By F. M. Bonicelli Verrina
PREAMBLE.
On September 6, 1980, Stanisław Kania (who became closer to the Centre during the 70s, for Edward Gierek’s will) became First Secretary of Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP), after the August strike in Gdańsk and other Polish cities, and the negotiations between the Party, represented there by Mieczysław Jagielski (First Deputy Prime Minister and once Gomułka’s Minister of Agriculture), and the strikers, in Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk, about the Twenty-One Demands directed to the Party, on safety, salaries, right of strike, reduction of export (one of responsibles for the increase of prices), written by, among the others, the notorious historian of Middle Age, Bronisław Geremek; both the sides were supported by two commissions of experts. Also in Szczecin negotiations took place between the strikers and the Party man Kazimierz Barcikowski. For Lech Wałęsa that was “the first stage of Poland’s transformation into a pluralist system”1.
Just on July 1, 1980, the Polish Government announced that the price of food-stuffs would rise and in response to that announcement, a wave of labour strikes spread throughout the country, specially in those sectors vital for the payment of Polish debts (as coal mines and shipyards), increased after oil crisis of 19732. One of the reasons was also the fire of he activist and Hero of Labour, Anna Walentynowicz
As said by the Czechoslovak writer Eduard Goldstucker to the Italian journalist Franco Bertone3, Soviets did not resolve yet the complex of Kronštadt4, as clearly emerged from the words written by the Russian Ambassador in Poland, Boris Aristov, in August 1980: Poland’s present situation recalls the year 1921 in the Soviet Union: the struggle of the Bolsheviks with anarcho-syndicalists5. In more proper words the Ambassador personified the Soviet fear of the “ghost” of those sailors, brutally repressed by Lev Trockij, in 1921, and all those ones, then, who rejected the idea of bureaucratic revolution6, so defined by Polish sociologist Edward Abramowski (in 1918), as an irony of the fate, the same ones then known as trockijsts7, all around the world, persecuted by their same Party comrades, as in Spanish civil war, as in pro-USSR Jorge Videla’s Argentina8, where the Argentinian Communist Party supported the Junta and military persecution of trockijsts.
It’s not a case the special persecution reserved, by Iosif Stalin, to Jewish Labour Bund of Poland9, and then, to all the communists having similar ideas, specially if Jewish themselves, for fear of a “zionist conspiracy”10. A common accuse by KGB towards the Polish dissidents as Adam Michnik, Bronisław Geremek11, the partisan hero of Warsaw Ghetto’s Uprising, Marek Edelman, or the founder of Red Scoutism, Jacek Kuroń, the writers Kazimierz and Marian Brandys, for what concerns the Oleg Gordevskij’s revelations12. A “zionist conspiracy” eventually endorsed by Edward Raczynski13’s Government in exile, in London, and maybe led by catholic Bishops.
In facts, if in March, 1981, Kania publicly repudiated anti-semitism, after December 13, 1981, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Army’s newspaper and Trybuna Ludu, often used classical anti-semitic leit-motiven like “Jewish chauvinism” or “Jewish masons”, specially in order to beat Professor Geremek14.
While some works of the national poet Adam Mickiewicz were still banned, the Protocols of Zion were re-published. This is an important fact also to relate with the anti-Israel Soviet foreign policy.
On September 3, 1980, a top secret note from KGB, as to say from Jurij Andropov, who was more independent and autonomous after the beginning of catastrophic war in Afghanistan, and because of the state of illness of Leonid Brežnev, gave the instruction to PUWP’s Secretary to develop a new role for the military, recommending the Army’s Political Directorate should provide new cadres for Party leadership15, as to say, opening the way to Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski16 (already Minister of Defense and Prime Minister since February 11, 1981), together with other three Generals with ministerial position17, preparing a progressive substitution of civilians (the military coup marginated the Party itself), and to introduce legislation allowing the conscription of students and recent graduates and to militarise all factories. But with the American threaten of increasing American-Chinese military collaboration, eventually selling advanced weaponry to China. It was Zbigniew Brzeziński, the Polish US National Security Advisor, who strongly believed in the project to enhance Soviet phobia of encirclement18.
The aim of Kania was certainly to regain popular trust in the Party through some economic reform and improving the general situation, trying at the same time to re-assure Moscow and to put in a corner the extremists, Tadeusz Grabski and Stefan Olszowski, who were asking for violent repression. On the side of the strikers to marginate the “extremists” of the KOR (the organization for workers self-defense) and the nationalist faction of Marian Jurczyk, Leszek Moczulski and Andrzej Gwiazda, trying to support, instead, the moderate Lech Wałęsa.
Kania’s aim was also to find support in other communist parties abroad, but without compromising the dialogue with Moscow and avoiding to worry Jurij Andropov, Leonid Brežnev and Andrej Gromiko too much. A very hard item: the Polish masses come out in their millions (probably more than eight) and the Red Army ready on the Eastern border.
USSR threatened to reduce the supplies of natural gas, phosphorus, iron, cotton and mainly petrol, of more than the 50%. A very difficult threaten to bear in a situation already very difficult, with prices increasing also because of the private sector, a poor harvest19, a State’s heavy industry unable to produce objects of consumption people were asking for20 (and provided just by extremely expensive Pewex shops21 selling imported goods from West), members of PUWP leaving the Party for Solidarność, people queuing for meat, bread, alcohol and gasoline, protesting for censorship imposed by a close and corrupted bureaucracy, in the contest of a considerable debt with Western Countries and banks22.
On October 30, 1980, after first Kania’s visit to Moscow, the TASS communiqué referred to a “complete unanimity of views”, signifying Soviet agreement on the replacement of Gierek, while the Czechoslovak Rude Pravo began to accuse Kania’s liberal attitude, making comparisons with 1968 Spring of Prague, adding an escalation of attacks against Solidarność23.
A first success of Kania was achieved on November 10, in order to try to avoid further protests, when the statute of Solidarność was approved by the Supreme Court, including the principle of freedom of association, with the right to collective bargaining, in order “to protect the jobs, dignity and interests of workers in especially justified cases”24. New trade unions (as new unofficial newspapers) were springing up around Poland, as a basis of future political pluralism, and there was also a breathing space, for the Party, for divide et impera. Years later, Jaruzelski accused Solidarność not to have accepted, in November 1981, a common table of discussion with other minor unions25.
