He Dared to Hope

Anyone could read him at a glance. When things were going well, when it seemed for a while that the movement he led would brighten and liberate the lives of his fellow Poles, the face that grew so familiar in 1981 radiated delight: delight in his crusade, delight in his vision of the future, delight in being at the center of it all. In those moments, he held nothing back. But when things began to go wrong, when the tensions started to rise and the future he saw began to recede, the face grew heavy. The familiar walrus mustache sagged and the brown eyes turned weary. Again he held nothing back, and perhaps he could not if he tried. Lech Walesa is a man of emotion, not of logic or analysis. So was the movement, which he all but lost control of in the end, guided more by hope and passion than by rationality. That was the crusade’s strength—and its weakness.

What had begun as Poland’s year of liberty ended dramatically in violence, bloodshed and repression. The beleaguered government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, pushed to the wall by Walesa’s challenging Solidarity union, confronted with total economic collapse, and pressured by the furious Soviets, struck back in the classic Communist fashion. Its minions came for Walesa at 3 a.m. at his apartment in Gdansk, the gray Baltic seaport whose windswept shipyards had given birth to Solidarity in August 1980. They hustled him aboard a flight to Warsaw and then held him in a government guesthouse south of the city. They cut off communications with the outside world and imposed martial law. While the people slept, olive-drab tanks and armored personnel carriers moved through the snow-filled streets to take up positions in cities and towns across the country.

At 6 a.m., Jaruzelski went on the radio “as a soldier and the chief of the Polish government,” to announce that the nation was under martial law. He later repeated the grim message on national television, dressed in full military uniform with the white Polish eagle prominently displayed behind him. The “growing aggressiveness” of Solidarity’s “extremists” in the midst of an acute economic crisis, said Jaruzelski, had forced him to make his repressive moves “with a broken heart, with bitterness.” He assured Poles that military rule would be temporary and that the process of “renewal” launched by Solidarity would be resumed once disorder had been curbed. And nobody believed his assurances. Months of Poland’s desires, months of Poland’s dreams had reduced themselves to one new, pervasive, overwhelming condition: fear. Freedom and self-determination had been the goal through the inspired days of 1981. Now the goal was survival.

The crackdown had been harsh, fiercely and unexpectedly harsh. Military authorities rounded up thousands of Solidarity members, dissidents, intellectuals, artists and some 30 former government officials, including ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek. Tanks ringed factories and mines, and soldiers and police used force to clear out resisting workers, leaving at least seven dead and hundreds injured when miners in Katowice fought back with axes and crowbars. The shock was doubly traumatic because in the preceding months Poles had won more freedom than any other nation in the Soviet bloc. The country had developed a thriving intellectual and cultural life. People felt free to criticize the government openly; so, in fact, did some party members. Then, literally overnight, the new freedoms disappeared.

Behind the Polish military move loomed the shadow of the Kremlin. Indeed, if the government of General Jaruzelski had not imposed the crackdown, the Soviets certainly would have. The presence in Warsaw of high-ranking Soviet officers, including Marshal Viktor Kulikov, even suggested a direct Soviet role in planning what amounted to an invasion by proxy. For more than a year, the Kremlin had made it clear that it would not indefinitely tolerate the development of a union movement that could challenge a Communist government as directly as Solidarity had—a movement that was calling, in effect, for government by consent of the governed.

Thus, as 1981 came to a close, the courageous little electrician from Gdansk stood out not only as the heart and soul of Poland’s battle with a corrupt Communist regime, but as an international symbol of the struggle for freedom and dignity. Both as a newsmaker in his own right and as a representative of millions of Poles striving for a better life, Lech Walesa is TIME’S Man of the Year.

There was almost a tragic inevitability about the whole sequence of events that ended with Poland’s night of the generals. The leading characters in the nation’s drama seemed to be following a script for a catastrophe that both Walesa and Jaruzelski could see coming, that neither wanted—and that neither could avoid. For 16 months, Solidarity and the government had been locked in a struggle for control of the country’s destiny, while the leaders of Poland’s Roman Catholic Church, that age-old bastion of nationalism, appeared like a Greek chorus to intone warnings and admonitions to all.

The nation tottered on the verge of total economic collapse.

Not since the disaster of Germany’s Weimar Republic in the ’30s had a modern industrial state faced a peacetime economic failure of such catastrophic dimensions. As the economy faltered, the shortages of food, clothing and other basic necessities made queuing an increasingly exhausting and frustrating way of life, an ordeal made all the more cruel by the onset of an unusually harsh Polish winter. In the end, Solidarity and the government were unable to reach an accommodation as the crisis deepened.

The Polish experiment showed that a Communist government can be forced to make some reforms, but that it cannot give up a substantive measure of control without the fear of losing it all. Solidarity’s hope that a totalitarian Marxist system could be made accountable to society proved to be an illusion, evidence that a Communist society cannot tolerate freedom as it is known in the West. Walesa and his movement had made a travesty of Communism’s pretensions in the eyes of the world. An authentic proletarian revolution had risen, just as Marx had predicted, only to be put down by the guns of the oppressor class: the Communists themselves. However Solidarity’s revolution may ultimately run its course, the movement brought the heady taste of a new life to the Poles. That memory will die hard, if at all. Nor will the world forget the lessons in courage displayed by the millions of Polish workers who were inspired by Lech Walesa.

Other people and events commanded their share of attention during 1981 (see following story). Ronald Reagan, whose sweeping electoral victory made him TIME’S choice as the Man of the Year in 1980, started a revolution in domestic policy that curbed a Federal Government which had been growing without restraint since the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the ’30s. Reagan also had his failings. He had an uncertain touch on foreign policy and he made the astonishing discovery that his economic policies were projected to leave the U.S. with a $100 billion budget deficit in fiscal 1982.

