By a misfortune which had dogged US politicians’ microphones on other matters Polish, a microphone inadvertently left live passed on to waiting pressmen Mr Thompson’s reply: ‘Goddammit, Art, I’m not going to say that I wish to make it clear that if the brave Polish people rise against their Russian oppressors, then a Thompson Administration would most certainly leave them in the…’ Suddenly, realizing that his words were being overheard by newsmen, Thompson ended with a grin and the words, ‘expletive deleted’.
There was a ripple of amused applause from the newsmen. In subsequent statements, Mr Thompson was at pains to emphasize that he was threatening nobody. Nonetheless, he was now to some extent saddled with this overheard statement — and it would have been politically damaging for him to retreat too abjectly from it. Indeed, under questioning at a meeting of minority groups in Chicago, he attempted a counter-attack. He accused the Carter Administration’s Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski (himself a Pole by birth), of being ‘altogether too ready to sell his native country down the river’. Nobody who analysed Thompson’s statements could seriously suppose he was encouraging a Polish insurrection, but there were a good many people (including some in Poland) who feared that restless Poles who heard what he had said repeated in garbled form might suppose that that was just what he was doing.
After Mr Thompson’s election as president on the first Tuesday in November, a memo from the Polish Ministry of Home Security ordered the political police, assisted where necessary by the army, quietly to round up potential strike leaders from factories in Polish towns other than Warsaw. The Ministry had heard a rumour that otherwise some sort of provincial general strike might be called to mark President Thompson’s Inauguration Day on 20 January.
The rumour was untrue, but the arrests caused a crisis. The political police and the army tried to arrest workers’ leaders on 11 November, and met with resistance. In some places shots were fired. In more Polish troops were reluctant to obey orders and continue with the arrest of workers.
By 12 November factories in several provincial cities of Poland were under workers’ control, flying the prewar flag of Poland with the communist insignia torn out. Dramatic visual evidence of these events was provided by a group of dissidents working in Polish television. In Gdansk, the television station was taken over and held for some hours by technicians whose sympathies were with the strikers. Though the government reacted promptly, ordering the police to storm the station regardless of casualties, the staff were able in the time available to them to beam pictures of the riots out to Denmark and Sweden. In Sweden the authorities yielded at once to the threats which swiftly followed both from the Soviet Union and from Poland. They forbade both the use of the material in Sweden and its onward transmission. The Danes, on the other hand, passed it at once to Eurovision. From there it reached stations all over the world, affording striking and ineradicable proof of the intensity of feeling in Poland against the regime. One sequence in particular, showing Polish troops standing by while strikers wrecked a Soviet cultural centre in Szczecin, was more damaging to the Soviet Union than any.
In Wroclaw and Szczecin, communist party leaders went into the factories to ‘negotiate’. In both places they then tried to break the promises made in the negotiations and arrest the workers’ leaders. In Wroclaw they failed, and the communist mayor was shot by the strikers, who also took other communist leaders as hostages. In Szczecin the Party soon regained control.
The central government then entered into negotiations. It promised no punitive action against those who had made even the most open shows of defiance, including those who had shot the mayor of Wroclaw. This promise was honoured until mid-January. The communist government went on ruling the country, but — it seemed to some (perhaps to communist mayors especially) — in name only. In Moscow there was growing concern.
A special meeting of the Soviet Politburo was called for 14 November, together with the heads of government of all the republics in the Soviet Union. For this meeting the Kremlin leaders asked Academician Y. I. Ryabukhin, a Harvard-educated Muscovite sometimes known in the West as the best backroom Kissinger the Russians had, to prepare a position paper. This was what he wrote, in a document labelled ‘most secret’.
THE RYABUKHIN REPORT
1 Although President-elect Thompson has said some regrettable things, he is unlikely ever to countenance nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, just as we are unlikely to countenance it on the USA. Both superpowers have to bear in mind the high probability of second-strike destruction.
2 Despite this, we in the governing structure of the Soviet Union now face a situation which demands attention. Of the 180 heads of government in the different countries of the world, about 100 go to bed every night wondering whether they may be shot in a coup d’état in the morning. Except in Stalin’s day, men in the top posts in the Soviet Union have not had to fear that. Now they might well soon be doing so. After what happened in Poland there is a distinct possibility of coups d’état against several socialist governments in Eastern Europe. It cannot be wholly ruled out in some republics of the Soviet Union itself, especially in the Far East and south.
3 Nevertheless, we should not, at this juncture, send Soviet troops into Poland to arrest those workers in, for example, Wroclaw, who have been allowed almost literally to get away with murder. It has been thought unwise to order units of the Polish Army to open fire on the workers concerned. There are units of the Red Army which might conceivably also be reluctant to obey such orders. Only if the Polish government is overthrown by a plainly revanchist regime, or if similar events take place in other socialist countries (above all in the German Democratic Republic), should considerable Soviet forces be sent in to rectify the situation. Yugoslavia is a different matter (see note on the Yugoslav situation, below).
4 The position in Poland makes it important that we should put the Americans in a position of weakness somewhere else, and ensure that some humiliating retreats have to be undertaken by the Americans during the early weeks of President Thompson’s Administration. This can be called a Bay of Pigs strategy.
5 It will be remembered that in the early days of the Kennedy Administration in 1961 our agents among the so-called Cuban émigrés in America, who have been in many respects useful, helped to instigate the bound-to-be-abortive American-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs against Fidel Castro, who knew every detail of the invasion plan in advance. This humiliation of the Americans enabled Soviet penetration of South America to continue unchecked throughout the Democratic Administration of 1961-8, except that by placing offensive missiles in Cuba in 1963 Khrushchev unwisely pushed the Americans too far.
6 Unfortunately, we cannot precisely repeat the Bay of Pigs, because the United States is not preparing to invade anywhere unsuccessfully during the early days of the Thompson Administration. We should therefore try to set up situations where President Thompson in his early days will be forced to order or accept a retreat by America and its allies from a situation created by us.
7 A ‘Thompson retreat’ of this sort should be engineered in order to check a possible ‘momentum of revolt’ which may otherwise begin to be felt by the Soviet Union. At risk, if there is no such early retreat, may be the lives and livelihoods of many who work within the governing structure of the Soviet Union and its allies. If a ‘momentum of revolt’ were to spread from Poland, many would indeed go to bed each night fearing that they might be shot in a coup d’état next morning. There is little likelihood that the United States will risk the desolation of the planet by nuclear action simply because we have provoked the President, and it is unlikely to allow possibly less stable allies like Iran to risk doing so either. On the contrary, as Thompson has to operate in accordance with a public opinion which will grow scared much more quickly than our own censor-protected public opinion will do, he will order retreats at a much earlier stage than we. A straightforward threat of nuclear holocaust carries little conviction. On the other hand, to hint at escalation towards it offers great advantage to the USSR. We should make constant use of this.