Kania’s principal concern was to find a way to institutionalise Solidarność, making it co-responsible for resolving the country’s problems. The Gdańsk Agreement agreed the purpose to provide working people with appropriate means for exercising control and expressing their opinions.
Ordinary members of the PUWP began bombarding Warsaw demanding a IX Party Congress, urgently and under a new voting system26. For Kania the issue was simply to reassert basic principles of Leninism: the concept of democratic centralism and the leading role of the Party in new conditions of needed consolidation of all “healthy forces” around the “Centre”, but facing the “allies”, from the Hungarian friend Kádár János27, to the dangerous and suspicious East-German Erich Honecker, passing through the total indifference of Romanian Nicolae Ceauşescu, on October 30, Leonid Brežnev accused Kania to have failed in having the “decisive influence we had all been hoping for”28, but Brežnev also assured Kania that they would never intervene without his consensus29. Just as said once, already, to Aleksander Dubček.
As referred by Col. Ryszard Kuklinski (the Polish CIA informer), instead, the supreme commander of the Warsaw Pact, Gen. Viktor Kulikov, became in late November, 1980, a regular visitor to the Polish capital and to the Soviet Embassy, where he managed to assemble an alternative to the Kania leadership, willing to suppress the internal opposition by armed forces, in accordance with instructions from Moscow, preceding a large scale invasion by Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces. For this reason it is impossible to believe Jaruzelski had not thought to military coup until December 1981. Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs was already preparing Martial Law since March 16, 1981, at least30. And Kania was absolved by Warsaw Court for this fact, after a trial in 201231.
On December 1, 1980, two Polish officers of high rank travelled to Moscow, to finalise the invasion plan: Poland would be entered by Soviet, Czechoslovak and East-German divisions on the pretext of “Soyuz 81″, the Baltic would be blockaded by East-German Navy32. A sort of national revenge for Oder-Neisse boundary and for exploited German minority in western Poland?33
In November Kania dismissed 500 Party functionaries, reporting this to the VII Plenum (on December 1-2, 1980) telling he chose for accomodation and renewal, as for the defense of Socialism, accusing Edward Gierek for ignoring the laws of economics and for disregarding critical opinions, admitting many opportunities of last Plenum had been wasted34.
On December 4, Kania announced to the Central Committee: The fate of our nation and our country hangs in the balance35. On December, 5, at Warsaw Pact Summit, Honecker recalled a conversation in 1968, in Dresden, with Aleksander Dubček, who tried to convince him that what was happening in Czechoslovakia was not a counter-revolution but a “process of democratic revival of Socialism”. Honecker ended his accuse saying as a threat: everybody knows what happened later36. While Kania, defended by the First Secretary of the Hungarian Party, tried to make his audience understand that in Poland there were real problems ignored for years by the Party, the First Secretary of Bulgarian Party, Todor Žyvkov, and the First Secretary of Czechoslovak Party, Gustav Husak, openly accused the interferences of the West and mainly the Eurocommunism and the Yugoslav Party of unloyal intervention in the question, with the intent of giving their own interpretation of Polish facts, trying to influence the course also in the other countries of Warsaw Pact37.
This is the reason why it is impossible to agree with Jiři Pelikan, Czechoslovak communist refugee in Italy, when he accuses in his memories (which were very interesting in telling his witness of a case of political margination) the Italian Communist Party of shyness in its intervention38, because it was asked by Kania himself and by his dangerous position among his colleagues, to intervene with moderation, as also Jimmy Carter did. And in any case ICP did a lot, differently from the position of Georges Marchais, leader of the French Communist Party, who stated that the general balance of the conquests achieved by USSR in its history was at the end optimistic39.
On the day of Moscow summit no strikes took place. Also Solidarność chose for accomodation.
On March 24, 1981, also the Farmers’ Union became legal and Kania noted in the Politburo meeting: agreement to register the union today, means agreement to elections to the Sejm tomorrow40. Few months later Andrzej Wajda received the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for Man of Iron, which dealt with the formation of the Free Trade Unions, in the contest of July 1981 Solidarność hunger marches (with photographs of beaten members) and the foundation of Bolesław Bierut club, by the stalinist faction of PUWP, on the other side, greeted with enthusiasm by the TASS41.
The majority of the first dissidents came for sure from Socialism42, as Modzelewski, Kuroń, Geremek, Michnik, as it already happened in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, the dissent was really firstly a kind of revival of Socialism43: getting life from Leszek Kołakowski’s rediscovery of the “first” pre-1848 liberal Karl Marx44, from the Lwów philosopher (of Jewish origin) Adam Schaff’s possibility of a pluralist socialist system based on the idea of Marxism as a science (not a dogma) to be tested by people and general happiness, i.e. omnibus dubitandum est. This kind of ideas were looked with great hope and interest by eurocommunists from Western Europe, as the last chance to show a different face of Real Socialism. While the whole world was assisting to the suicide of Communism45, helped by the old Mikhail Suslov’s attempts to conceive new intermediary steps in the model of marxist revolution46, in order to justify why Russian Empire used the revolution to save its interests and borders, transforming itself in a gigantic sorrowful conservative monster, making capitalistic wars all around the world, with the excuse of Pacifism. The accuse of non-orthodoxy was obviously to turn against the “orthodox” ones47, those who believed in “work for work”48.
The journalist of L’Unità (official newspaper of Italian Communist Party, founded in 1924, by Antonio Gramsci, banned in Czechoslovakia by Gustav Husak) Luciano Antonetti, critical member of Italian Communist Party and personal friend of Aleksander Dubček, remembered as, after 1989, the Czechoslovak leader was found “guilty” by new political leaders, as Václav Klaus, all concentrated on lustrece and “de-communistization”, in order to take all the merits of freedom, for the fact of having been a communist and for the fact of having been unable to escape his status of prisoner de facto and take part to the after-1969 dissent and to the protests and denounces for civil rights violations49. It’s not surprising if someone as Modzelewski felt the necessity, in 1991, to create a new political group in the Sejm, as Solidarność Pracy, with other nine MP, in order to remind his old comrades, as Jacek Kuroń, that Solidarność was a trade union for the rights of workers and had nothing in common with new drastic economic politics of Leszek Balcerowicz, and to criticize the policy of “the lowest salaries and the highest prices since the end of war” was not a communist fantasy50.