In a year marked by widespread political violence, assassins shot a U.S. President, a Pope and a Nobel laureate. The first two victims recovered. The third, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, died in a lash of bullets, casting a shadow over the cause of Middle East peace that he had courageously espoused. That turbulent region of the world was further shaken by the aggressive acts of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor; attempted to destroy a Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Beirut, killing 300, mostly civilians; and in effect annexed the Golan Heights.

U.S.-Soviet relations grew more tense as the Reagan Administration adopted a hard-line approach to its dealings on virtually every issue with the Kremlin and with Communism worldwide. As the Administration talked sternly, a powerful movement swept through Western Europe in opposition to the planned deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in NATO countries. The antinuclear crusade threatened NATO’S solidarity against the Warsaw Pact nations. Urged on by the Europeans, the U.S. met with the Soviets in Geneva on Nov. 30 to begin their long-awaited talks on mutual reductions of their medium-range missiles.

For Americans, the most moving moment of the year was the return of the 52 U.S. hostages who had been held in Iran for 444 days. The most reassuring moment occurred on April 12, when the space shuttle Columbia roared triumphantly into orbit, trailing behind a fiery, orange-and-white plume—and all doubts about U.S. supremacy in space technology. The most delightful moment for Britons, and for about everybody else, came when a demure 19-year-old with glowing cheeks and feather-swept blond hair said yes to the future King of England. The spectacular wedding of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince Charles lifted hearts everywhere.

None of these developments in 1981, however, equaled the drama of Poland’s triumph and tragedy. At the center of the Polish revolution was one of history’s more improbable heroes. With a double chin, a bit of a paunch, and a height of only 5 ft. 7 in., Lech Walesa, 38, hardly has an imposing physical presence. His working-class Polish is rough and often ungrammatical; his voice, perhaps from years of heavy smoking, is hoarse and rasping. His speeches frequently are riddled with mixed metaphors and skewed analogies; Solidarity’s leaders admit that Walesa (pronounced Vah-wen-sah) is more intuitive than intellectual. He rather defiantly claims that he has never read a serious book in his life.

Yet Walesa got through his message of hope to his countrymen. Said a Warsaw journalist: “Sometimes he doesn’t even make any sense, but he is always reassuring. He energizes people.” He could work a crowd like an actor onstage, never reading a speech—not even when addressing the Pope—and never speaking too long, stabbing the air with his oversize hands, making all the right gestures with almost flawless timing. His real strength as a speaker was an ability to reduce complex issues to simple words and images that everyone could understand. Said one Solidarity official: “He knows his audience. He can sense what they want, and almost always he is right.”

Walesa showed little patience for the details of union organization or the niceties of parliamentary procedure. He loved to barnstorm the country, arguing, cajoling, sitting up half the night with workers while the air turned blue with cigarette smoke. At the podium, and at the bargaining table, where the arguments with government officials stretched wearily on for hours, he was quick and voluble, and guided by sure instincts. As his fame and power grew, he was amused and sometimes delighted by his celebrity status, whatever his disclaimers. There was, in fact, more than a touch of the demagogue in him. When his policies were opposed by other union leaders, he would sometimes threaten to take his case directly to the rank and file, or even to quit. “He is like De Gaulle of France in that regard,” says former Solidarity Spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz.

There was something to that. Like De Gaulle, Lech Walesa was a man guided by faith in himself and his destiny: he had no qualms about speaking for the 10 million members of Solidarity. He was certain that he knew what they—what the country—wanted. “We eat the same bread,” he would tell the crowds. An urban worker with rural roots, he was, as he claimed, a son of the people. Lech Everyman. Reflecting on his leadership role last month, he told TIME: “As a believer, I think this was my mission. This is the way fate threw me into it.”

The son of a carpenter, he was born in a clay hut during the Nazi occupation in the village of Popow, between Warsaw and Gdansk. His father, Boleslaw, was conscripted by the Nazis to dig ditches during the war and died in 1946 from the exposure and beatings he suffered. His mother, Feliksa, seemed to have the most effect on Walesa. The parish priest remembers her as “the wisest woman in the parish. She always had to be the most important person around and was a fantastic organizer. Lech is an extension of his mother and even looks like her. He has the same face, size, build and smile.”

Walesa was only an average student at his parish grammar school. Ironically, he got his worst marks in a subject that now deeply concerns him: history. One schoolmate remembers him as a showoff, “always swimming out to the farthest point of the lake.” At the state vocational school in Lipno, where he learned the electrician’s trade, Walesa was reprimanded several times for smoking in the dorm, but he is also remembered as a good organizer. By his own account, Walesa early had a knack for taking command. “I had something in me that made me the leader of the gang,” he says. “I was always the leader of the class, I was always the leader of the hooligans, the leader of the choirboys. I was always on top.”

In his treatise on heroes and hero-worship, Thomas Carlyle wrote that “Universal History is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” A lowly worker like Walesa would never have suited Carlyle’s elitist view of greatness. Walesa is a completely different kind of hero: a common man who has taken his fling at changing history not by leading governments, winning great battles or writing books, but by embodying the hopes, faith, courage, even the foibles, of the vast majority of his countrymen.

The national ideals that Walesa represents have their roots in more than 1,000 years of Polish history. “They are accustomed to liberty,” wrote an anonymous Byzantine historian about the Slavs in the 6th or 7th century. Perhaps because they were so open to invasion by the Germans and the Russians, the Poles early developed a fierce sense of national unity. In addition to repeated foreign invasions, Poland suffered three partitions in the 18th century that wiped it off the map as a separate state until 1918.

Poles have revolted countless times against their oppressors, only to fail heroically. Almost every generation of Poles for the past century and a half has risen in arms. This penchant for rebellion—evident again in Solidarity—prompted Karl Marx to call Poland the “thermometer of the intensity and vitality of all revolutions since 1789.” Successive occupations and uprisings, moreover, gave Poles a deep-rooted mistrust of foreign-imposed governments and sharpened their skills at organizing broad-based conspiracies. It also increased their pride in the past. Many of Solidarity’s buttons show the Polish eagle adorned with the crown that was banned by the Communists.

