Vladimir Bukovsky agrees. For twelve years Bukovsky languished in the Communist gulag, where he was shifted back and forth among prisons, work camps, and, as was the cruel Communist custom, even lunatic asylums. He now lives in Cambridge, England. By the time of Solidarity’s struggles, he was a free man living in the West, albeit one intimately informed of the Poland situation. Asked about the Reagan administration’s importance to the survival of Solidarity, he remarked succinctly: “It was crucial.” Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, March 8, 2003. From within Solidarity, a telling testimony comes from Jan Winiecki, a Warsaw native who earned doctorates in economics and public administration at the University of Warsaw and was an economic adviser to the Solidarity underground in the 1980s. “Of all the things most key to Solidarity’s survival, most important was the sheer will, sheer desire, of the Polish people,” Winiecki stresses. Yet, he says the Reagan impact on Solidarity was significant: “It’s very important for those underground to know they’ll have support diplomatically if they’re repressed. They knew they could count on Reagan and his administration for this rhetorical, moral, public support—this political support. It raised their spirits that they could survive.” Winiecki believes that the three main external impetuses to Solidarity were, in order of happenstance, the pope’s 1979 visit, 1981 martial law, and Reagan’s advocacy from 1981–89. He believes that Reagan’s role was fundamental to the Soviet collapse, and that the Reagan administration accelerated the implosion by at least a decade. He points to not only Reagan’s support of Solidarity but also to SDI and the arms race. “This was because the USSR tried to meet the Reagan challenge through the arms race, the technological competition of SDI,” said Winiecki, who also cites aid to Solidarity among causal factors. Interviews with Jan Winiecki, March 17, 1998, March 4, 1999, and March 7, 2000.
26. Walesa spoke at a conference on “The Reagan Legacy,” held at the Reagan Library on May 20, 1996. Mack Reed, “Walesa Hails Reagan at Daylong Seminar,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1996, A1, A18.
27. For his part, Reagan called Walesa a heroic figure. Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the Human Rights Day, Bill of Rights Day, and Human Rights Week Proclamation,” December 8,
1988, in John O’Sullivan, “Friends at Court,” National Review, May 27, 1991, 4. 28. In April 2005, Walesa told me that Reagan had “emboldened” and “encouraged” him in the 1980s. He spoke of Reagan’s “testimony to the truth and liberty” and “his understanding of life as living in light without a lie,” which “was always an inspiration for me.” Walesa’s words were translated by Tomasz Pompowski, a senior editor and reporter at Fakt, the largest newspaper in Poland. As he translated, Pompowski could not help but add that Reagan had meant a “great deal” to him as well. Interview with Lech Walesa, April 25, 2005. 29. Walesa spoke at a conference on “The Reagan Legacy,” held at the Reagan Library on May 20, 1996. Mack Reed, “Walesa Hails Reagan at Daylong Seminar,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1996, A1, A18.
30. Lech Walesa, speech at the conference, “The Reagan Legacy,” Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, May 20, 1996.
31. Reagan, An American Life, 303.
32. Ibid., 301.
33. Reagan, “Address at Commencement Exercises at Eureka College,” Eureka, Illinois, May 9, 1982.
34. A reader can literally count on one hand the total number of references to Solidarity in Edmund Morris’ Dutch and Lou Cannon’s Role of a Lifetime and still have two fingers two spare. Incredibly, Lech Walesa is not mentioned even once in either 870-plus-page work. 35. Clark said, “In Afghanistan, the Soviets lost face; in Poland, they lost an empire.” He said this twice. See “The Pope and the President: A key adviser reflects on the Reagan Administration,” interview with Bill Clark, Catholic World Reporter, November 1999; and Bill Clark, “President Reagan and the Wall,” Address to the Council of National Policy, San Francisco, California, March 2000, 8.
36. See Radek Sikorski, “Christmas Day in Romania,” National Review, January 22,
1990, 23–24.
37. Maciek Gajewski, “In Solidarity’s Cradle, Poles Applaud Reagan,” United Press International, September 16, 1990; and “Poles give Reagan a hero’s welcome,” Reuters, September
16, 1990.
38. This, of course, was a play on the face of Helen of Troy that launched a thousand ships. Gajewski, “In Solidarity’s Cradle, Poles Applaud Reagan.”
39. Interviews with Radek Sikorski, February 28 and March 3, 2003.
5. For a superb source on this episode, which includes interviews with all of the participants, see the PBS documentary, “Yeltsin,” produced by Pacem Productions and First Circle Films, 2000. The documentary was broadcast nationally in August 2000. Shevardnadze resigned on December 20, 1990. In his speech to the Fourth Congress of People’s Deputies to the USSR, he said he was resigning as Foreign Minister and warned against “the onset of dictatorship” in the USSR.
6. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 280.
7. Kryuchkov speaking on “Yeltsin” documentary.
8. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 280–82, 383–84, n145. It can also be said that even if Gorbachev did not order the violence, he was responsible for hiring those who did, and, worse, for failing to subsequently remove them from their posts.
9. Here, Gorbachev strongly and quickly condemned the shootings and said firmly, “I resolutely reject all speculation and suspicion” that he was responsible. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 282.
10. Gorbachev speaking on “Yeltsin” documentary.
11. Editorial, “Gorbachev’s Tanks,” The New Republic, February 4, 1991, 9–10.
12. The Tbilisi, Georgia incident took place in April 1989, a few weeks prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. As in Beijing, thousands of young people participated in peaceful demonstrations over several days, seeking democracy and independence from Gorbachev’s USSR, until the night of April 8–9 when Soviet troops responded brutally. They used asphyxiation agents—poisonous gas—fired from canisters. The majority of those who choked to death were young women. Rather than hold the USSR together, the incident further propelled the independence movement throughout the various republics. Soviet Communist authorities were ripping the union apart by the very policies and actions intended to keep it together. Archie Brown says that Gorbachev did not authorize this use of force by Communist authorities and had in fact urged that the demonstration be resolved peacefully through dialogue. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 265–66.
13. One of the better testimonies to how Gorbachev neither planned nor desired the upheaval in Eastern Europe was a December 1992 review essay by Michael Cox in the scholarly journal Soviet Studies. Michael Cox, “Beyond the Cold War in Europe: A Review Article,” Soviet Studies, 44, no. 6 (December 1992): 1099–1103.
14. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 268.
15. In his superb work published by Yale University Press, William E. Odom cautiously discusses the situation in December 1991 in which Gorbachev summoned Marshal Yevgenny Shaposhnikov to the Kremlin and, according to Shaposhnikov, raised the prospect of using the military to preserve Gorbachev’s hold on power. As Odom notes, this account can only be confirmed by Gorbachev, “who is hardly going to do so.” William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 352–54.
16. Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, 302.
17. Ibid., 304–6.
18. The headline read: “Soviet Leaders Agree to Surrender Communist Party Monopoly on Power.” The accompanying news article was by Francis X. Clines.
19. Jack Matlock agrees with me on these points. See Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, 317–18.