In Antonetti’s opinion, the West didn’t want seriously a reform of the communist system, as told by Modzelewski, in Poland there was not one Dubček or one Jiři Pelikan, but an entire new generation of youngs, for the first time workers and students together, in alternative to the leadership, but it was more convenient to use Central Europe as a big laboratory for New Economy, also in the opinion of the American Nobel, Joseph Stiglitz.
NATO AND EUROCOMMUNISM. THE ITALIAN CASE: A CHANCE FOR LIBERALISM.
On December 29-31, 1977, US President Jimmy Carter visited Poland and his National Security Advisor, the Polish Zbigniew Brzezinski, had been very careful in organizing the visit in Warsaw, passing simbolically through all the topic memorial places of Resistance, specially the unofficial ones of the heroes of Ghetto’s Uprising and of Armia Krajowa, then obscured by pro-Moscow Lublin Committee and Armia Ludowa.
In late July 1980, Romuald Spasowski, Polish Ambassador in USA, a lifelong communist, met Brzeziński in Washington, in order to notice him that in Warsaw and Moscow they were aware of his telephone conversations with the Vatican about some “great deal”.
On December 19, 1981, six days after Jaruzelski’s coup, Spasowski called the US State Department to announce his defection and request of asylum, for him and his family (his daughter and his son-in-law were Solidarność activists)51.
In his letter to NATO Allies, on Poland, on September 1, 1980, Carter wrote:
Events in Poland are of such importance that I would like very much to have your personal assessment of them, and also to share mine with you. Because these events involve a sizable country in the very center of Europe which inevitably plays an important role in the present communist system, what is going on in Poland could precipitate far reaching consequences for East-West relations and even for the future of Soviet bloc itself. In my view we in the West have adopted the correct position: to be sympathetic to Polish efforts to reform the system, but to urge also restraint by all parties concerned, and particularly to stress that the matter is for the Poles themselves to resolve, without any foreign interference. My administration has been very careful not to say or do anything that could be seized upon by the Soviets as a pretext for intervention, and I know this has been your position as well. The best outcome from every standpoint would involve accomodation between the authorities and the Polish people, without violence. Such an accomodation could well transform the character of the Polish system, leading possibly to a more liberal and democratic mode. We must of course be concerned about possible Soviet reactions to the events in Poland, but at the moment, it appears that Mr. Gierek has at least Soviet acquiescence for his course of action. My impression is that the majority of Poles also favor evolutionary changes without recourse to violence, and I am heartened by the conciliatory approach adopted publicly by the Pope (John Paul II) and Cardinal (Stefan ) Wyszynski52. Certainly the economic side of the Polish situation is also important for us to consider. Poland will undoubtedly continue to want economic and financial assistance from the West. I believe our aid should be designed to encourage the Poles to undertake a more fundamental and systematic reform of their economic system. I would very much welcome your thoughts on this problem, which also has relevance to the problems faced by other Eastern Europeans as well. I also wanted to take this opportunity to inform you of our latest contacts with the Polish Ambassador in Washington, Spasowski, a senior man who had previously served as deputy minister of Foreign Affairs. Spasowski has been in to see Warren Christopher twice in the last several days (…) I think it is extremely important for us to keep in touch as the situation in Poland develops. I look forward to hearing from you, and hope that we can also keep in close touch at working levels53.
Carter seemed to believe in the moderator role of Wyszynski and the Pope, highly influentials on the moderates of the two sides, Carter seemed to advocate the possibility of PUWP to reform itself and that the situation should not be forced and be let to develop gradually to a more liberal way, maybe with the chance to liberalise, step by step, all the Eastern Europe.
One of the first problems of Italy, and of many other Western Countries, was, as discovered by Adam Michnik, by talking with an Italian friend, that, in the 70s and 80s, no leftist publisher was ready to publish a book about the truth on Katyn, for example. Italian communist leader Gian Carlo Pajetta, wrote in his memories, that would be stupid to deny that each one in the ICP had been stalinist54. But already in 1975, at the Conference of Helsinki, contemporary to the Letter of 59 (a protest against pro-Soviet changes in Polish constitution, signed by major intellectual dissidents from Poland), the Czechoslovak problem was mentioned by Italian and Spanish Communist Parties.
The new role played since 1975 by the ICP is also evident by the fact that Jacek Kuroń, on July 20, 1976, wrote a direct open appeal to Secretary Enrico Berlinguer (1972-1984).
In the opinion of communist historian Eric Hobsbawm it is absolutely not right to talk of stagnation, talking about Brežnev’s era (1964-1982), and it is demonstrated by facts55; we should consider that even Mikhail Gorbačёv emerged in those years, when in Caucasus he began his “revolution”, from new corageous and successful agricultural methods56, protected and sponsored by the old First Secretary of CPSU and by Andropov. Another important argument is that the national ways to
Communism, already evident since 1947, exploded in those two decades.
In the summer 1968, the young Czechoslovak academician Radovan Richta, called by Dubček to write the political program, stated that the Czechoslovak Communist Party should give a political program, scientifically founded, to the Czechoslovak people, refusing an arbitrary, monopolistic, monolitic role of the Party and refusing the principle of leadership of CPSU. The program should be an analysis of international situation and contradictions, new international perspectives given by technical and cultural development in modern world, a comparison between communist ideas and other political experiences, first of all, a political program should not be a prescription of life. The international communist movement should be able to understand the hopes of our workers and our nations57. In his opinion the communist parties have lost the concept that Marxism is not a fine but an instrument and its fundamental aim is to free humans, under the light of culture and civilization: socialization can not mean socialization of misery58. Societies should progressively diminish physical labour by increasing mental labour.