The result of the defeated uprisings has left a scar on the national psyche, a kind of ambivalence and fear that endure to this day. “On the one hand,” says Social Historian Wiktor Osiatynski, “the Pole applauds the drive for democratic freedoms. On the other hand, not far below the surface roils the thought that previous such efforts for national salvation have ended in catastrophe.”

Polish patriotism has been closely bound up with religion ever since the baptism in 966 of the nation’s first ruler, Prince Mieszko I. During occupation periods, the Catholic Church kept Polish language and culture alive and served as the main bastion of nationalism. After the 0 Communist takeover in 1945, the church provided a unique alternative to a “godless” Marxist regime. Going to Mass became not only a religious act but a quiet sign of rebellion against the state. Today, 75% to 80% of Poland’s 36 million people are practicing Catholics. A deeply religious man, Walesa always wears on his lapel a badge depicting the so-called Black Madonna, a portrait of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child that is in the Czestochowa monastery, 125 miles southwest of Warsaw.

Religion, patriotism and a tragic history fed a current of romantic fatalism that runs deep in the Polish character.

Grand gestures and heroic sacrifices come naturally to the Poles, along with an alarming capacity for martyrdom. The 19th century playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski called long-suffering Poland “the Christ of nations” because of its capacity for anguish. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that bringing Communism to Poland was “like trying to saddle a cow.” He did it anyway, but a nation of rebellious, romantic anti-Russian Catholics proved to be troublesome from the beginning. Most Poles never regarded the party in Warsaw as more than an outpost of Soviet imperialism. As Walesa puts it: “For 36 years, something foreign was injected into us.”

In 1956 Polish workers rioted to protest food shortages. In 1968 Polish intellectuals protested censorship and other curbs on freedom. Seeking scapegoats for the rebellion, the government, conscious of Poland’s notorious antiSemitism, launched an “anti-Zionist” campaign that forced many Jewish intellectuals, artists and officials to emigrate.

In 1970 the most bloody uprising until then flared in the port cities along the Baltic coast. The movement, touched off by price hikes, was centered in the Gdansk Lenin shipyard, where Walesa had begun to work as an electrician in 1967.

For the first time, Walesa showed that he really was a natural rebel and leader, although even then he displayed his instinctive fear of going too far. When his fellow workers from the Lenin shipyard occupied the first floor of police headquarters, Walesa persuaded a crowd of 20,000 not to attack the nearby prison. Later, as the protests continued in the streets, Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka’s police and army units opened fire. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of workers died; the figures have never been authenticated.

To this day, Walesa fears that he did not lead his fellow workers with enough vigor or wisdom in 1970. What inspired him during the rebellion that began in August 1980 was, he says, “the blood of the workers who had put their trust in me. It was my stupidity in not taking it to victory that time. I wanted to improve on myself.”

In the wake of the 1970 riots, Gomulka was replaced by Edward Gierek, a former coal miner who had earned a good reputation for improving life in his fiefdom around the steel and coal center of Katowice in southern Poland. Gierek promised dramatic gains in the nation’s standard of living, mainly through a massive influx of foreign investment. Instead he destroyed the economy, and it was that which proved to be the fulcrum of Poland’s crisis. The disintegrating economy helped create Solidarity, and it remains the essential problem for General Jaruzelski.

Gierek had the instincts of a high-rolling capitalist. His decision to borrow heavily abroad to finance an expansion of heavy industry was based on the optimistic, and naive, theory that new factories, using the best equipment and techniques, would turn out products that would be sold to cancel the debts. In all, Gierek imported about $10 billion worth of modern capital goods. Then he wasted all of it in textbook cases of how not to run an economy. For example, he put nearly $1 billion into developing and producing a light tractor designed by Massey-Ferguson and made at a gigantic new Ursus tractor facility near Warsaw. But it turned out that the company was not licensed to sell its products in the West and that, moreover, they were too expensive to be sold in the East. Besides, most Polish farm equipment did not fit the tractor. Result: production of about 500 tractors a year instead of the expected 75,000.

Gierek also made a deal with the RCA Corporation and the Corning Glass Works to build a color television factory outside Warsaw that was supposed to turn out 600,000 sets in 1981. Result: some 50,000 were produced this year, mainly because of bad management and a shortage of parts. Says Marshall Goldman, an economist who is associate director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center: “It was like a heart transplant in which the system rejects the foreign body. The factories simply were not working.”

Meanwhile, to keep people happy, Gierek was allowing wages to rise 40% from 1970 to 1975, compared with an increase of only 17% over the previous decade. To give Poles enough meat, Gierek quadrupled imports of grain and fodder; the per capita consumption of meat jumped from 132 lbs. per year in 1970 to 1541bs. in 1980.

The state’s pricing system, designed to hold down food costs to consumers, was a blueprint for bankruptcy. The state was paying farmers 10 zlotys for a liter of milk that it sold in stores for 4 zlotys. Live hogs were bought from farmers at 130 zlotys per kilogram and sold as butchered pork at 70 zlotys per kilogram. Farmers bought bread and fed it to their livestock because it was cheaper than the wheat it was made from. Price subsidies began absorbing a staggering one-third of the national budget.

The whole absurd structure was bound to collapse, and it did. When the OPEC nations raised the price of oil in 1973-74 and caused a worldwide recession, Poland’s exports, instead of continuing to rise as Gierek planned, began to falter. Unable to lay off any workers—a taboo under the full-employment doctrine of Communism—Gierek had to borrow more and more money from the West to keep going. Poland’s foreign debt rose from $4.8 billion in 1974 to $25.5 billion in 1981. Servicing and repayment of the loans, which are owed to 15 Western governments and 501 Western banks, now consume all of Poland’s hard currency export earnings, estimated at $6.5 billion for 1981 (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS).

