http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1454825,00.html
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.
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
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