These brave political statements offered to international Communism a chance of turning point to Liberalism, or at least to original Marxism, showing that a change was impossible but out of the control of USSR. Leadership and line could not be dictated by Moscow.
Italy represented for many years the country which gave the best hopes to Stalin, in the West, and ICP was a typical example of a party loyal to Stalin’s dictations, but also able to conquer a wide part of the electorate, to re-assure the other political forces and democratically penetrate the State. Also the foundation of an important city, in USSR, as Togliattigrad (named by the name of the Secretary of ICP, died in 1964) is not meaningless. USSR has been one of the most important economic partners of Italy and also FIAT59, major Italian industry, produced cars in Soviet Union and Poland, like models 126 and zigulì.
At the Italian political elections of 1976, three years after the assassination attempt of Enrico Berlinguer (Secretary of ICP), in Bulgaria, the ICP had the largest and most variegate electorate ever had by a communist party in the West, with the 33,4% of ballots, breaking the Italian political immobility60, and ICP somehow reached the historical message of 1968, beginning a prolific dialogue with other political forces, like the Church61, and occasionally Italian Liberal Party too.
In internal policy ICP strongly condemned tragic phenomenon of red terrorism and conquered a wide part of Italian bourgeoisie and middle-class through the “moral question”, i.e. a classical liberal subject: the denounce of corruption and inadequacy of the leading Italian party: the Demo-Christians (DC). While in France Marchais was still accusing the Socialist Party of “burgeoise corruption” and in Spain the Spanish Communist Party was still emerging from decades of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and so it was still strongly linked to stalinist members like pasionaria Dolores Ibarruri and still lived a “prisoner condition”, as well as Communist Party of Portugal.
In foreign policy the ICP kept, since 70s, a position of “pacific Atlantism”, as defined by Pierre Hassner62, recognising the importance of international conquests of Atlantism and the Italian placement in NATO. In addition to this, ICP sponsored a new form of Internationalism, sponsoring for a strong European Union (in the spirit of Geremek’s studies), as a third force between the two blocs, but without leaving Thirdworldism and the principle of Pacifism, often falling in contradictions, in cases like Vietnamese Soviet-sponsored invasion of criminal khmer Cambodia (ICP spoke against the aggression). During the invasion of Somalia, by communist Ethiopia, were communist Somalians (with historical links with ICP for colonial past) asked the ICP to intervene in favor of Somalia, against Soviet ally Ethiopia, and they were quite ignored, while Bettino Craxi (Italian socialist Premier in the years 1983-1987) supported till the end the Somali dictator Siad Barre, who studied at Carabinieri School in Florence.
In Angolan civil war ICP supported the petrodollars cause of Agostinho Neto against freedom fighter Jonas Savimbi. ICP maintained then a constant support to Palestinian fight, also enforced by strategic economic interests of Italy in Middle-East and commercial links of Italy with Iraq and Libya.
Craxi made, in contrast and competition with Eurocommunism, a Mediterranean Eurosocialism, with an important entente with North-African socialist Presidents, opening Italy to a Mediterranean fundamental role, then bringing Pelikan to Euro Parliament and imposing Italian Socialist Party in a strong international campaign for civic rights, in a direct competition with ICP, even by attacking Leninism as an anti-thesis to pluralism, replying to Berlinguer from the columns of L’Espresso, socialist periodical of Italy.
By the way, ICP lost radical groups like the group of the intellectuals of Manifesto, Armando Cossutta, the nearest to USSR, or the smaller groups as Lotta Comunista, which already stood for Budapest protest, in 1956, and were linked to Fourth International, Trockijsm, Posadism, and believed in a stronger adherence to original Internationalism together with the moral necessity to definitively cut the links with “American and Soviet Imperialism”.
Differently from the French communists, Berlinguer refused the deal with military Argentina of Videla, even if invited by the Argentinian Communist Party’s Secretary, Athos Fava, and promoted several Parliamentary interpellations about the sort of many Italian desaparecidos, as for the cause of civil rights in Czechoslovakia and Poland, sometimes together with other parties or groups, like Independent Left (the group of Ferruccio Parri).
It was anyway still possible, in ICP, that a young communist journalist, maybe working for L’Unità or Rinascita, willing to feel more free to speak his mind and to have the possibility to write also for other “no-aligned” newspapers and periodicals, invented pseudonyms, pen-names, to use and then was asked by the Party to reply himself, as told Francesco Cataluccio, a writer and expert of Eastern Europe, remembering of his experience of ICP member and supporter of dissidents in Poland, in 1980. Also the translations in Italian language of the Czechoslovak Milan Kundera’s books were published under the protection of pseudonyms63.
In this contest, since 1975, ICP refused the financing from USSR and Berlinguer, on November 7, 1977, invited in Moscow for the solemnity of the Sixtieth Anniversay of Revolution, declared that Democracy, freedom and pluralism are universal values and should not exist states ideologically based. A speech deeply criticized by Pravda and Rude Pravo, as openly appreciated by Jimmy Carter64. Giorgio Napolitano, prominent figure of ICP and later first communist President of Italian Republic, born in a liberal family, was in those years the maker of a stronger deal with SPD in Federal Germany and with French Socialist Party and British Labour, but a real opening to Italian Socialist Party was never realized, prefering a government together with DC, the agreement between Enrico Berlinguer and Aldo Moro, “Historical Compromise”, in June 1977.
Another important factor was that in the 60s and 70s young Italian communists rediscovered old founder of ICP Antonio Gramsci (who, by the way, had an important exchange with the liberal activist and highly influential intellectual Piero Gobetti), abandoned to death, by Stalin, in a fascist prison, in Italy, in 1937. Valdo Magnani, who refused the guide-role of CPSU and was expelled by the ICP, and Amadeo Bordiga and Umberto Terracini (of Jewish origins), who early criticized Soviet imperialism and the abolition of pluralism, as proletarian dictatorship, had great importance as examples, like Altiero Spinelli, the anti-stalinist communist who wrote the famous program for the foundation of EU. They were marginated by Palmiro Togliatti, the Komintern man of Stalin, in Italy, by the way, author, in 1947, as Minister of Justice, of the amnesty for Italian war criminals.