When Poland was forced to reduce its borrowing, the country began to suffer from a lack of spare parts for the spanking new equipment already in place. Round and round the vicious circle spun. The nation’s factories operated in 1981 at only 60% of capacity. To make matters worse, poor harvests from 1974 to 1980 ravaged the country’s agriculture, which Gierek had foolishly ignored in favor of industrial development, despite the fact that agriculture accounts for 20% of Poland’s domestic gross national product. Moreover, a disproportionate amount of supplies and equipment went to the inefficient state farms, while the far more productive private farmers, who own 75% of Poland’s arable lands, were shortchanged.

Fearing a national outcry, Gierek was reluctant to ease the strain on the budget by raising prices. He was right. When he finally increased prices in 1976, there were major riots in Radom and at the Ursus tractor factory. The brutal repression of these riots led to the formation of the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), a precursor of Solidarity. The organization was the first significant link between the dissident intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and the workers who later founded Solidarity. Inspired by KOR activists, small independent—and illegal—labor unions cautiously began to form in various parts of the country. Lech Walesa joined such a unit and was arrested and briefly jailed scores of times.

Catholic intellectuals also began to work with the movement. In Cracow, meanwhile, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla emerged as a strong advocate of human rights and promoted an independent intellectual life. In 1974 Communist Party Ideologue Andrzej Werblan called the Cardinal “the only real ideological threat in Poland.” The astuteness of Werblan’s judgment became dramatically apparent four years later when Wojtyla became John Paul II. The naming of the first Polish Pope caused an explosion of national pride in Poland. As had occurred so often in the past, a religious act had become a patriotic cause for the Poles.

If any one event created the psychological climate in which Solidarity emerged, it was the visit of John Paul to his homeland in June 1979. From the moment that the Pope knelt in Warsaw’s airport to kiss the ground, he was cheered wildly by millions of Poles. John Paul never criticized the Communist regime directly, nor did he have to: his meaning was plain enough. “The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man,” he told an enormous outdoor congregation in Warsaw. With that hardly veiled allusion to Communism, a deafening roar of approval filled the great city square. Says a Polish bishop of that day: “The Polish people broke the barrier of fear. They were hurling a challenge at their Marxist rulers.”

The spark that ignited Solidarity’s revolution was a government decree that raised meat prices in July 1980. As they had done many times before, Polish workers reacted with angry protests. But this time something was different. This time the workers occupied the factories. Still, the movement had no focus. In Gdansk’s Lenin shipyard, protest seemed to be on the verge of dying out when a stocky man with a shock of reddish-brown hair and a handlebar mustache clambered over the iron-bar fence and joined the strikers inside. They all knew Lech Walesa. He was an unemployed electrician, fired eight months earlier for trying to organize an independent trade union.

Walesa took charge and became the head of an interfactory strike committee that eventually became the bargaining representative for most of the 500,000 strikers, from the Baltic to the coal-mining heartland of Silesia, who had joined the revolt. Led by Walesa, the committee launched a bold set of political demands, including the right to strike and form free unions, that were unheard of in Communist countries and that authorities at first refused even to discuss.

Meanwhile, the Lenin shipyard was becoming the emotional center of an extraordinary national movement. Festooned with flowers, white-and-red Polish flags and portraits of Pope John Paul II, the plant’s iron gates came to symbolize that heady mixture of hope, faith and patriotism that sustained the workers through their vigil. As the world watched and wondered if Soviet tanks would put an end to it all, Walesa and his fellow strikers stood their ground. Like soldiers before battle, they confessed to priests and received Communion in the open shipyard. To reduce the risk of violence, Walesa called for a ban on alcohol and insisted on strict discipline. Through it all, his plucky courage and infectious good humor helped keep up the workers’ spirits.

Walesa also proved adept at hard bargaining once the Gierek government, afraid that the rebellion would spread, finally agreed to negotiate. Meeting face to face across a wooden table in the shipyard’s conference hall in August of 1980, Walesa and his fellow strikers consistently outmaneuvered the government team. Every evening, Walesa would climb the flower-covered main gate to give news of the talks to the crowd outside. His appearance was greeted by cheers and rousing choruses of Sto Lat (May He Live a Hundred Years). He responded with his actor’s instincts, regaling his audience with jokes and raising his clenched fist in salute. Bantering with foreign journalists, he announced, “I am the leader. I am No. 1.”

Firmness and patience paid off: the government team finally gave in on almost all of the workers’ demands. In addition to the right to strike and form unions, the Warsaw regime granted concessions extraordinary in a Communist country, including reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks for the unions and the church. At a nationally televised ceremony, where strikers and government representatives stood side by side and sang the Polish national anthem, Walesa signed what became known as the Gdansk agreement with a giant souvenir pen bearing the likeness of John Paul II.

As workers rushed to join up at hastily improvised union locals across the country, Walesa and the other ex-strike leaders quickly found themselves at the head of a labor federation that soon grew to 10 million members—fully a quarter of the Polish population. Organizing and controlling the loosely knit federation, which was divided into 38 semiautonomous regional chapters, soon became a major challenge for Walesa and the national commission that he headed in Gdansk. The job was complicated by an almost insatiable drive for democracy among a rank and file that had no experience with the democratic process. Most of the Solidarity activists were young. They were both angry and exuberant: bitter over the party’s moral and material bankruptcy, giddy with the sense of new-found power. Their impatience for change fed radical tendencies opposed to Walesa’s moderation. And those currents would grow stronger as the months went by with no improvement in the country’s economic situation.

Even more important than the organizational problems for Walesa and Solidarity was the question of defining policy and strategy. In the beginning, Walesa insisted that Solidarity should be a pure and simple labor movement, not a political opposition. On the day he showed up at a Gdansk apartment building to open Solidarity’s first makeshift headquarters, a wooden crucifix under his arm and a bouquet of flowers in his right hand, Walesa told a crowd of reporters, “I am not interested in politics. I am a union man. My job now is to organize the union.”

Matters would never again be quite that simple for him, although he began by winning an extraordinary concession from the government on a strictly labor matter: a five-day work week, granted on Jan. 31 after decades of six-day work weeks in Poland. But that only aggravated the economic crisis by further reducing production—especially in the coal-mining industry, whose output fell by nearly 10% in 1981. In addition, the country was soon swept by a spate of wildcat strikes over local issues. In some cases, Solidarity chapters were taking on the Communist Party bureaucracy by demanding the ouster of corrupt local officials or the conversion of party buildings to public hospitals.

For the first time, rank-and-file militants threatened to spin out of Walesa’s control. “We must concentrate on basic issues,” Walesa pleaded as the protests spread. “There’s a fire in the country.”

Putting out those fires kept Walesa busy through much of the year. Since he hates to fly, he crisscrossed Poland in a union-owned white Polski-Fiat 125 P driven by his personal chauffeur and assistant, Mieczyslaw Wachowski. Walesa was at his best plunging into a midnight meeting of angry workers and then persuading them, by force of rhetoric, shouting or cajolery, to end a strike. He made the 340-mile round trip between Gdansk and Warsaw countless times, tires screeching as Wachowski dodged plodding farm wagons. During those drives Walesa would spend his time catching up on his sleep, or tuning in to rock played by Radio Free Europe. Lately, he had been listening to English lessons on his tape recorder in preparation for a trip that he had planned to make to the U.S.

But for all Walesa’s skill as a moderator, Solidarity was increasingly forced into the path of contentious political activism by the regime’s failure to deal with its fundamental problem: the economy. The authorities could not act effectively because the party and government had fallen into a state of near terminal paralysis. Decades of blatant propaganda and economic failures had long since discredited the rulers in the eyes of the public. If the government had actually produced a golden egg, gibed Dissident Kuron, “people would say that it was not golden; second, that it was not an egg; and third, that the government had stolen it.” Some 900,000 Poles quit the Communist party after August 1980, reducing its strength to a mere 2.5 million, only 7% of the population. The resignations increased in October when the Central Committee urged party members, about 1 million of whom belonged to Solidarity, to quit the union. In a strikingly candid statement, Central Committee Member Marian Arendt recently told a Polish weekly: “Mostly it is workers who are leaving [the party]. Once I was so naive as to think that a few evil men were responsible for the errors of the party.

Now I no longer have such illusions. There is something wrong in our whole apparatus, in our entire structure.”

The party was on the verge of total collapse. What was more, Solidarity’s surge had started another surprising movement in Poland: a grass-roots crusade for reform that sought to democratize the party from within. Adopting the workers’ slogan of ODNOWA (renewal), party reformers tried to make the leadership more responsive to the rank and file. Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, a pragmatic politician who had replaced Gierek in September 1980, shrewdly adopted the cause of renewal in the hope of controlling it from the top and limiting its scope. At the same time, he cooperated with Solidarity to avoid a possibly disastrous confrontation.

All the while, the Kremlin watched with rising anxiety. Solidarity’s very existence was incompatible with the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. But perhaps even more important, the drive for democracy within the Polish party challenged the Leninist doctrine of centralized party discipline. Poland’s festering economic crisis also put a drain on the whole Soviet bloc, whose member nations’ economies were interlocked within the COMECON trade organization. And in Moscow’s worst-case scenario, the “Polish disease” might infect other East bloc countries and the Ukraine, posing a threat to the future of the Soviet empire.

“Emotionally, the Soviet leaders must have wanted to intervene dozens of times in the past year,” says a Western diplomat in Moscow. But the Soviets also realized the diplomatic and economic consequences would be costly: they would risk armed resistance by the proud Poles, exacerbate relations with the U.S. and Europe, affront the Third World nations they were so ardently wooing, and take on responsibility for the Polish economy.

The Kremlin kept constant pressure on the Poles with sallies of vituperative propaganda, sword-rattling threats and hints that a reduction of Soviet economic aid might put some backbone into Warsaw’s fainthearted leadership. Kania was summoned to Moscow and lectured at least three times. He and his fellow centrists were forced to perform a precarious high-wire act: on the one hand, they sought to accommodate demands for liberalizations coming from Solidarity and from their own rank and file; on the other, they had to protect themselves against Warsaw party hard-liners and convince the Soviets that they were still in control.

In June the Soviet Central Committee sent Warsaw a letter, as ominous as a drum roll, that criticized by name the Polish Communists for tolerating counterrevolution: “We are disturbed by the fact that the offensive by antisocialist enemy forces in Poland threatens the interests of our entire commonwealth and the security of its borders—yes, our common security.” In early July, a chill settled over Warsaw: Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko dourly descended upon the Polish capital with yet another admonition against any liberalizing tendency within the party.

Moscow’s sobering warnings helped Kania curb his radicals and marshal a safe, moderate centrist majority at a crucial party congress in July. The party reformers were still strong enough to purge most of the old Central Committee, and only five top party officials, including Kania and Jaruzelski, were reelected. But control stayed in the hands of Kama’s centrists, who, under pressure from Solidarity, had allowed an amount of freedom in Poland that would have been unthinkable just twelve months before.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Solidarity and Walesa was that they made it possible for Poles once again to speak their minds. In Solidarity bulletins and hundreds of newly established independent newspapers, articles regularly appeared that would shock the most tolerant censor in any other East bloc country. Solidarity’s national weekly Solidarnosc, for example, last month ran a blistering two-part expose on the privileges of top Communist officials. In student clubs, journalists’ groups and literary unions, there were open discussions of topics that had been forbidden in the universities, such as Poland’s history between the world wars. New publications bloomed like wild flowers. Edited by Catholic Intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the weekly Solidarnosc quickly reached a nationwide circulation of 500,000, easily outdistancing the once-prestigious party weekly Polityka (circ. 350,000).

