The Triumph of Broken Promises by Fritz Bartel

Author:Fritz Bartel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674275812
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2022-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

On August 31, 1988, the eighth anniversary of the Gdańsk Accords that had brought Solidarity into legal existence, Poland’s ruling and working classes found themselves face to face once again. Minister of the Interior Czesław Kiszczak sat down with Wałęsa and invited the Solidarity leader to take part in negotiations about launching a roundtable. At the two sides’ first official exploratory meeting on September 16 in the Warsaw suburb of Magdalenka, Kiszczak made the party’s reason for exploring a compromise abundantly clear. The roundtable could, he said, “respond to and eventually correct the economic model, which should ensure that reforms are effectively realized, achieve economic equilibrium, and resolve the debt issue. The success of the economic reform program . . . depends upon its understanding and social acceptance.” Wałęsa agreed that was necessary “to save the country from collapse,” but he quickly made his own conditions clear: “union pluralism and the legalization of Solidarity.”62 This was still not something the party was ready to do, so the two sides quickly gridlocked over the nature of Poland’s social and political future.

Like Western institutions and the Catholic Church before it, Solidarity now had an opportunity to exercise its own power of omission. The union would only endorse the government’s economic plans once the Communist Party had met its political conditions and legalized its right to exist. And like Western institutions and the church before it, the question confronting Solidarity’s leaders was whether they would accept anything less than the fullness of their demands before endorsing the party’s program. Over the fall of 1988, it became clear they would not. Like Western institutions and the church, Solidarity, too, would hold the party’s feet to the fire until the communists agreed to all their demands.

At first, this principled obstinance produced few results. Within weeks, the Magdalenka talks broke down over the issue of trade union pluralism, and it appeared the idea of a roundtable was to be short lived. At the end of September, Rakowski assumed the role of prime minister and announced his intention to form a government of national unity by inviting members of the opposition to become government ministers. Hoping to increase pressure on the party to accept Solidarity’s demands, every opposition member turned Rakowski down. Rather than feeling pressure to come to terms with the opposition, however, he proceeded undeterred with the state’s most spectacular move against Solidarity since martial law: on October 31, he closed the Gdańsk Shipyard, the union’s birthplace, on account of unprofitability.63

It was a move laden with intention and significance. Over the course of the 1980s, Rakowski had watched with increasing dismay as successive Polish governments wilted, in his judgment, before the challenge of imposing economic discipline. By 1988, he was the premier advocate within the party apparatus of strengthening and legitimizing the state’s power for the express purpose of breaking promises. “The workers have become our enemies,” he confided to his diary in the midst of the August strikes. “Our ammunition is weak. We tolerate illegal strikes.

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