Even other different political experiences were rediscovered, like the anarchist partisan community founded by brothers Cervi in the countryside of Reggio Emilia, all killed during the war by the fascists. Romolo Caccavale, a prominent journalist of L’Unità, began his researches about the tragedy of Italian communists killed by Stalin in USSR during the war.
In addition to all this, also the birth of many catholic groups and catholic workers or students’ associations communist-oriented, like Francesco Demitry’s “Christians for Socialism”, was a relevant fact in Italian politics, together with the rediscovery of an international leftist Catholicism, in Latin America and Eastern Europe. In this contest the translation of the works by Jozef Tischner and Adam Michnik.
On the other hand, in the Italy of 70s and 80s, the alternatives were represented by other parties, like the Italian Socialist Party, which offered to Italy the first partisan President of the Republic: Sandro Pertini (1978-1985), even if it was moving to “Right positions” with its new leader Bettino Craxi, or the Radical Party, with a historical figure of Resistance like the Senator Leo Valiani, of Hungarian Jewish origins, one of the founders of the Republic, who was persecuted by Fascism in Italy, was with the trockijsts in Mexico and fought in the Resistance in Milan, he also advocated the Italianity of Trieste and Fiume. Also Italian Liberal Party had prominent figures of partisan as Manlio Brosio, who had been Ambassador of Italy in USSR from 1947 to 1952 and General Secretary of NATO from 1964 to 1971.
In 1962, the Italian Socialist Party, still strongly linked with the Italian Communist Party, out of Italian Governments since 1948, made a government together with DC, the Centre-Left. The DC Premiers Amintore Fanfani and, two years later, Aldo Moro, representing the Left of their party, put the basis for a catholics-communists political dialogue and cooperation, interrupted since 194865, openly conceding socialist-like reforms, as the nationalization of electricity, the agrarian reform, the regional governments, the unification of school, but fundamentally realizing in Italy an exclusive leading role for DC, which lasted until 1994, and as well depowering the opposition. In the summer of 1964 an attempt of military coup in Italy was blocked by delations and Premier Aldo Moro opposed the Secret of State66.
A catholic-socialist compromise was avoided in Sicily in the historical political season of Milazzismo, in 1958, when DC liberal member Silvio Milazzo, in opposition to a regional Government of compromise between major line of DC and Italian Socialist Party, was able to assemble an alliance with the communist sicilian leader Emanuele Macaluso, not a stalinist and future director of L’Unità, and with Liberal Party and Republicans. Milazzo was excommunicated by his party but put the basis for a dialogue between Italian Liberalism and Italian Communism, which went on with up and downs and reached a peak in 1974 when ICP and ILP made a pro-divorce alliance (Baslini-Fortuna), in the occasion of referendum on divorce, against DC and MSI (the Social Movement, the fascist period nostalgic party), i.e. a coalition against the major conservative political forces in Italy, bringing the new laws about family of 1975, which gave the same juridical position to wife and husband, and the abortion, in 1981.
We should say ICP generally prefered the dialogue with Catholicism (as someone said, they represented the two Churches of Italy), than with ILP, except some occasion, even for the small percentages of ILP (before Fascism, the major Italian party) and its little influence after the war (except giving the first President of the Republic, Luigi Einaudi, in 1948). Even after 1989 the successors of ICP, PDS (Democratic Party of Left), DS (Democrats of Left) and then PD (Democratic Party), rarely attracted Italian liberals diaspora (as in case of successor of Giovanni Malagodi, Valerio Zanone, who entered in PD) and were very much interested, instead, in attracting the big number of Left DC.
Giovanni Malagodi, successor of Luigi Einaudi, economist and Secretary of ILP since 1958, opposed to the compromise of 1962, because Socialist Party was still stalinist and then because he denounced a clear authoritarian compromise between two conservative and demagogic political forces, with no intentions to share a path to Reformism but just the will to share a political hegemony. This parliamentary speech, on March 9, 1962, had a strong meaning if we consider that Malagodi increased of 5-4% the liberal votes at the following elections, specially from the middle-class.
Giovanni Malagodi, twice President of Liberal International, was deeply convinced of the possibility, as a liberal due, to dialogue with Communism, to try to liberalise Communism, showing to Warsaw Pact Countries that the workers’ dreams were realized just in a contest of Democracy, pluralism and freedom67. For this reason, he always categorically refused a compromise with conservatives and MSI in virtue of common anti-communist feelings.
In his speech Libertà e Comunismo, Freedom and Communism, of 1961, Malagodi, who also advocated the participation of communists in the Control Committee of Italian State Television RAI, for a democratic strong coherence and conviction, said that often Communism represents a wrong path to freedom, an impatient Liberalism, the aim of liberals should be convince communist world of the primacy of individual liberties. While, for Malagodi, Fascism is an act of bullying, even more contradictory and not rarely the two ideologies make an alliance.
Indro Montanelli, who was a very popular Italian journalist of liberal attitude, openly said, after the Polish facts of August, he would not promote and support the Polish dissidence, and also Oriana Fallaci, another journalist of similar positions, showed some suspect towards the Polish dissidents, after her interviews to them.
Also the ILP was author, since August 26, 1980, of several parliamentary interpellations about Polish facts, as sometimes Radicals, Republicans and occasionally MSI68.
THE 1981-1989 POLISH FACTS THROUGH THE ITALIAN PRESS.
On September 18, 1981, the Italian national newspaper La Stampa, announced the emergency sitting of the Central Committee of PUWP, in Warsaw, just one month before Kania’s resignation, supposing on Moscow’s instructions. On October 18, La Stampa emphasized the dramatic resignation, in the title: Kania costretto a dimettersi. Scioperi proibiti per tre anni. (Kania obliged to resign. Strikes forbidden for three years)69. As Carlo Galluzzi, ICP Department of Press and Propaganda, declared after December 13: An imposed return to the Past70. The “mistakes” were not repaired yet.
Kania, who never assured USSR to take more serious measures against dissidence, and went on in the dialogue with the Church and with the trade unions, after an extraordinary Party Congress of success and renewal, but with a Party still fragmented, was probably discovered speaking his mind about USSR, by a KGB bug, and forced to resign, on October 18.
L’Unità wondered, on October 20, 1981, if Poland moves to a pluralist Government? trusting of Kania’s replacement by Prime Minister Jaruzelski, as a positive turning point. Jaruzelski was known as a moderate, but more decisive than Kania. The facts brought then L’Unità, on December 14, 1981, after the disillusion of the terrible Sunday, to a first page title like: A dramatic turning in the crisis proclaimed by Jaruzelski. Power taken by a military committee of “salvation”. It was the way for ICP to take immediately the distances and express its disapproval. A great relevance given to the fact that the militaries did not arrest just thousands of syndicalists and dissidents, but also Gierek and Schaff, who few months before asked for the Nobel Award for Peace to Jaruzelski. Suspended the constitution, the associations, trade unions and all the press71. Cities and factories militarized, as in the plan made by Kulikov and General Czesław Kiszczak, Minister of the Interior Affairs since July.
In January, 1982, Berlinguer, in front of ICP Central Committee, proclaimed that the “propulsive momentum” of October Revolution, ran out, and Achille Occhetto (future Secretary) began to develop interest in recovering another revolutionary reference, found in the French Revolution of 1789, the fight for civic rights, with a new interest in it by Italian historians.
A great ICP promoted question was in that moment concertazionismo, the idea that all very important technical, economical and social subjects should be discussed and decided, in concert, by enterpreneurs, trade unions and State together. An example for the East were in this contest FIAT and Olivetti. Also the Italian catholic socialist associations promoted this idea of socialization, like “Civitas Humana” of Giuseppe Dossetti, one of the founders of the Republic, priest, partisan, politician, who was a fundamental interlocutor in the dialogue between Left and Church in Italy, a vehicle of socialist ideals in the Church, with books like La Chiesa e lo stato democratico, The Church and the democratic state, and opposed the entry of Italy in the NATO, in 1948.
The matter was at that point to choose a sort of Italian Bad Godesberg, by accepting capitalistic system (as Napolitano proposed) and search the alliance with Craxi’s Eurosocialism, attempting to stop Italian socialists’ move to Right, or to continue on the path of “moderate anti-capitalism” and “moderate Atlantism”, which gave great results in first European elections, but condemned ICP to a slow decline and one end, after the complete collapse of international Communism, in 198972. In this season also the new direction of L’Unità, given to Emanuele Macaluso, a communist convinced modernizer, had some relevance.
In any case, after the death of the charismatic leader Enrico Berlinguer, happened suddenly, in front of thousands people, during a speech in Padova, on June 11, 1984, just four months after his opposite Andropov’s death, the successor, as Secretary of ICP, Alessandro Natta, made steps back. He arrived to affirm, in April 1988, that the declaration of the end of propulsive momentum of October Revolution, was to refer to a specifical historical moment, the December 13, 1981, to Jaruzelski and Brežnev, but lost efficacy and decayed as behaviour of ICP, by the moment that in USSR, with the new leadership, rose up again in a democratic way to Socialism, in the new contest of perestrojka and glasnost’ (apart for keeping secret the Černobyl incident).
This Natta’s statement was, in the opinion of Paolo Galimberti, journalist of Italian radical newspaper La Repubblica, a declaration which dangerously brought again the ICP beyond the limits drawn by Berlinguer (represented by moral question and so, the complete acceptance of civic rights). Natta also hugged Gorbačёv, a ritual carefully avoided in the past, by Berlinguer. Natta also received a medal, the Order of October Revolution, and this moment evoked old Togliatti’s ICP. Also the use of “comrade” to speak to the First Secretary of CPSU was not less relevant73.
Probably, for Berlinguer, that dramatic declaration was not dictated by a reaction to the negative emotion of December 1981, but a definitive cut with USSR. The end of propulsive momentum was a heavy declaration, signifying, for coherence, a refusal of anything coming from USSR after that year, the start of a new independent path, something more than Sinatra doctrine (as national way to Communism was ironically called by new Soviet leadership), with no possibility of return or absolution for USSR, from ICP.
Natta’s statement, one decade after the maximum success of ICP’s way, the foundation of Eurocommunism, somehow declared the end of Eurocommunism itself.
The Soviet leadership as well, recognised the precious role played by Enrico Berlinguer, more than the rapprochement to Moscow, made by his successor. On June 11, 2014, former USSR Ambassador in Rome, Nikolaj Lunkov, defined Berlinguer
the “critical conscience” of USSR, the “best European communist leader, open and sincere”, showing that his role had a recognised relevance in the changes in Eastern Bloc. As the example of his funeral in Rome, with the participation of international communist autorities, who could see one million of free people, going freely to the funeral of a communist leader, in a Western Democracy74.
Even though, as Armando Cossutta, the critical conscience of Berlinguer, admitted in 1997 to Corriere della Sera, Boris Ponomarёv, prominent conservative member of Central Committee of CPSU, worked to divide the ICP, in 1983, in order to destroy and obscure Eurocommunism. As referred by Cossutta, he met Gian Carlo Pajetta, Celeste Negarville and Giacomo Pellegrini, the partisans in ICP, and talked about the loyalty of the US Communist Party, whose leader was in prison for five years and was able to conquer twelve thousand followers, and Pajetta replied that they three together had been for more than thirty years in prison and the ICP had more than two million votes.
So Ponomarёv went to meet Ludovico Geymonat, Italian red eminence, philosopher and mathematician, ideologue of the Italian stalinist Left group: Democrazia Proletaria, Proletarian Democracy, who assembled Rina Gagliardi and Mario Capanna, two journalists for the extreme Left, and proposed Cossutta to join a communist movement against Berlinguer’s line. Cossutta refused and loyally criticized Berlinguer within the Party and remained in the Party till its dissolution. In 1991 he founded the small party Comunisti Italiani. The other ones later founded a new minor party, Rifondazione Comunista, together with the syndicalist Fausto Bertinotti (friend of prominent figures of Italian finance), a party for a new foundation of Communism, after 1989, which twice allied with the Italian alliance of the Left and twice made those same Governments fall. Cossutta also remembered the loyalty of Honecker and Kádár. Kádár privately declared to Berlinguer that to take the ICP out from the international pro-Soviet parties made more difficult every renewal in Eastern Bloc, lacking the crucial Western reference75.
This episodes show, in positive and in negative, how much ICP was crucial for Communism in the West, being the original heart of Eurocommunism.
After the Natta’s visit in Moscow, Achille Occhetto, who was the successor at the Secretary, who participated to the days of the meeting between Jaruzelski and the Polish dissidents, lived the historical days of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and decreed the dissolution of ICP (November 12, 1989), on May 6, 1988, said to La Repubblica: For us Democracy is another thing76. Reasserting old positions.
On December 22, 1984, few months after the assassination of Jerzy Popiełuszko, La Repubblica titled: A strange Poland for Andreotti.
The Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giulio Andreotti, travelled to Poland and met together: Mieczysław Rakowski (Vice-Premier, liberal wing of PUWP), Stefan Olszowski (Minister of Foreign Affairs, dogmatic wing), and the two Solidarność founders Bronisław Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
The economical relations were also established again, after the break followed to December 13, 1981. Andreotti, considered De Gasperi’s heir, also established cultural links Italy-Poland and received the Laurea honoris causa in History from the University of Toruń (before him: Reza Pahlevi, laurea honoris causa cancelled on Khomeini’s request). There was the occasion for a homage to historical Italian first democratic Premier, after Fascism, Alcide De Gasperi, a symbol of Liberalism, devote Catholicism, Resistance and one of the European Union founders. In addition to all this, a homage to Popiełuszko’s grave and a meeting with Jaruzelski. The little Italian Ost-politik, on Pope’s footprints, ended the isolation of Warsaw77. Andreotti was in facts the first NATO Minister to visit the country and meet Jaruzelski, after the visit of socialist Premier of Greece, Andreas Papandreou, and after the cancellation of the programmed visit, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, FDR Minister of Foreign Affairs.
President of the Republic, Sandro Pertini, after the discovery of the tortured corpse of Jerzy Popiełuszko, said to be disgusted by that fact, and showed his horror in strong words directed to Jaruzelski, asking to clarify the episode. While in that occasion Natta expressed his condolences to the family of the priest, to the Church and to the Polish people, wishing a fast progress in the direction of truth and civic rights, as did Premier Bettino Craxi and Italian Socialist Party78.
L’Unità on November 7, 1984, affirmed, by the words of Romolo Caccavale: Someone wanted the chaos, a homage to the heroic figure of the priest, with the will to light what was behind the tragic episode. Caccavale, who followed in first line the Polish facts, since 1980, was aware that if dialogue would end, the assassins of Popiełuszko won.
The aim of ICP, together with the Italian Government and the Pope was in those days to do all the possible to promote and save the dialogue in Poland, who for sincere reasons, who for political reasons, who for economical reasons.
On December 27, in facts, the news of the arrest of the executioners had a great relevance on all Italian newspapers.
Not less relevant was the visit of Italian Premier, Craxi, to DDR, and his meeting with Erich Honecker, on July 11, 1984. Craxi declared that something had to move on and evolve in the apparent stagnation of relations between the two Blocs. Honecker was available to work for the retake of relations and exchanges, stating together that every action in this direction reduced the reciprocal fear and did much for Peace79.
In travels like this, and the following one, to Poland, we can see the clear belief of Italy, in 1980s, to follow the line of European Liberalism (embraced first by Berlinguer),
for a more important and more pregnant presence of EU in the world, opening to East, trying to represent an alternative to Ronald Reagan’s USA, within the West.
THE DOCUMENTS FROM ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY’S ARCHIVE AT FONDAZIONE GRAMSCI, ROME.
The following informations are taken from the ICP’s archive documents, conserved by Fondazione Antonio Gramsci, in Rome, concerning the years 1980, 1981, 1982.
The section of the Archive is Esteri (Foreign Affairs), under the voice: Polonia (Poland). The documents are conserved in microfilms.
The selection of papers to archive was made by the Secretary and the author of the main part of the section “Foreign Affairs” is of course the ICP’s Delegate for Foreign Affairs, who, in the years 1980-1982, was Antonio Rubbi, from Ferrara, a politician with a provincial and rural background, who took note of the most important episodes to inform the Secretary, as the meetings with the ambassadors or with the representatives of foreign parties, eventually conferences or articles too, together with the letters from the visits abroad of the members.
In an archive’s secret note to the Secretary, of September 25, 1976, Sergio Camillo Segre (a prominent member of the CC of ICP) mentioned a dinner with Gianni Agnelli (FIAT), Giovanni Malagodi and Antonio Giolitti (among the others) where he met Zbigniew Brzeziński, who said Jimmy Carter was very interested in the development of Eurocommunism.
In the summer of 1979 (when the Pope first visited Poland) Enrico Berlinguer deserted the Paris Conference of pro-USSR communist parties80 and visited China. Even if, after the assassination of Aldo Moro (one of the obscure, unresolved political crimes happened in the History of Italy), happened in 1978, renounced to the Historical Compromise with the Christian Democrats (DC).
In July 1980, Paolo Bufalini and Gian Carlo Pajetta travelled to Moscow and met Kirilenko, Zagladin and Ponomarёv, to try to explicate the positions of ICP, but being instead insulted, threatened and reprimanded, having also supported, in the last years before, the principle of balance, standing against both NATO and Soviet missiles in Europe.
On September 9, 1980, Enrico Berlinguer declared to the Central Committee: We must be cautious and prudent. If the Party (in Poland) will not drive the process, the situation could go out of control. It seems that Kania and the PUWP go in positive direction. But we shall not put the stamp on it and we shall not talk of Eurocommunism for it.
The crucial war between Iraq and Iran, started in September, gave reason to the eurocommunist prediction of the fall of bipolar system, aggravated by the following desertion of detente, by new US President, Ronald Reagan.
