinion of Colonel Jonathan Alford of London's Institute for Strategic Studies, the intervention would be carried out "with a very great margin of superiority." His estimate is that the Soviets would bring in as many as 35 divisions, with around 500,000 men. But Alford believes the Soviet high command has counseled caution over Poland. One reason: even on so crushing a scale, the military is rarely able to produce a political solution.

One of the anomalies of the situation in Poland is that the crackdown was a purely military operation. Jaruzelski is the leader of the Polish Communist Party as well as the armed forces and the government, but in his speech to the nation last week he chose to call himself "a soldier and chief of government." There was no mention of the Communist Party. Politburo members were reportedly not told that martial law was being declared until two hours before the troops began to move. The Polish party is deeply demoralized after losing an estimated one-third of its 3 million members during the past year. It is distressing to the entire Communist world for a country's armed forces to become more powerful than its Politburo. That is a contradiction of Karl Marx's warning to avoid such "bonapartism" by ensuring that the party be always supreme. Thus the rebuilding of the party, and how strong he chooses to make it, is one of the interesting tasks facing Jaruzelski.

Once again, as in previous crises in Eastern Europe, the U.S. and its allies found that their power to influence events was sorely limited (see following story). President Reagan roundly criticized the Polish military takeover and declared that Solidarity was being suppressed with "the full knowledge and support of the Soviet Union." The U.S. announced that it would withhold $100 million of food aid, and refused to consider another $640 million worth of food requested by Poland unless the Warsaw regime eased its military rule. But Washington could do little else.

U.S. and Western European bankers were directly involved, however, in a Polish effort to stave off bankruptcy. Poland owes foreign banks and governments a total of $26 billion, the largest external debt of any East bloc country. The funds were borrowed in the last decade to finance a crash industrialization program and to import food. Last week Poland's foreign trade bank appealed to 23 leading Western banks for an emergency loan of $350 million to pay part of the $500 million in interest that is due this year. If the deadline is missed, banks could declare Poland in default, but that would seriously weaken some of the creditor banks and help tighten credit around the world. The bankers were not sure what to do, and any action would be painful. "After all," said a banker in West Germany, which is holding $4.5 billion in Polish loans, "you can not liquidate a country and distribute its assets."

In Italy, France and elsewhere, thousands of demonstrators turned out to protest against Jaruzelski's declaration of martial law. Pope John Paul II declared, "The church has received with grief the news of the breaking off of the dialogue," and asked both sides to try again to find a solution. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had been visiting East Germany at the time of the Polish crackdown, emphasized Bonn's policy of "noninterference." Later he told the Bundestag, "We Germans should not set ourselves up as judges over the Poles." At least, he added, "not yet." The British government tended to be critical of the Solidarity leadership for overreaching, and to be sympathetic to Jaruzelski's need to avoid Soviet intervention. French President Franc,ois Mitterrand took a stronger line, asserting that "the loss of public and individual liberties is in every case to be condemned."

By the weekend the situation in Poland was getting ever more strained. In Silesia, an unknown number of miners were said to be occupying their mine shafts, and threatening to blow up the mines if the security forces should try to remove them. There were unconfirmed reports that ten striking miners had been clubbed to death and 56 shot dead in bitter fighting. In Gdansk, the clashes between shipyard workers and the authorities continued. Throughout the country there were reports of "Italian strikes," in which employees show up at their jobs but only pretend to work.

A plea for calm was issued by the government in Walesa's name, but few Poles seemed to believe that he had authorized it. Informal cells of worried activists were forming in the capital. One such group was operating out of a bakery in downtown Warsaw. If any of the cell's dozen members failed to show up at least once every three days, the sales clerk was to alert one member, who would pass the word along.

There was no way of estimating how much further the government planned to carry its crackdown. Late in the week some foreigners were allowed to fly out of the country, and there was at least one vague sign that Poles themselves might some day be permitted to leave: the government's new currency regulations introduced a limit ($300) on the amount of money citizens could take with them on foreign trips. In addition, the sale of alcololic beverages was resumed after a week of prohibition. Many factories remained closed. So did the universities and any other institutions that might prove troublesome. Even PAX, the pro-government organization of Catholic laymen, was dissolved. Observed an American diplomat of Poland's military rulers: "They have pulled it off with stunning efficiency. But there is an irony here. What they have succeeded in doing is to shut Poland down, to bring it to a halt. The real challenge is just the opposite, to get the country moving again. And, as a result of what has happened, this will now be harder than ever to accomplish."

The hopeful view was that the military might yet manage to restore order without heavy bloodshed and then, after a period of easing tensions, try to reach a new understanding between the government and Solidarity. The church, a powerful and respected force in a nation that is more than 90% Catholic, would have to serve a mediating role. Jaruzelski might succeed with such a plan if he could somehow convince his countrymen that his real goal is one of national reconciliation and that his moves staved off a worse fate, namely a Soviet invasion. The drift last week, however, was in the direction of rising chaos, and the government appeared to be deeply concerned. When Warsaw radio first announced the casualties at Katowice, it described the killing of Poles by Poles in words of anguish. "Let us lower our heads in silence to honor the victims of yet another Polish tragedy," declared the announcer. "Let the bloodshed in Silesia cause the provocateurs to sober up and make the madmen realize that the road to confrontation leads nowhere." Some diplomats in Warsaw were convinced that those words had been written by Jaruzelski himself out of an obvious worry that his unseasoned young army might lose control of the situation. As Poles faced their bleakest Christmas since World War II, a dreadful stillness settled across the land. The days seemed colder, the nights darker, the streets emptier. The quiet was broken only occasionally, most often by the rumble of armored personnel carriers. But every so often, as it has for centuries, a familiar anthem would rise from some church, apartment building or worker's cottage: "Poland is not yet lost..." --By William E. Smith. Reported by Roland Flamini/Bonn and Gregory H Wierzynski/Warsaw with other bureaus

With reporting by Roland Flamini, Gregory H. Wierzynski

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