The Gdansk accords had promised Solidarity access to the state broadcasting networks, but it never was given regular television time. Solidarity protested so vehemently that top TV officials at times literally barricaded themselves in their studios at night for fear that bands of workers might burst in and take over the station. Solidarity never went that far, but it did bar government camera crews from attending the Gdansk congress in September and October 1981, thereby forcing Poland’s state television network to run British Broadcasting Corporation footage on their own news shows.

The church too gained from the new liberalizations. Just three weeks after the Gdansk accords were signed, the voice of Bishop Jerzy Modzelewski, who was preaching from the pulpit of Warsaw’s Church of the Holy Cross, echoed across the country. It was another first: the beginning of regular Sunday radio broadcasts of the Mass, something the church had been seeking in vain for decades. Other concessions followed. Priests and nuns, for example, were allowed to do pastoral work in hospitals and other state institutions.

Previously banned authors were published again, including Nobel-prizewinning Poet Czeslaw Milosz, a prominent defector of the ’50s who returned to Poland for a triumphant visit last June. Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady, a 19th century play with anti-Russian overtones, was shown on television. State employed actors elected a new director of the national Polish theater, Kazimierz Dejmek, who had been ousted from the troupe during the 1968 purges. Political films like Workers 80, a documentary on the Lenin shipyard strike, and Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron, a fictionalized version of the Gdansk events (in which Walesa played a walk-on part), cleared the censors and played to packed houses in Poland.

A liberal new passport law led to an unprecedented freedom of movement. Lech Walesa, the Communist regime’s most prominent critic, traveled almost as freely as a Western jet-setter. In January he made an emotional trip to Rome to see Pope John Paul II. Falling to his knees, Walesa kissed the papal ring and then briefly resisted the Pope’s efforts to pull him to his feet. The union leader then had a rare private meeting with the Pope, which lasted for half an hour. Later, in his public remarks, John Paul II warmly supported Solidarity. “I wish to assure you,” he told Walesa, “that during your difficulties I have been with you in a special way, above all through prayer.” He declared that the right to form free associations was “one of the fundamental human rights.” But the Polish Pope also cautioned Walesa to follow a moderate course.

Thousands of less illustrious Polish travelers also crossed the borders unimpeded, although many failed to return: some 33,000 Poles fled to Austria and became official refugees during the year, a dramatic reflection of Poland’s economic and political uncertainties.

One of the most striking cultural changes was the frank treatment of the Polish past. Solidarity persuaded the regime to throw out thousands of schoolbooks that twisted and falsified Polish history. The memory of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, Poland’s popular anti-Soviet mili tary leader between the world wars, was rehabilitated and recognized even by the Warsaw government. Near the Lenin shipyard, three 138-ft. towers, crested by symbolically crucified anchors, were erected to commemorate the strikers killed by government troops in 1970. Said a Polish historian: “The Poles have gone on a memorial binge.” Freedom was being won. But the battle for bread was not, and if this failed, all else would fail as well.

Solidarity therefore resolved to overhaul the country’s crumbling economic system and to share with the government in running it. “We wanted to make the authorities accountable to society,” explained Bronislaw Geremek, Walesa’s chief theoretician. As a start, the union decided to attack the corrupt and inefficient nomenklatura system, under which the government chose plant managers not for their skills but for their loyalty to the party. The union’s stratagem: force the government to approve a system of self-management for the factories that would allow workers’ councils to choose their own managers. Even Walesa was skeptical about the efficiency of such a system if it were put into effect. Said he: “I know we will fail.

It’s a bad solution. But I don’t have a different solution, so I must accept it. Self-management is better than what we had before.” On that issue, as well as on a number of other points, Walesa was coming under heavy pressure from the radicals in Solidarity. During the first Solidarity congress in September, the delegates passed a truculent resolution demanding a referendum to let the people choose between the union’s program for self-management and a government-proposed plan that would have left all effective economic control in the hands of the state. If the government enacted its own bill, Solidarity threatened to boycott the law and “carry out the reforms in our own way.” Another militant resolution called for free elections to the parliament. But by far the boldest act was a declaration, which took Walesa by surprise, encouraging the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to “struggle for free and independent unions.” Moscow called the act “openly provocative and impudent,” as 100,000 Soviet troops staged maneuvers on the Polish border.

Walesa, who had taken no part in shaping the offending resolutions, concentrated on defusing the self-management issue before the second half of the congress met at the end of September. On the eve of that session, he and three other members of Solidarity’s twelve-man presidium accepted a compromise version of the government’s self-management bill. It would give workers’ councils the right to choose managers at most enterprises; the state could veto nominees it found objectionable. Parlament passed the plan into law the day before the union delegates returned to Gdansk. A dangerous union-government showdown was thereby averted.

It was a deft move, but it cost Walesa some of his popularity. When the Gdansk congress reconvened, Walesa’s high-handed style became the central issue. Attacked in speech after speech for compromising with the government without consulting the rank and file, Walesa had to fight three radical candidates to keep his job. He was elected, but his 55.2% of the vote showed that his hold over the movement had slipped markedly since his Lenin shipyard triumph.

Walesa was so angry that he scarcely showed up on the convention floor after the vote, preferring to watch the proceedings on a TV monitor in a well-guarded room near by. Nor did he even bother to read the session’s final resolutions, which called for sweeping political, social and economic reforms. He charged that some of his radical opponents wanted “to destroy the Sejm [parliament] and government, take their place, and become more totalitarian than they are.”

