486 SOLIDARNOSC
Republic. Walesa, like the old Sarmatian nobleman whom he so uncannily
resembled, seems to have grasped instinctively that the principal threat to
Solidarity's existence would come from the absolute pretensions of state and
Party power. If this was so, the Polish working class was reviving the long lost
principles of the Noble Democracy—traditions which appeared to have sur-
vived two centuries of oblivion. At the very least, it was a fascinating historical
parallel.
Inevitably, of course, the rise of Solidarity inflicted massive damage on the
Communist establishment. The main casualty was Edward Gierek, the discred-
ited First Secretary, who was replaced on 6 September 1980 by a compromise
figure of opaque views, Stanislaw Kania. More seriously, the conventional
workings of the Party dictatorship were fouled up by the appearance of 'hori-
zontal structures' among the comrades who were beginning to join Solidarity
but not to leave the party. As a political army the PZPR simply could not func-
tion, if, instead of taking orders unquestioningly from the top, its soldiers
wanted to discuss the orders among themselves. Most importantly, the Polish
comrades were losing the confidence of their Soviet masters. This was an era in
which the 'Brezhnev Doctrine' still held good, even though Brezhnev was in the
terminal stages of a long degenerative illness. Ever since the invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968, fraternal parties had been given the leeway to follow
their own 'roads of socialism': but only on condition that they did not waver in
their allegiance to Marxism-Leninism. And a free trades union supported by
millions of workers is something which Lenin would never have permitted. So
once Solidarity was officially recognized and registered, the Moscow Centre
prepared to intervene.
Moscow had numerous mechanisms in place for ensuring the subservience of
its satellites. In normal times, the International Department of the CPSU was
charged with supervising all the Central Committees of all the fraternal parties
abroad. It treated all appointments to the upper echelons of those parties as its
own preserve, incorporating all the Communist leaders who held power abroad
into its own Soviet nomenklatura system. In theory, therefore, no satellite gov-
ernment was capable of straying from the set path. But when, as in Prague in
1968 or in Warsaw in 1980, the foreign comrades exceeded their brief, they
could be preserved from several directions. In the last resort, the Soviet Army
stood ready to roll in and to reassert Moscow's control. Before that, every satel-
lite country possessed its own army and interior security forces whose senior
officers were Soviet-trained and sworn under oath to uphold the Soviet alliance.
Lastly, there was the KGB whose agents held influential posts in every sector of
each satellite's State and Party machine. This is where General Wojciech
Jaruzelski came into his own.
Born in 1923 Jaruzelski was a man with the biography of a janissary. He was
a Pole, the son of a traditional Catholic landed family from the Lublin region,
who had fallen into the clutches of the Soviet regime at a tender age and who
had been trained and nurtured as a member of the Communist elite. In 1939,