A central matter, here, was that the Pope was a Pole. Karol Wojtyła was elected on 16 October 1978, having been Archbishop of Cracow, the most religious city in Poland. He had risen from the pious lower-middle class, and brought enthusiasm to everything (he was even in his youth a good amateur actor). He knew his Communists, and told people, even in 1946 when he was just a parish priest, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll finish themselves off.’ But he was also a good tactician: the formidable Cardinal Prince Sapieha promoted him, and when he went to Rome, though he did not like the changes in the Church that came with Vatican II, he was careful not to make a personal issue of things. He was also a considerable intellectual, very well-read in Catholic philosophy and able, when he invited the world’s philosophers to the Vatican, to hold his own. Other Popes before him had either been deeply troubled about the modern world, not really knowing what to do, or perhaps too keen to go along with it. John Paul II — the name he took — had no doubts. He really came from the triumphalist world of the later nineteenth century, when Leo XIII, with Rerum Novarum in 1891, had made an effort to reconcile Catholicism with socialism. Here, Leo had quoted Aquinas from the thirteenth century — when ‘capitalism’ had started — and tried to identify a Christian answer. The Conservative Party in England belonged in this context, and the Christian Democrats in Italy and Germany were exemplars; perhaps, even, the most interesting question in France is why there never was an equivalent. Pope John Paul certainly had the measure of the modern world, and had a good idea as to how it might be managed. For instance, he did not bother very much with the media, and had his chauffeur read out a fortnightly summary of the press in the back of the car. He did not bother very much about the secular pieties, such as democracy, which he probably associated with ugly women and uneatable food. However, he had a wonderful sense of timing, of stage presence (much admired by Sir John Gielgud), and a papal appearance was a memorable occasion. In Poland the audiences were in hundreds of thousands. It was the man and the hour. On 13 May 1981 Mehmet Ali Ağca tried to kill the Pope. There was a Bulgarian connection; Ağca himself was a Turkish Fascist who had already murdered the editor of a Turkish left-wing newspaper and had mysteriously escaped from his prison. The circumstances have never been explained, even by Ağca himself after long years of incarceration: he seems to have lost his mind. But it would not have been stupid on the KGB’s part to want rid of this Pope: for he did destroy them.
Communist Poland now disintegrated, at any rate down to its most basic parts. Gierek had a heart attack, was even imprisoned for a year and in the event he died in 2001 aged not far off a hundred. He was succeeded by a nonentity, Stanisław Kania. Communist Poland was now down to its essence, the army, in the shape of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. On 9 December 1981 Marshal Viktor Kulikov, as head of the Warsaw Pact forces, moved on Warsaw. On the 12th, at night, roadblocks were set up, borders were sealed, and special troops moved on the telephone exchanges with long axes to cut the wires abroad. At 6 a.m. on came the general, national anthem to the fore, sternness of gaze, while tanks patrolled the streets outside. It was a military coup. In military form, Jaruzelski was almost a fossil of the Kołakowski generation. It was not that he believed in Communism, but he did believe that the Poles must find a method of living with Russia, that the great mistake of the country’s history was to fail to do so. A good part of the aristocracy had thought the same, sometimes with a corrupt side, in the Convention of Targowice in the age of Catherine the Great (1792). Some priests at that time had behaved in a suicidally nationalist manner. Pope John Paul was determined not to let this happen again: the Church would this time have a strategic sense. He managed matters in Poland. He had gone there in May 1979, to an audience of 400,000 in Plac Zwyciestwa, and through Cardinal John Krol in the USA he had a good contact with Reagan. This Pope was not at all popular with the media, but the morning Mass in the Vatican was crowded as never before. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. This time round, a million people turned up for the Black Virgin at Częstochowa, and some pilgrims betook themselves there from Warsaw on their knees. The Politburo in Moscow were apoplectic. They had Afghanistan on their hands, and no-one wanted to repeat the experience of Prague in 1968 let alone Budapest in 1956. The only hope was that the Poles would themselves do something.
In September-October 1980 there were agreements of the government with Solidarność, in the context of a strike threat, and coal output going down by 90,000 tons and inflation at 12 per cent. In mid-January 1981 Jaruzelski took over the government — a weird figure, be-corseted because of lumbago, and wearing dark spectacles because of eye problems that went back to the privations of resettlement in 1940. He did ask Brezhnev for troops but the entire Politburo voted against this: he would have to do it on his own. Nine million Poles were now in Solidarność. On 3 April 1981 he and Kania, the Party chief, by now, as was solemnly recorded in Politburo minutes, a very serious drunk, went to Brest-Litovsk. Solidarność held a conference in the autumn and there were Soviet descents on Warsaw — the head of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, and even the minister of foreign affairs, Andrey Gromyko. The Communist Party sacked all but eighteen of the Central Committee and Gierek was the scapegoat as the economy now crashed: there was not even tea to be had at hotel bars in Lublin. By November 1981 matters were in place for a declaration of martial law. A colonel, Ryszard Kuklinski, told the Americans. Jaruzelski took over the Party and tried to have Solidarność in a subordinate role, which Wałęsa refused; on 13 December 1981 WRON, the national security council, of fifteen generals and a cosmonaut took over. Wałęsa was put in a comfortable villa with his wife (seventh time pregnant) and apologetic generals. It had been Gomułka’s and he was there for seven months. There was no European reaction — quite the contrary, as Claude Cheysson even said, ‘socialist renewal’ was at stake. There were problems as soldiers took over the mines and the Seym produced a huge reform package that meant decentralization, etc., but it led nowhere. There were over 10,000 internments, and over 150,000 ‘prophylactic discussions’ but the overtones were farcical. If you lifted the hotel telephone you were told ‘Rozmowa kontrolowana’, meaning that someone was listening. That the tape was old and wheezing did not inspire fear, and conversations with the Polish intelligentsia anyway consisted of funny stories.