In turn, many of Walesa’s critics felt that he had been too moderate toward an intransigent regime. “He has an enormous tendency to give in, to agree with the government,” complained Economist Stefan Kurowski, the principal author of Solidarity’s economic program. “He is not intelligent enough. He is prone to listen to advisers who want to make careers.” Andrzej Gwiazda, a radical who challenged Walesa for the leadership post, contemptuously called him a “dictatorial, vain fool” and a “blockhead with a mustache.”

Walesa’s populist style and personality, as appealing as they were to the public, irked many of his fellow union leaders. Mieczyslaw Lach, a regional union leader, charged that “Walesa takes too many decisions himself. We often need quick, clear decision, but he has gone too far.”

Walesa tried to show that he understood the forces that drove his Solidarity critics, both at the local and national levels. Said he: “You have to remember that in the factories people are not normally interested in politics. They are just normal, gray people, and they say, ‘Look, it was pretty bad before August [1980], but at least we had our bread, we had some sort of living conditions, and life was possible then. Now, after you [Solidarity] took over, it is worse.’ So activists at the local level are under pressure. Some people want solutions fast. This is the only thing we differ in. I want to be more careful: I don’t want to see the renewal collapse. But those guys want to make a blitzkrieg.”

In the end, of course, a different blitzkrieg came, launched by the distant, enigmatic figure who was trained to attack. On Feb. 9 General Jaruzelski had been made Premier by the government and had begun to spar with Walesa’s union. But on Oct. 18 the Communist Party’s Central Committee accepted the resignation of the ineffectual Kania and elevated General Jaruzelski to the party leadership, the real source of power in the country. Jaruzelski was thus the head of the party, the government and the army. The very fact that the Soviets allowed the Poles to violate the Communist dogma that party civilians must always control the military was a sign of their dismay over the Polish party’s disarray, and of their faith in the Soviet-schooled general.

Jaruzelski was a man whom Moscow could trust. He had been trained by the Soviets and fought in the Red Army during World War II. In contrast to the corrupt leaders of the Gierek regime, he had a clean personal record and a spartan lifestyle. Although he had spent ten years on the Polish Politburo, he stayed aloof from the political and ideological infighting within the party. As Defense Minister, moreover, he controlled the regime’s only disciplined and organized institution: Poland’s 210,000-man army, which still had the respect of the people.

In contrast to Walesa, the balding, stern-faced general projected no charisma. His image of cold detachment was heightened by the dark glasses he normally wore because of a chronic eye inflammation. But the people respected him because of his well-known refusals in the past to use the military against strikers, and his celebrated declaration, “Polish soldiers will not fire on Polish workers.” On hearing of Jaruzelski’s appointment as Premier, ex-Army Draftee Lech Walesa commented: “Jaruzelski is a military man, and Poland loves its soldiers.”

One of Jaruzelski’s first acts after assuming power was to call out the army. Using a sure touch that foreshadowed what was to come, he sent some 3,500 officers and enlisted men to 2,000 towns and villages scattered across the country during the last week of October. Their ostensible mission: to help clear up food distribution bottlenecks and tackle other economic problems. But the officers were also filling their notebooks with information on the corruption and negligence of local party officials and, presumably, on the activities of Solidarity. The operation was generally popular with the people, who welcomed the soldiers as harbingers of efficiency and order. In retrospect, the deployment seems to have been a rehearsal for the military crackdown.

Before he resorted to that extremity, however, Jaruzelski appealed for national unity. He asked Solidarity and the church to join with the party in a “front of national accord” that would cooperate on economic recovery. The overture raised hopes that Poles might at last find a way out of the impasse by forging the vital element that had been missing from their body politic for more than three decades: a true social compact.

On Nov. 4 a potentially historic meeting took place at the government’s Parkowa guesthouse in Warsaw. There the bemedaled boss of Poland’s Communist Party received the head of a 10 million-member labor union and the spiritual leader of more than 30 million Polish Catholics. For two hours and 20 minutes, Jaruzelski, Walesa and Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Polish Primate, discussed the state of their troubled nation. Walesa came away with Jaruzelski’s offer to open negotiations with Solidarity on a wide range of social issues. The three leaders also discussed the general’s plan to involve the union and the church in the government’s recovery effort. Glemp pronounced himself “a little more optimistic” after the meeting.

Before Walesa went to the summit meeting, Solidarity’s ruling body had chastised him for presuming to represent 10 million workers on his own. “We want democracy, not a dictatorship!” one angry union official had shouted. “All right, let’s vote that we don’t want talks with the Primate and the Premier!” yelled Walesa, tears of frustration running down his cheeks. “But then you go out and explain your vote to the nation.” Now that the Warsaw meeting was over, Solidarity grudgingly endorsed the tripartite dialogue. It threatened, however, to call a general strike if the negotiations brought its members no satisfaction within three months. The commission also refused to endorse Walesa’s call for an end to wildcat strikes around the country.

Though Walesa and Jaruzelski continued to talk of entente and national unity after their meeting, the idea was not gelling. As always, the union was suspicious of government motives, and with good reason. The government wanted Solidarity to support an economic plan to raise prices, but it had never given the union any concrete guarantees that its rights would be respected. The authorities seemed to be stalling in hopes that the economic crisis would wear down Solidarity’s popular support and split the union. In fact, the regime had never fully carried out any of its major promised reforms. Now the authorities were even talking about curbing the right to strike, which had been at the heart of the hard-won Gdansk accord. The obdurate position of the government, which made any concessions seem increasingly unlikely, goaded the radicals in Solidarity to press even harder for reforms and made the final confrontation inevitable.

