CRACKS IN THE ICE: EASTERN EUROPE 67districts were put on permanent alert. If any of the Polish armed forces
showed signs of disloyalty it would be necessary to heighten the scale
of mobilization.^7 The Politburo wanted to keep the Poles on tenter-
hooks in order to help Jaruzelski go about his business of pacification.
On 9 September 1981 it endorsed a proposal from Defence Minister
Dmitri Ustinov and Marshal Sergei Sokolov to hold the next meeting
of the Warsaw Pact’s Military Council on Polish soil.^8 This would
surely drive home the message that what had happened in Czech-
oslovakia in 1968 could be repeated.
On 16 November 1981 Suslov summarized the Soviet leadership’s
position at the Party Central Committee plenum. He condemned
Gierek’s ‘voluntaristic economic policy’ of using Western loans for
a ‘great leap forward’. The national debt had risen disastrously to
$27 billion and yet the Poles still had to turn to the West for spare
industrial parts. Poland had been drawn into the clutches of global
capitalism. The Polish administration had been naive and irrespon-
sible.^9
According to Suslov, ‘bourgeois ideology’ had flooded into the
country through its twelve million Polish emigrants. He did not spare
Poland’s communist leaders, who had increased the size of the party
to three million members without sieving out unsuitable recruits. He
objected to how Gierek had allowed peasant smallholders to join.
Suslov no longer saw the Polish United Workers Party as a respectable
communist party. Gierek could not claim that he had not been warned:
Brezhnev personally had repeatedly expressed his concerns.^10 Suslov
added that the West’s ‘subversive centres’ had exploited the situation
by infiltrating their cadres and spreading their ideas.^11 The Soviet
Politburo had wanted General Jaruzelski to replace Gierek. But Jaru-
zelski had rejected the idea in favour of appointing Stanisław Kania.
Whereas Jaruzelski might have stood up against the strike movement,
Kania struck deals with them; and Suslov was pessimistic about future
events.^12 The Politburo sent emissaries to compel Kania to comply
with the USSR’s demands. Kania objected to being told to get tougher
with Solidarity. On 18 October the Central Committee of the Polish
United Workers Party, supported by leaders of the army and the
security forces, pushed him aside in favour of Jaruzelski. Suslov com-
mended this as a ‘positive phenomenon’.^13
He reported that Brezhnev congratulated Jaruzelski the next day,
offering comradely advice: