Chapter I: Solidarity, July-December 1980.
While working on my "Fallen on the March" TL, I commenced work on a project on the side that blossomed into another full-fledged TL. It concerns a Soviet invasion of Poland in response to Solidarity and a longer Cold War with some more 'interesting' developments due to hardliners staying at the helm in Moscow. I hope everyone likes it.
Soyuz-80
By 1980, discontent was simmering only just below the surface in communist Poland. Edward Gierek, the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party and de facto head of state, had opened up Poland to Western influence and had initiated economic reform based on Western loans, which ultimately ended in failure (the Polski Fiat factory was the notable exception because it made such popular cheap cars; production of the Polski Fiat 126p continued until 2000 while in Italy production of the Fiat 126 had ceased in 1991). Poland had already seen serious civil unrest after announced price increases in 1970 and 1976 which had been suppressed rather violently. 1976 had even seen the introduction of food ration cards, because of the destabilized market, and they became a feature of life in the Polish People’s Republic. The regime’s retreat, having occurred for the second time in several years, amounted to an unprecedented defeat. Within the rigid political and economic system, the government was unable to reform (it would lose control and power) as well as unable to satisfy society’s staple needs, because it had to sell abroad all it could to make foreign debt and interests payments. This quandary, combined with the daily reality of the lack of necessities, facilitated the consolidation of organized opposition. For the rest of the 1970s, resistance to the regime grew, assuming also the forms of student groups, clandestine newspapers and publishers, importing books and newspapers, and even a “Flying University.” The regime practiced various forms of repression against the budding reform movements.
The centrally planned communist economic system of Poland – unable to meet the complex demands of a modern economy and administrated incredibly inflexibly – continued to fail. By 1980, Gierek’s government had no choice but to raise consumer prices to realistic levels to prevent Poland from defaulting on its foreign debt and interest payments, which would undoubtedly lead to Poland being cut off from foreign (read: Western) credit in the future. Western bankers providing loans at a meeting at the Bank Handlowy in Warsaw on July 1st 1980 made it clear that low prices of consumer goods could no longer be subsidized by the state, a condition the regime accepted. The regime knew this could spark another worker rebellion. Nevertheless, on the same day a system of gradual but continuous price increases, particularly for meat, was announced. A worker rebellion indeed resulted, with a wave of strikes and factory occupations commencing at once. The largest of these took place in Lublin in July 1980, ultimately involving 150 factories and 50.000 workers. The strikes reached the politically sensitive Baltic Sea coast with a sit-down strike at the Lenin Shipyard on August 14th, and the strikes along the coast closed the ports and brought the economy to a halt.
The workers occupying the various factories, mines and shipyards across Poland organized as a united front. They were not limiting their efforts to seeking economic improvements, but made and stuck to a crucial demand: an establishment of trade unions independent of government control. Among other issues raised were rights for the Church, the freeing of political prisoners and an improved health service. The party leadership was faced with a choice between repressions on a massive scale and an amicable agreement that would give the workers what they wanted, and thus quieten the aroused population. They chose the latter. On August 31st Lech Walesa signed the Gdansk Agreement with Mieczyslaw Jagielski, a member of the politburo. The agreement acknowledged the right of employees to associate in free trade unions, obliged the government to take steps to eliminate censorship, abolished weekend work, increased the minimum wage, improved and extended welfare and pensions, and increased autonomy of industrial enterprises, where a meaningful role was to be played by workers’ self-management councils. The rule of the party was significantly weakened (to a “leading role in the state”, not society) but nonetheless explicitly recognized, together with Poland's international alliances. The fact that these economic concessions were absolutely unaffordable was overlooked in the wave of national euphoria that followed.
The foundation of Solidarity, the first non-communist trade union, followed in September under the leadership of Lech Walesa and proved an inspiration. Solidarity structures were formed in most places of employment and in all regions. It was finally registered as a national labour union in court in November, despite the regime’s efforts to thwart or derail its activities and status. Solidarity was an egalitarian and collectivist movement that sought to reform socialism and achieve social justice and didn’t want to introduce industrial private ownership or capitalism in general. At this point the movement didn’t seek to overthrow communism or cut off ties with the Soviet Union; in fact the upheaval could be viewed as working people revolting against the capitalist features emerging under Gierek’s government, using strikes and other tactics to block government policies. Meanwhile, the government had made promises at Gdansk that it couldn’t keep even if it had wanted to due to a contradiction that remained unaddressed: if they followed economic necessity they would generate instability. GDP had fallen by 2% in 1979 and fell another 8% in 1980.
In response to the Polish crisis, a summit was to be held in Moscow on December 5th and would be attended by a Soviet delegation as well as the leaders of the other Warsaw Pact leaders. At this point a commission composed of senior party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov had advised against a military intervention in August, but Brezhnev hadn’t made up his mind yet, so things were still up in the air. Particularly Suslov, better equipped to understand the fundamentally proletarian origins of Solidarity, reminded his colleagues how Polish leader Gomulka had used force against striking workers against Soviet advice in 1970, with dire consequences for his standing. Suslov was reluctant due to the risk of damaging the Soviet Union’s international standing as the paragon of socialism. His sentiments were shared by Andropov and Ustinov, who were directly responsible for the invasion of Afghanistan, whose disastrous consequences had by then become sufficiently evident. Gromyko had never been enthusiastic about it in the first place. All of them did agree with Gromyko that “we cannot afford to lose Poland” but they remained unsure how the desirable result should be achieved.
The party bosses in Poland and those of its neighbouring fellow socialist states – particularly East Germany’s Erich Honecker and, less conspicuously, Czechoslovakia’s Gustav Husak – weren’t constrained by such doubts and inhibitions. Honecker in particular, more interested in power than in ideology, attacked the Polish regime for its soft approach to the opposition, insisting that Solidarity had to be tackled with arrests, even if these led to bloodshed. He accused the Polish leadership of “capitulationism.” Husak concurred that the situation was similar to Czechoslovakia’s in 1968 and should be dealt with accordingly.
Poland started to consider using “administrative measures”, i.e. arrests, if the situation got out of hand. In the utmost secrecy a working group was formed by Minister of Defence General Wojciech Jaruzelski to prepare for the imposition of martial law in response to pressure by the Warsaw Pact to act. The working group was supervised by Jaruzelski’s closest associate Chief of Staff General Florian Siwicki. Even without such pressure, its members were indignant about the opposition’s audacity and the looming political chaos that threatened their Soviet made careers and privileges. They remained implacably hostile toward the opposition, which they voiced in the military press at every possible occasion. As President Ronald Reagan later stated, the officers’ corps of Warsaw Pact countries were “Soviet officers in Polish, East German and Czechoslovak uniforms.” That was not far from the truth, given that, in 1980, they accepted subordination of their military to Soviet command in wartime.
Between spells of feebleness General Secretary Brezhnev capably articulated Moscow’s attitude toward events in Poland. He was no doubt influenced by the successful intervention in Czechoslovakia, for which he had been prominently responsible, but also by the dim forebodings of a dragged out, bloody Soviet Vietnam in Afghanistan. Brezhnev agreed with Honecker and Husak that the Czechoslovak and Polish situations were similar and that a military intervention might be required. He also, however, fostered exaggerated hopes about the effects of Soviet material aid to Poland to prevent its economic collapse. But above all, he kept the pressure on Polish leader Stanislaw Kania to put down Solidarity.
Kania knew that resisting Soviet military intervention would be a disaster and in October he successfully persuaded Brezhnev to postpone the annual Soyuz manoeuvres of the Warsaw Pact until next year, a decision soon reversed by Moscow. These potentially provocative military exercises of 1980, Soyuz-80, were set to begin on December 8th and were expected to be completed by December 21st. Brezhnev accepted Honecker’s proposition that the party chiefs of the alliance members meet in Moscow on December 1st, which was postponed to December 5th. At this point invasion plans were already being drawn up. Before the summit began, the preliminaries of the Soyuz manoeuvres had already begun and included movements patterned on those that preceded the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, in variance with the routine exercises. The main difference with 1968 – where the Soviets had unsuccessfully tried to discredit the Prague government and substitute it with a puppet government – was that the action against Poland was to take place with the foreknowledge and cooperation of its existing regime.
Soviet plans envisaged the entry of fifteen Soviet divisions, two Czechoslovak and one East German division, which Soviet Chief of Staff General Nikolai Ogarkov revealed to Polish Deputy Chief of Staff General Tadeusz Hupaowski and his assistant Colonel Franciszek Puchaa when they visited Moscow on December 1st. The Soviets expected the full cooperation of the Polish government. Without Polish assistance they would have required thirty divisions and in the event of organized resistance they would have needed forty-five, but they discounted those possibilities (in itself a devastating commentary on the quality of Poland’s regime at the time). The Polish military at the time consisted of 350.000 men in five tank divisions, eight motorized rifle divisions, an airborne division, a naval infantry division, fifteen other brigades (five of them artillery brigades) and six specialist regiments, backed by another 500.000 men in reserves that could be mobilized in a week, 600 combat aircraft, and a navy made up of twenty missile boats, three missile destroyers and twelve submarines. Their only task was to stand by and do nothing as Warsaw Pact countries came in to “assist them against fascist elements.”
Hupaowski and Puchaa returned to Warsaw to bring the news and they caused consternation in the upper echelons of the Polish military, who were accustomed to being treated as valuable subordinates instead of expendable pawns. Jaruzelski (who was shocked) at least tried to negotiate and convince the Kremlin to exclude East German troops from the intervention because of historical sensibilities. He failed at that, but did extract the dubious concession of agreeing that two Polish divisions would cooperate by actively supporting the German and Czechoslovak divisions to prevent incidents and resistance. They were to ensure, as it was euphemistically phrased, a “collision-free regrouping” of the invading forces. Unlike Gomulka, who managed to rally the nation behind him and stared down the Soviets twenty-five years before, his 1980s successors lacked the capacity to differentiate their country’s interest from Soviet ones. Neither could they hope to successfully compete for popular support with the much more popular and inspiring leaders of Solidarity.
Smooth access, however, couldn’t be guaranteed: the plans of General Horst Stechbarth, commander of East Germany’s ground forces, included the preparation of field hospitals. At the same time the Czechoslovak army, equipped with large amounts of ammunitions, fuel and supplies, carried out reconnaissance operations on the assumption that violence would take place. On December 3rd, Warsaw Pact supreme commander Marshal Viktor Kulikov asked the despondent Jaruzelski to permit the allied forces to advance into Poland on zero hour on December 8th. Jaruzelski begged for postponement and received no answer while the Warsaw Pact’s military machinery kept moving closer toward Poland.
Everything depended on Kania’s performance at the crucial meeting that was to take place on December 5th 1980. Meanwhile, Kania took a plane to Moscow at 01:00 AM December 4th in a desperate attempt to meet Brezhnev before the meeting, but the plane crashed during takeoff. A joint investigation by the Soviets and Poles would eventually conclude that the Tu-134 airliner Kania had been in crashed due a 50 cm metal rod on the runway which was hit by the plane’s wheel, causing it to be launched into the portside wing’s fuel tank. Up until today the report is being questioned, particularly by Polish nationalists who claim the Soviets had placed a bomb as part of a conspiracy to invade Poland no matter what (making Kania’s status as a martyr ironic since he, in fact, was a loyal stooge of Moscow until the end). The despondent Jaruzelski had gotten drunk and had fallen asleep in his office in the Ministry of Defence, where he was informed of the crash around 02:30 AM. Sleepy after only two and a half hours of sleep, hung over and still full of residual alcohol (the autopsy concluded that his blood alcohol level at the time had been 0.8) , he made the fateful decision to drive himself rather than waiting for a driver to take him to the Office of the Council of Ministers that morning. In the morning of Thursday December 4th 1980, his car slipped on a patch of ice on the road and ended up wrapped around a lamppost. He ended up killing himself by speeding, driving at over 70 km/h (~ 45 mph) in a 30 km/h (~ 20 mph) zone. The police concluded that icy roads, speeding and driving under the influence had caused the crash. The fatal accidents of Kania and Jaruzelski produced a power vacuum in the Polish People’s Republic that temporarily crippled the regime’s ability to respond to Solidarity.[1]
The summit at Moscow was postponed to the evening of December 6th and was joined by General Miroslaw Milewski, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Polish People’s Republic and thereby the head of the Security Service (the SB, Poland’s equivalent of the KGB and the Stasi). Milewski basically sat there while Honecker lambasted him for Poland’s softness toward the opposition, with the tacit approval of Czechoslovak President Husak and Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov, with the Soviet leadership watching. Milewski did little to convince the others that the Polish regime could deal with the matter at hand, but did state that no German forces should set foot on Polish soil given the history of Polish-German relations up to and including WW2. It would surely produce a national uprising. He had already accepted that the intervention was going to happen and therefore didn’t stand up to Moscow because he was afraid that that would make the situation worse. Poland could not hope to overcome a Warsaw Pact invasion; any stand-up fight would result in serious destruction and heavy loss of life, inevitably ending in defeat.
Brezhnev decided that the East Germans would only put one division on guard on the border and conduct reconnaissance flights. Otherwise the military intervention was to be carried out as planned. The 7th Guards Tank Division and the 10th Guards Tank Division were assigned from the 3rd Shock Army stationed in East Germany to replace the German division. Two Czechoslovak divisions would move in from the south and another fifteen Soviet divisions would enter Poland from the east. They would deploy within the proximity of major cities and industrial centres, thus creating the appropriate intimidating atmosphere for the “political” situation the Soviets wanted. The go-ahead for Soyuz-80 to continue as planned was given with Brezhnev’s approval during that meeting and it commenced on schedule on December 8th 1980.
[1]The deaths of Kania and Jaruzelski form the dual PoD. A bit contrived, perhaps, but I think it works.
Soyuz-80
Chapter I: Solidarity, July-December 1980.
By 1980, discontent was simmering only just below the surface in communist Poland. Edward Gierek, the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party and de facto head of state, had opened up Poland to Western influence and had initiated economic reform based on Western loans, which ultimately ended in failure (the Polski Fiat factory was the notable exception because it made such popular cheap cars; production of the Polski Fiat 126p continued until 2000 while in Italy production of the Fiat 126 had ceased in 1991). Poland had already seen serious civil unrest after announced price increases in 1970 and 1976 which had been suppressed rather violently. 1976 had even seen the introduction of food ration cards, because of the destabilized market, and they became a feature of life in the Polish People’s Republic. The regime’s retreat, having occurred for the second time in several years, amounted to an unprecedented defeat. Within the rigid political and economic system, the government was unable to reform (it would lose control and power) as well as unable to satisfy society’s staple needs, because it had to sell abroad all it could to make foreign debt and interests payments. This quandary, combined with the daily reality of the lack of necessities, facilitated the consolidation of organized opposition. For the rest of the 1970s, resistance to the regime grew, assuming also the forms of student groups, clandestine newspapers and publishers, importing books and newspapers, and even a “Flying University.” The regime practiced various forms of repression against the budding reform movements.
The centrally planned communist economic system of Poland – unable to meet the complex demands of a modern economy and administrated incredibly inflexibly – continued to fail. By 1980, Gierek’s government had no choice but to raise consumer prices to realistic levels to prevent Poland from defaulting on its foreign debt and interest payments, which would undoubtedly lead to Poland being cut off from foreign (read: Western) credit in the future. Western bankers providing loans at a meeting at the Bank Handlowy in Warsaw on July 1st 1980 made it clear that low prices of consumer goods could no longer be subsidized by the state, a condition the regime accepted. The regime knew this could spark another worker rebellion. Nevertheless, on the same day a system of gradual but continuous price increases, particularly for meat, was announced. A worker rebellion indeed resulted, with a wave of strikes and factory occupations commencing at once. The largest of these took place in Lublin in July 1980, ultimately involving 150 factories and 50.000 workers. The strikes reached the politically sensitive Baltic Sea coast with a sit-down strike at the Lenin Shipyard on August 14th, and the strikes along the coast closed the ports and brought the economy to a halt.
The workers occupying the various factories, mines and shipyards across Poland organized as a united front. They were not limiting their efforts to seeking economic improvements, but made and stuck to a crucial demand: an establishment of trade unions independent of government control. Among other issues raised were rights for the Church, the freeing of political prisoners and an improved health service. The party leadership was faced with a choice between repressions on a massive scale and an amicable agreement that would give the workers what they wanted, and thus quieten the aroused population. They chose the latter. On August 31st Lech Walesa signed the Gdansk Agreement with Mieczyslaw Jagielski, a member of the politburo. The agreement acknowledged the right of employees to associate in free trade unions, obliged the government to take steps to eliminate censorship, abolished weekend work, increased the minimum wage, improved and extended welfare and pensions, and increased autonomy of industrial enterprises, where a meaningful role was to be played by workers’ self-management councils. The rule of the party was significantly weakened (to a “leading role in the state”, not society) but nonetheless explicitly recognized, together with Poland's international alliances. The fact that these economic concessions were absolutely unaffordable was overlooked in the wave of national euphoria that followed.
The foundation of Solidarity, the first non-communist trade union, followed in September under the leadership of Lech Walesa and proved an inspiration. Solidarity structures were formed in most places of employment and in all regions. It was finally registered as a national labour union in court in November, despite the regime’s efforts to thwart or derail its activities and status. Solidarity was an egalitarian and collectivist movement that sought to reform socialism and achieve social justice and didn’t want to introduce industrial private ownership or capitalism in general. At this point the movement didn’t seek to overthrow communism or cut off ties with the Soviet Union; in fact the upheaval could be viewed as working people revolting against the capitalist features emerging under Gierek’s government, using strikes and other tactics to block government policies. Meanwhile, the government had made promises at Gdansk that it couldn’t keep even if it had wanted to due to a contradiction that remained unaddressed: if they followed economic necessity they would generate instability. GDP had fallen by 2% in 1979 and fell another 8% in 1980.
In response to the Polish crisis, a summit was to be held in Moscow on December 5th and would be attended by a Soviet delegation as well as the leaders of the other Warsaw Pact leaders. At this point a commission composed of senior party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov had advised against a military intervention in August, but Brezhnev hadn’t made up his mind yet, so things were still up in the air. Particularly Suslov, better equipped to understand the fundamentally proletarian origins of Solidarity, reminded his colleagues how Polish leader Gomulka had used force against striking workers against Soviet advice in 1970, with dire consequences for his standing. Suslov was reluctant due to the risk of damaging the Soviet Union’s international standing as the paragon of socialism. His sentiments were shared by Andropov and Ustinov, who were directly responsible for the invasion of Afghanistan, whose disastrous consequences had by then become sufficiently evident. Gromyko had never been enthusiastic about it in the first place. All of them did agree with Gromyko that “we cannot afford to lose Poland” but they remained unsure how the desirable result should be achieved.
The party bosses in Poland and those of its neighbouring fellow socialist states – particularly East Germany’s Erich Honecker and, less conspicuously, Czechoslovakia’s Gustav Husak – weren’t constrained by such doubts and inhibitions. Honecker in particular, more interested in power than in ideology, attacked the Polish regime for its soft approach to the opposition, insisting that Solidarity had to be tackled with arrests, even if these led to bloodshed. He accused the Polish leadership of “capitulationism.” Husak concurred that the situation was similar to Czechoslovakia’s in 1968 and should be dealt with accordingly.
Poland started to consider using “administrative measures”, i.e. arrests, if the situation got out of hand. In the utmost secrecy a working group was formed by Minister of Defence General Wojciech Jaruzelski to prepare for the imposition of martial law in response to pressure by the Warsaw Pact to act. The working group was supervised by Jaruzelski’s closest associate Chief of Staff General Florian Siwicki. Even without such pressure, its members were indignant about the opposition’s audacity and the looming political chaos that threatened their Soviet made careers and privileges. They remained implacably hostile toward the opposition, which they voiced in the military press at every possible occasion. As President Ronald Reagan later stated, the officers’ corps of Warsaw Pact countries were “Soviet officers in Polish, East German and Czechoslovak uniforms.” That was not far from the truth, given that, in 1980, they accepted subordination of their military to Soviet command in wartime.
Between spells of feebleness General Secretary Brezhnev capably articulated Moscow’s attitude toward events in Poland. He was no doubt influenced by the successful intervention in Czechoslovakia, for which he had been prominently responsible, but also by the dim forebodings of a dragged out, bloody Soviet Vietnam in Afghanistan. Brezhnev agreed with Honecker and Husak that the Czechoslovak and Polish situations were similar and that a military intervention might be required. He also, however, fostered exaggerated hopes about the effects of Soviet material aid to Poland to prevent its economic collapse. But above all, he kept the pressure on Polish leader Stanislaw Kania to put down Solidarity.
Kania knew that resisting Soviet military intervention would be a disaster and in October he successfully persuaded Brezhnev to postpone the annual Soyuz manoeuvres of the Warsaw Pact until next year, a decision soon reversed by Moscow. These potentially provocative military exercises of 1980, Soyuz-80, were set to begin on December 8th and were expected to be completed by December 21st. Brezhnev accepted Honecker’s proposition that the party chiefs of the alliance members meet in Moscow on December 1st, which was postponed to December 5th. At this point invasion plans were already being drawn up. Before the summit began, the preliminaries of the Soyuz manoeuvres had already begun and included movements patterned on those that preceded the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, in variance with the routine exercises. The main difference with 1968 – where the Soviets had unsuccessfully tried to discredit the Prague government and substitute it with a puppet government – was that the action against Poland was to take place with the foreknowledge and cooperation of its existing regime.
Soviet plans envisaged the entry of fifteen Soviet divisions, two Czechoslovak and one East German division, which Soviet Chief of Staff General Nikolai Ogarkov revealed to Polish Deputy Chief of Staff General Tadeusz Hupaowski and his assistant Colonel Franciszek Puchaa when they visited Moscow on December 1st. The Soviets expected the full cooperation of the Polish government. Without Polish assistance they would have required thirty divisions and in the event of organized resistance they would have needed forty-five, but they discounted those possibilities (in itself a devastating commentary on the quality of Poland’s regime at the time). The Polish military at the time consisted of 350.000 men in five tank divisions, eight motorized rifle divisions, an airborne division, a naval infantry division, fifteen other brigades (five of them artillery brigades) and six specialist regiments, backed by another 500.000 men in reserves that could be mobilized in a week, 600 combat aircraft, and a navy made up of twenty missile boats, three missile destroyers and twelve submarines. Their only task was to stand by and do nothing as Warsaw Pact countries came in to “assist them against fascist elements.”
Hupaowski and Puchaa returned to Warsaw to bring the news and they caused consternation in the upper echelons of the Polish military, who were accustomed to being treated as valuable subordinates instead of expendable pawns. Jaruzelski (who was shocked) at least tried to negotiate and convince the Kremlin to exclude East German troops from the intervention because of historical sensibilities. He failed at that, but did extract the dubious concession of agreeing that two Polish divisions would cooperate by actively supporting the German and Czechoslovak divisions to prevent incidents and resistance. They were to ensure, as it was euphemistically phrased, a “collision-free regrouping” of the invading forces. Unlike Gomulka, who managed to rally the nation behind him and stared down the Soviets twenty-five years before, his 1980s successors lacked the capacity to differentiate their country’s interest from Soviet ones. Neither could they hope to successfully compete for popular support with the much more popular and inspiring leaders of Solidarity.
Smooth access, however, couldn’t be guaranteed: the plans of General Horst Stechbarth, commander of East Germany’s ground forces, included the preparation of field hospitals. At the same time the Czechoslovak army, equipped with large amounts of ammunitions, fuel and supplies, carried out reconnaissance operations on the assumption that violence would take place. On December 3rd, Warsaw Pact supreme commander Marshal Viktor Kulikov asked the despondent Jaruzelski to permit the allied forces to advance into Poland on zero hour on December 8th. Jaruzelski begged for postponement and received no answer while the Warsaw Pact’s military machinery kept moving closer toward Poland.
Everything depended on Kania’s performance at the crucial meeting that was to take place on December 5th 1980. Meanwhile, Kania took a plane to Moscow at 01:00 AM December 4th in a desperate attempt to meet Brezhnev before the meeting, but the plane crashed during takeoff. A joint investigation by the Soviets and Poles would eventually conclude that the Tu-134 airliner Kania had been in crashed due a 50 cm metal rod on the runway which was hit by the plane’s wheel, causing it to be launched into the portside wing’s fuel tank. Up until today the report is being questioned, particularly by Polish nationalists who claim the Soviets had placed a bomb as part of a conspiracy to invade Poland no matter what (making Kania’s status as a martyr ironic since he, in fact, was a loyal stooge of Moscow until the end). The despondent Jaruzelski had gotten drunk and had fallen asleep in his office in the Ministry of Defence, where he was informed of the crash around 02:30 AM. Sleepy after only two and a half hours of sleep, hung over and still full of residual alcohol (the autopsy concluded that his blood alcohol level at the time had been 0.8) , he made the fateful decision to drive himself rather than waiting for a driver to take him to the Office of the Council of Ministers that morning. In the morning of Thursday December 4th 1980, his car slipped on a patch of ice on the road and ended up wrapped around a lamppost. He ended up killing himself by speeding, driving at over 70 km/h (~ 45 mph) in a 30 km/h (~ 20 mph) zone. The police concluded that icy roads, speeding and driving under the influence had caused the crash. The fatal accidents of Kania and Jaruzelski produced a power vacuum in the Polish People’s Republic that temporarily crippled the regime’s ability to respond to Solidarity.[1]
The summit at Moscow was postponed to the evening of December 6th and was joined by General Miroslaw Milewski, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Polish People’s Republic and thereby the head of the Security Service (the SB, Poland’s equivalent of the KGB and the Stasi). Milewski basically sat there while Honecker lambasted him for Poland’s softness toward the opposition, with the tacit approval of Czechoslovak President Husak and Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov, with the Soviet leadership watching. Milewski did little to convince the others that the Polish regime could deal with the matter at hand, but did state that no German forces should set foot on Polish soil given the history of Polish-German relations up to and including WW2. It would surely produce a national uprising. He had already accepted that the intervention was going to happen and therefore didn’t stand up to Moscow because he was afraid that that would make the situation worse. Poland could not hope to overcome a Warsaw Pact invasion; any stand-up fight would result in serious destruction and heavy loss of life, inevitably ending in defeat.
Brezhnev decided that the East Germans would only put one division on guard on the border and conduct reconnaissance flights. Otherwise the military intervention was to be carried out as planned. The 7th Guards Tank Division and the 10th Guards Tank Division were assigned from the 3rd Shock Army stationed in East Germany to replace the German division. Two Czechoslovak divisions would move in from the south and another fifteen Soviet divisions would enter Poland from the east. They would deploy within the proximity of major cities and industrial centres, thus creating the appropriate intimidating atmosphere for the “political” situation the Soviets wanted. The go-ahead for Soyuz-80 to continue as planned was given with Brezhnev’s approval during that meeting and it commenced on schedule on December 8th 1980.
[1]The deaths of Kania and Jaruzelski form the dual PoD. A bit contrived, perhaps, but I think it works.
Last edited:
