THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 497world of its own, completely divorced from government-approved agencies.
Jarazelski undoubtedly possessed the instruments of effective repression. He
could have closed down the clandestine printing presses, rearrested the activists,
and passed a few exemplary death sentences. But, like Gorbachev after him, he
knew that the old Communist methods were bankrupt, and that the system
could be revived only through a measure of popular co-operation. So he
refrained from extreme measures. He harassed the illegal Underground, but
allowed it to exist. He invited the Polish Pope to Poland for a second visit in June
1983, to gain a fleeting shaft of reflected glory. But, then, he had to swallow his
dismay when his chief prisoner, Lech Walesa, was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize. For a political leader desperately in search of public respectability, it was
a body blow.
This time around, the outside world was much better informed about Polish
affairs than ever before. In 1980—1, the global media had descended on Poland.
The homeland of John Paul II and of Walesa was no longer a strange, unknown
country. Western intellectuals, who had traditionally harboured a strong con-
tingent of pro-Soviet fellow travellers, could finally see reality with their own
eyes and largely abandoned their former sympathies. A torrent of books and
films about Poland swept aside the prevailing indifference and ignorance. Only
a tiny handful of left-wing militants could maintain the pretence that Solidarity
was the work of saboteurs and provocateurs. In English-speaking countries,
books such as Timothy Garton Ash's Polish Revolution, which chronicled the
events of 1980-1, or Norman Davies's God's Playground, which presented the
essential historical background, enjoyed wide circulation.
The Poles, too, were able to receive far more information than previously.
Equally, they were far more receptive. Having enjoyed a season of what
Gorbachev would later call glasnost, they were not going to give up easily.
Hence, despite the censorship and the jamming, they were aware as never before
that the outside world was concerned for their fate. After 1980, public aware-
ness of emigre journals such as Kultura, edited in Paris by Jerzy Giedroyc, was
much enhanced. A very special role was played by the US-sponsored Radio Free
Europe in Munich, and by the Polish-language services of the BBC, Radio
Vaticana, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, and others. Forty years
earlier, the Nazis had routinely shot any Pole caught in possession of a radio. In
1944-5,the Soviet NKVD issued licences only to approved radio listeners. In the
1980s, with radios in every household, such measures were impractical.
Underground Solidarity gave pride of place to the war of information.
Excluded from most areas of political activity, it threw itself with a will into the
Drugi Obieg, literally 'the other circulation' - the Polish equivalent of Russian
samizdat, or 'self-publishing'. Starting during martial law and continuing to the
end of the 1980s, a huge network of illegal newsletters, journals, and books was
secretly printed and distributed. Courageous men and women risked their free-
dom in order to take part. At first, the operation sought simply to keep people
abreast of current affairs. But it soon grew into a massive onslaught against