Comment

We are rewriting the history of communism's collapse

It was Gorbachev, not the Pope, who brought the system down

Jonathan Steele
Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian

The deaths of the powerful elicit extravagant claims, and many of the tributes to
the man being buried in Rome today have been little short of grotesque. Dumbing-
down comes over obituary writers, and in their eagerness to define a clear legacy
they often produce simplifications that take no account of how the world and people
change.

The way Poles saw communism in the 1970s is not the way they see it now. The Polish
Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the communist authorities, and both
worked subtly together at times to resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his
own views as he travelled.

Article continues
[AD]
So the notion that anti-communism was always a consistent part of his motivation is
off the mark. It was prominent in his early trips to Poland but less important in
his dealings with Latin America. Pacifism was also a key principle for John Paul,
and when it came to preserving power in his own domain, authoritarianism was his
watchword rather than the protection of freedom.

The retrospectives that draw a line between his first visit home as Pope in 1979,
the rise of Solidarity a year later and the collapse of the one-party system in
1989 are especially open to question.

They ignore martial law, which stopped Solidarity in its tracks and emasculated it
for most of the 1980s. It was a defeat of enormous proportions that John Paul could
not reverse until the real power-holders in eastern Europe, the men who ran the
Kremlin, changed their line.

The Pope's 1979 tour, with vast crowds at his open-air masses, undoubtedly gave
Poles a tremendous sense of national revival. It added an unpredictable factor
after decades of periodic crises between discontented workers, communist leaders
who wanted to show their national credentials by finding a "Polish road to
socialism" and narrow-minded rulers in Moscow.

The Pope's support when workers struck in Gdansk and founded the Solidarity union
as Poland's first independent national organisation helped it to grow with amazing
speed.

But things had changed a year later. Solidarity was split over tactics and goals.
At its 1981 autumn congress, where western reporters were given full access,
delegates fiercely debated priorities: was the key issue to be workers' demands for
better wages and self-management in their factories or the call for political
freedoms that the intellectuals on the Solidarity bandwagon saw as paramount?
Should the union accept or reject the Communist party's leading role in government?

All sides agonised over whether and how Moscow would intervene. There were already
strong hints that the Polish army would be used rather than Soviet tanks. None of
us thought a clamp-down could be avoided. Within weeks we were proved right. The
Kremlin got its way with relative ease. Poland's own communist authorities arrested
thousands of Solidarity's leaders and drove the rest underground.
John Paul's reaction was soft. Armed resistance was not a serious option, but there
were Poles who favoured mass protests, factory occupations and a campaign of civil
disobedience. The Pope disappointed them. He criticised martial law but warned of
bloodshed and civil war, counselling patience rather than defiance.

After prolonged negotiations with the regime, he made a second visit to Poland in
1983. Although martial law was lifted a month later, many Solidarity activists
remained in jail for years. The government sat down to negotiate with Solidarity
again only in August 1988, by which time Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched the
drive towards pluralistic politics in the USSR itself and publicly promised no more
Soviet military interventions in eastern Europe.

The impetus for Gorbachev's reforms was not external pressure from the west,
dissent in eastern Europe or the Pope's calls to respect human rights, but economic
stagnation in the Soviet Union and internal discontent within the Soviet elite.

The Pope's cautious reaction to martial law was prompted by his firm belief in non-
violence. If it tempered his anti-communism, so did the high value he put on
national pride.

His line on communist Cuba differed sharply from his line on Poland. He realised
that Castro's resistance to US pressures reflected the feelings of most Cubans. He
saw that nationalism and communist rule went hand in hand in Cuba in a way that
they did not in Poland, where the party was ultimately subordinate to Moscow. In
Havana the Pope mentioned freedom of conscience as a basic right, but his visit
strengthened Castro. His critique of capitalism and global inequality echoed
Castro's and he denounced the US embargo on Cuba.

Nor was John Paul's attack on liberation theology in the 1980s motivated primarily
by the fact that the so-called "option for the poor" was infused with Marxism. The
Pope was worried by other features too. He felt it was being used to justify
violence and leading Catholic parish priests to support armed struggle by peasants
against repressive landowners and feudal dictatorships.

In Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas toppled the US-backed Somoza regime by force,
three priests became ministers. In El Salvador priests were often reporters' best
conduits to guerrilla commanders, taking us into remote villages to meet them. In
the Philippines some priests carried guns themselves. "The situation required more
than a human rights group. I went underground and joined the defence forces,"
Father Eddy Balicao, who used to serve in Manila Cathedral, told me in the
mountains of Luzon.

John Paul also opposed liberation theology because he saw priests defy their
bishops and challenge the church's hierarchical structure. Even while communism
still held power in Europe, he had more in common with it than many of his
supporters admit. He recentralised power in the Vatican and reversed the
perestroika of his predecessor-but-two John XXIII, who had given more say to local
dioceses.

With the fall of "international communism", the Vatican was left as the only
authoritarian ideology with global reach. There was no let-up in the Pope's
pressures against dissent, the worst example being his excommunication of Sri
Lanka's Father Tissa Balasuriya in 1997, an impish figure who questioned the cult
of Mary as a docile, submissive icon and argued that, as a minority religion in
Asia, Catholicism had to be less arrogant towards other faiths.

The Pope could not accept that challenge to the Vatican's absolutism. So it is
fitting that he will be buried in the crypt from which John XXIII was removed,
symbolically marking the primacy of Wojtyla's conservative era over the liberal
hopes of an earlier generation.

� Jonathan Steele reported from Poland, the Soviet Union and Latin America in the
1970s and 1980s

j.steele@guardian.co.uk