'We Want a Decent Life'

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on December 29, 1980.)

For three hours the crowd swelled with new arrivals: miners from Silesia wearing their traditional long black coats and plumed czaka, railway workers from Lublin, bus drivers from Pulawy. Hundreds of thousands strong, they spilled out into side streets, waiting patiently in the early twilight while the tender strains of a Chopin piano concerto wafted from a loudspeaker.

They had come to Gdansk to honor the memory of 45 workers killed by police and army bullets ten years before in riots along the Baltic coast. At long last a monument had been built: three slender trunks of steel crowned by crosses that bore dark anchors, like stylized Christ figures. To some, the 138-foot-high sculpture outside the main gate of the Lenin Shipyard symbolized the futile workers' uprisings against Poland's governments in 1956, 1970 and 1976. To others, it recalled specifically the three workers gunned down there early one December morning in 1970. But most of all, last week's ceremonies represented the revolution of the moment: a danger-laden struggle between Poland's workers and their Communist masters.

Shortly before 5 o'clock, the dignitaries were introduced. Poland's President Henryk Jablonski, a silver-haired figure in a black overcoat: a smattering of applause. Franciszek Cardinal Macharski of Cracow wearing crimson biretta and robes: hearty applause. Then Union Leader Lech Walesa, the improbable hero of last summer's strikes, bundled in his customary duffel coat: tumultuous applause. After a minute of silence, the city's church bells began to peal, and ship sirens wailed from the port, a keening cry that sent shivers through the crowd. The names of those who died at Gdansk and Gdynia in 1970 were read aloud, with the workers shouting back after each one "Yes, he is still among us!" Walesa lit a memorial flame, which at once burned brightly despite a light drizzle. Said he: "This monument was erected for those who were killed, as an admonition to those in power. It embodies the right of human beings to their dignity, to order and to justice."

It was an extraordinary sight, this huge throng bathed in floodlights with the bifurcated sculpture reaching for the inky sky. But the occasion was even more extraordinary for its message. With the world anxiously looking on, representatives of union and church and state sat together on the podium, unified as Poles despite their differences, all hoping to change the face of Communism without bringing on Soviet intervention. "Our country needs internal peace," said Walesa. "I call on you to be prudent and reasonable."

Similar calls for restraint were heard at commemorative ceremonies last week in Gdynia and Szczecin, the other flash points of the 1970 revolts. The observances themselves could have been construed as a challenge to Moscow, but the Kremlin was apparently prepared to swallow them, for the sake of helping the Polish Communist Party reassert its authority. After weeks of roller-coaster crisis, leaders of the party and Solidarity, the foundation of Poland's independent unions, appear to have reached at least a temporary meeting of minds. One White House aide, delighted that the threat of an immediate Soviet invasion appears to have passed, declared last week in Washington: "Walesa has surpassed Wallenda in pulling off the biggest tightrope act in history." Nonetheless, Soviet divisions on the Polish frontier and in East Germany remained on top alert, ready to pounce if unrest flared -- or if the Warsaw government of Party Boss Stanislaw Kania simply could not control the popular demand for more freedom and a better life.

Poland poses the gravest threat to the Soviet Union since it forcibly formed the East bloc after World War II. Indeed, events there have, in a sense, stripped the clothes right off the empire. Walesa and his colleagues in the Solidarity leadership know that they are, as it were, condemned to Communism; their basic goal is not to reject the system but to make it work better. Nonetheless, the workers' revolt shouts out Communism's economic and ideological failures and reminds the world that the glue of Soviet hegemony is force and intimidation, not shared purpose. Says Seweryn Bialer, head of Columbia University's Research Institute on International Change: "Previous challenges to Soviet control have come from above, from the leaders of satellite nations. The Polish challenge comes from below, from the workers, the only class of which the Soviet Union is afraid."

It is not surprising that Poles, alone among East bloc peoples, are trying to shake up Communism. Rebellion is a dominant strain in Polish history, often against Russia and usually with catastrophic results. Russia helped partition Poland out of existence in the 18th century, and Polish uprisings were crushed by Catherine the Great in 1794, Nicholas I in 1831 and Alexander II in 1864. Poles accuse the Soviets of murdering 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest during World War II and of standing idly by while the Nazis brutally put down a heroic uprising in Warsaw by Poland's underground Home Army. These bitter memories make the present subservience to Moscow even more humiliating.

Rebellion is a natural outgrowth of the Polish character -- ebullient, romantic, ready to defend national pride at the drop of a kapelusz, and ironic enough to look forward to a potent drink right afterward. Sums up a Polish woman: "We can only be compared with the Irish." A Western diplomat who has served in Poland puts it differently: "The Poles are a bunch of anarchists." That may be overstating matters, but it is true that the Poles bend less willingly to Soviet domination than any other satellite. The Catholic Church, which has nurtured the Polish spirit when outside powers have tried to extinguish it, commands their allegiance in a way that Moscow and the Polish Communist Party never could.