As the split between the union and the government grew wider, the church was wary of getting too closely involved in trying to work out a political agreement. The Pope, says a bishop in the Vatican, felt that it was “the duty of the church to proclaim the rights of man, including the right to form trade unions, but the organizational work should be done by laymen.” Walesa shared the Pope’s beliefs and his concerns. He told TIME: “We cannot put the church at risk, because we do not know how this will end. We may be wrong, but the church has to be right.”

As the unity talks dawdled, an astonishing event occurred that showed how much the Communist Party itself had disintegrated during the turmoil set in motion by Solidarity. Trying to put more pressure on the union, Jaruzelski asked the parliament to approve a bill banning strikes during declared emergencies. In Communist countries, anything the regime wants, the parliament automatically approves; the party controls all governmental institutions. But Jaruzelski was told in early December that the parliament would not pass the antistrike bill, stark proof of the collapse of party discipline.

With the party disintegrating, the Soviets pressing him to take stern action and the economy in ruins, Jaruzelski turned to the one institution he still trusted: the army. Quietly, he began to complete plans for imposing martial law while gradually taking the offensive against Solidarity. With army units held in reserve, he used riot police to break up an eight-day sit-in at Warsaw’s Fire Fighters Academy by students who were demanding academic reforms. Next, the government went on radio with illegally obtained tapes of Walesa warning, at a hot-tempered Solidarity meeting, that “the confrontation is unavoidable and will take place.” The union leader did not deny the quotes; he only said that they had been distorted by being taken out of context. The tone of the government’s attacks reached a new pitch. For the first time Walesa himself was singled out for criticism: the army newspaper called him “a great liar and provocateur” leading a group of “madmen” striving for “anarchy and chaos.”

Then on Dec. 12 Solidarity radicals gave Jaruzelski the excuse to do what he probably had been planning all along. From the start, the government and the Kremlin had made it clear that they could not tolerate a challenge to the existence of Poland as a Communist state, or any loosening of ties with the Soviet Union. That is precisely what the radicals voted to do at their last meeting in

Gdansk. While Walesa looked on in frustrated silence, they called for a national referendum on the future of the Communist government and a re-examination of Poland’s military alliance with the Soviet Union.

That was the perfect pretext for the government to impose martial law. Near the end of the session, when communications with the outside world had already been cut, Walesa stood up, raised both arms in a gesture of despair, and angrily told his fellow leaders: “Now you’ve got what you’ve been looking for.”

The end had begun. Within hours, most of the union leaders had been arrested, Walesa had been flown to Warsaw, and army vehicles were clanking across the country. By the time Jaruzelski appeared on television, Solidarity’s tumultuous revolution had been gagged and shackled. No one could know if Warsaw’s leaders would honor their pledge to restore the people’s freedoms once “order” returned. But one thing was certain: the flame that was lighted in August 1980 had brightened all Poland, and Poles do not give up easily. In the words that emblazon the tomb of the venerated Marshal Pilsudski: “To be defeated and not to surrender, that’s victory.”

Jaruzelski’s brutal crackdown will only multiply the problems of governing Poland and building its economy. The Poles’ suspicion of the government prevented them, and Solidarity, from cooperating with Warsaw to aid the economy. That mistrust will run even deeper now that the officer who had promised never to shed Polish blood has done so. Moreover, the workers could totally sabotage the economy. As Walesa put it in a discussion with TIME editors last October, “We can be defeated, but we will not be compelled to work. Because if people want us to build tanks, we will build streetcars. And trucks will go backward if we build them that way. We know how to beat the system. We are pupils of that system.”

Nor can Jaruzelski expect much help from the Western banks and governments. Indeed, the banks are resisting Poland’s attempt to rewrite its present loans, and President Reagan has ordered a series of economic reprisals against the country. The Administration is also urging its European allies to consider invoking trade sanctions against the Jaruzelski regime. To help stave off disaster, Poland has applied for membership in the International Monetary Fund. But the IMF will undoubtedly demand economic reforms painful for a Communist regime. Among them: decentralized planning and a price rise that would lower the standard of living. In any event, the presence of martial law will indefinitely delay IMF action on Warsaw’s application. So Poland may have to turn even more to the Soviet Union and the other East bloc countries and thus automatically be pulled back into the morass of Communist control.

As long as Solidarity existed, Jaruzelski had some chance of enlisting its help to sell a skeptical nation on the need for belt tightening. But the general has now cut his main link to the people. The church, moreover, has accused the government of turning the country into a “nation terrorized by force.”

Having silenced all dialogue, Jaruzelski may be condemned to continue his rule by force, thereby giving the world yet another glaring example of Communist government by repression. And should he fail to restore order, the Soviets are still poised to come in and finish the job for him. If it comes to that, a chapter of Polish history that began in hope will truly have ended in catastrophe.

“There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess,” Winston Churchill once remarked, “and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.” To an extraordinary degree, Lech Walesa embodies the Polish virtues of courage, faith, patriotism, spontaneity. But neither he, nor his lieutenants, nor the men who ruled the country were able to avoid the errors that finally led to tragedy. They were unable to reach a compromise to save the “renewal” that they all claimed to have wanted.

Perhaps the root of that failure lay in the fundamental incompatibility of Marxism-Leninism with freedom. A Leninist party must assume that it is infallible; it can brook no opposition. That system, as imposed on Poland by the Soviet Union, almost seemed capable of making significant changes during the past 16 months. But the survival instincts of the party and the geopolitical realities facing Poland doomed Walesa’s mission.

Lech Walesa had the overwhelming majority of the Polish people behind him, and to them he conveyed a compelling message of hope. The Poles will not forget—they never have. During Poland’s 16-month awakening, the priests and parishioners of a church in central Warsaw used to sing together joyfully: “O Lord, please bless our free fatherland.” On the first Sunday after martial law was declared, the words of that hymn were changed back to those traditionally sung when the country was under foreign domination. “O Lord,” the congregation sang, “please return us our free fatherland.” —By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Richard Hornik and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Warsaw, with other bureaus