U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, 1980–1981

10 Liberalization Infects the Party

Chapter 10: Liberalization Infects the Party From mid-April to about mid-July 1981, the level of confrontation between the regime and Solidarity was relatively constrained—certainly by comparison with the preceding nine months. To some extent this was result of the union’s tacit agreement to abide by Jaruzelski’s call for a strike moratorium in his 10 April speech to the parliament. It also was a reflection of increased sensitivity of the leaders on both sides to the risk that even relatively narrow confrontations could erupt into conflicts with potentially disastrous consequences. Equally important, however, was that both the party and the workers union were then grappling with internal challenges. Kania and Jaruzelski were struggling to contain a defiant reform movement in their party’s grass roots, while simultaneously preventing party reactionaries from exploiting the struggle for their own hard-line purposes. The status of Polish United Workers Party and the authority of its leaders had already been severely eroded by their demonstrable inability to rein in Solidarity. But before Kania and Jaruzelski could hope to rebuild the party to where it could undertake decisive measures, they had to stem the damaging centrifugal forces being generated by the party’s rebellious reformists and combative reactionaries. Solidarity, meanwhile, was organizing its own internal structure and preparing for its own elections. Heated debates were already underway within the union over how to define its leadership’s mandate for negotiating and making commitments for the rank and file. Even more fundamental was the question of how Solidarity would define itself—as a trade union focused on defending workers’ concerns, or as an acknowledged political organization with a proactive role in the formulation of social and economic policy and management of the economy. The pressures from this latter question would intensify through the summer, as the already dismal economy continued to decline. Both the party and Solidarity were preparing for their respective congresses . For the party it was to be an “extraordinary” congress, which had been called for back in the middle of the crisis of late 1980 for the express 153 154 U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland purpose of addressing the demonstrable failures in party policies and economic performance that had given birth to Solidarity. For Solidarity, it was to be its first “national” congress, and would be the first occasion where its operating statutes and rules and its identity as a political entity would be debated in such a forum. These congresses would shape the identity and character of the regime and the union that would confront each other later in the year. The reform effort within the party was spearheaded by what had become known as the “horizontal movement.” Its genesis was the effort by factorylevel party organizations to replicate the lateral coordination employed by Solidarity’s interfactory committees. A network among lower echelon party groups had begun to coalesce as far back as the fall of 1980, and had almost immediately begun pressing for a fundamental overhaul of the party election statutes. Its principal goal was to enable individual party units to put forward their own nominees and conduct their own elections for leadership posts at each echelon, rather than merely voting their approval of a list of candidates submitted from the top. A group of reformers quickly seized on this as the system that should also be applied for electing national party leaders. They argued that party organizations at individual enterprises should be empowered to nominate and elect their own delegates to assemblies at the regional level, and that these regional assemblies should then follow the same process to select delegates for a national congress. Under the same system, the national congress would be required to conduct open nominations and hold secret votes to elect a Central Committee and the top party leaders.1 On 15 April 1981, just as the storm over the Soyuz ’81 exercise was settling , the horizontal movement held a formal meeting to endorse a set of reform proposals for submission to the party’s upcoming congress. This gathering was held in Torun (about equidistant from Warsaw and Gdansk) and was attended by 750 delegates of Polish party organizations from at least eleven provinces. The delegates agreed on a package that included the earlier proposals for a bottom-up electoral system and horizontal links between party organizations, and also called for all delegates to the upcoming party congress to be elected by secret ballot from a list of nominees put...