THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 501The impasse came to a head in the late summer of 1988. When strikes broke
out, both in Gdansk and elsewhere, none other than Lech Walesa was brought
out of the wilderness in order to persuade the strikers to stand down. He thereby
won an undertaking that negotiations would take place. In November, he was
allowed to debate his case on state television, thoroughly embarrassing the head
of the official trades unions, Alfred Miodowicz. Then the Prime Minister
resigned because he could no longer cope with the OPZZ. Jaruzelski's regime
stared political bankruptcy in the face. With enormous reluctance, the
Communists edged towards sharing power. At one point, Jaruzelski had to con-
front the Party with an offer of his own resignation. Eventually the waverers
were convinced that undiluted dictatorship was no longer viable and that
dialogue with Solidarity was unavoidable. The date for the first meeting of a
Round Table between the Communist Government and the Solidarity
Opposition was set for 6 February 1989.
The Death of Polish Communism, 1989—90The sight of a weakened totalitarian regime voluntarily entering into meaning-
ful negotiations with its opponents is not unprecedented. In Poland, which is
part of the Roman Catholic world, the example of Spain was well known; and
the process of bargaining whereby the late Fascist regime prepared the way for
its own demise had been discussed more than once in Polish opposition circles.
After all, the problems of post-Communism were not very different from those
of post-Fascism. The Polish Communists, of course, had different ideas. There
can be little reason for arguing that the group around Jaruzelski, by pressing for
dialogue with Solidarity, thought that they were surrendering power. On the
contrary, they planned to use Solidarity for their own purposes, and to make a
number of limited concessions whilst holding on to the essential levers of con-
trol. After all, they were well accustomed to the tactic of co-opting 'non-Party'
figures and of disarming their critics by absorbing them into the system. For
them, the real question was whether the Solidarity leaders would agree to a sub-
servient role or whether once again they would try to be independent. Naturally,
the Party beton or 'hardliners' were suspicious. But they, too, saw that things
could not carry on unchanged. Some of them thought that South Korea offered
an attractive model: a capitalist economy linked to authoritarian politics.
One should also stress that early in 1989 the Poles were ploughing a lone fur-
row. As yet, none of the other Communist states was showing outward signs of
distress and no ruling Party had compromised its 'leading role'. Gorbachev's
perestroika in the USSR was aiming at very limited goals, which the Polish com-
rades had already conceded. In the political field, the sort of Party-guided
pseudo-pluralism, which Gorbachev seemed to favour, had operated in the PRL
for over thirty years. The Warsaw Pact was still unquestioned. Comecon was
still in place. Huge numbers of Soviet troops were still stationed either in Poland
or in the immediate vicinity. The unsmiling comrades in neighbouring