On November 20, 1980, the Direction of ICP sent a letter to the parties of Warsaw Pact, inviting to recognise the the protest as a reality from the mass, exhorting to renovate themselves and to recognise the new trade unions, in order to avoid the repetition of past tragic events, impossible to forget.
At the CC meeting, Giorgio Napolitano predicted catastrophic consequences for the ICP if something would go wrong in Poland, but Pajetta wondered: if in 1968 ICP supported Dubček’s course, who should stand for, in 1980, Kania or Wałęsa?
When Vadim Zagladin, Brežnev’s adviser, travelled to Rome, to talk about Poland with the Italian communists, he met Pajetta, who told him that an intervention, like in Czechoslovakia, in 1968, would be a catastrophe and Zagladin answered that ICP was a party, while parties in Warsaw Pact were States.
The idea of Kania of renovation without anarchy, as the hope of John Paul II, for a pacific transition in the East (expressed in Helsinki), were to fail under the “unavoidable use of force” mentioned by the Ambassador of DDR, in a note to Antonio Rubbi, on March 25, 198181.
1980
The first document which can be found in the section Esteri-Polonia, is a leaflet for an invitation to the public, at a conference, with the title: Il decennio di Gierek e l’attuale crisi polacca (The Gierek’s decade and the Polish crisis), on March 29, 1980, organized by the Institute Fondazione Antonio Gramsci, the ICP’s cultural institute, in Rome, with a surprising sense of the time and of the events which brought Poland to the great strikes of August. Cohordinator of the conference was Adriano Guerra, with speeches by Francesco Cataluccio, Franco Bertone, Carlo Boffito, Paolo Santacroce, Aldo Agosti, Claudio Napoleoni, Gaetano La Pira and others.
Adriano Guerra was an Italian partisan who during the war was deported in German lagers, then free for the arrival of the Soviets returned to Italy and joined the ICP. He left the ICP in 1956 and later returned in the Party but always in a critical attitude and being one of the first supporters and promoters of the dissidence in the Warsaw Pact Countries. In 2006 he wrote a biography of Berlinguer with a meaningful title: La Solitudine di Berlinguer, The Solitude of Berlinguer. Where he supports the idea that Berlinguer was abandoned in facts by the Party because many prominent members feared or refused a complete break with Moscow. Ota Sik, probably the most liberal among Dubcek’s friends, who advocated the end of State subsidies and the introduction of competition, in socialist States, and then became economical advisor of China, in his memories regretted just about the facts that Dubcek should have been less soft with the stalinist members in the Party, whose crimes become also evident by the investigations of Parliamentary Commissions. If probably Berlinguer too would have been less soft with the conservatives in ICP things would have maybe developed in different ways, specially after his famous speech in January 1977, the Austerity a chance to change Italy, a very revolutionary speech considering it was made by the most important leader of the Left, in Italy and EU.
For all the 70s, Italy had a prominent role in the Polish Economy, as importer of texile machines82, asked by Edward Gierek to promote the development of an industry of objects of larger consumption, in Poland, as, by the way, more western-like clothes. The presence of experts of Economy, like Napoleoni, who was also a promoter of dialogue between Church and Socialism, was dictated by a marxist sense of the impact of Economy on History, but probably also by the sense of the importance of Poland for Italian Export. By the way, the young Cataluccio was an expert of Poland and Eastern Europe, who also lived in Poland and Czechoslovakia, while Bertone was an expert of Polish Church, investigated in his book L’anomalia polacca. Agosti was a historian, expert of the History of Communism.
Pelikan, who was brought to Euro Parliament by Craxi, stated in his memories he had never been invited at these ICP’s conferences, probably for the ICP’s care to avoid the dissidents as the representatives of those regimes, but with the result to organize conferences of experts for other experts, refusing a larger debate with the witnesses and losing the possibility of a wider participation of the public.
After the facts of August, Luciano Antonetti, friend of Dubček, travelled to Prague, from September 22 to October 10.
In his message refers about a private meeting with Konstantin Zarodov (Department of Propaganda of CPSU), who said to him, that the Polish facts showed the inability of Polish cadres to resolve the economic problems and Poland represents an enormous expense for the Comecon. Probably the Hungarian Party sponsored an exportation of Hungarian example. Antonetti says that Czechoslovak Press attacks Gierek as Dubček. Antonetti writes also about the fourty-eight hours stop in the Country, imposed to a delegation of ICP representatives, in visit in Czechoslovakia.
It seems that the Government in Czechoslovakia is going to realize a strong crackdown against Charta 77, after the Polish facts, but Czech frontier workers in the North, continue to cross the border with Poland, without any limitation.
On November 19, 1980, Antonio Rubbi, ICP’s member of the Parliament and ICP’s delegate for Foreign Affairs, met the Polish Ambassador in Italy, Stanisław Trepczyński (1977-1981), and wrote then a message about the meeting, for the Secretariat: Enrico Berlinguer, Gian Carlo Pajetta and Paolo Bufalini.
In the PUWP there is an open fight between the line of renovation (Kania) and the line of restoration (Olszowski and Grabski). Kania wants to renovate the regional Secretaries. The Prefect of Częstochowa is a symbol of the conservatives, he refused to make the street for the pilgrims, to the famous sanctuary. Many, instead, simply don’t understand the situation and are frightened to lose their charge and they prefere to buy time. Kania is like Kadar.
On a side, Kania uses the endorsement of Brežnev to fast the substitutions, on the other side Pravda launches accuses, giving voice to the Polish suslovians, Grabski and Olszowski. The position of the Army officers is: nothing against Warsaw Pact, nothing against Poland. Moczar, the alternative man, has new honest faces, but without any chance and any competence.
Pope decided in this moment not to rise the problem of Nunziatura Apostolica, and exhorted Wyszynski to remain in office, after that he announced to resign, following strong attacks received from periodical Kultura, the periodical of Polish Right emigrés. Wyszynski visited the Pope and the Ambassador, in Rome. For the Pope the destabilization in Poland would be a tragedy.
The Ambassador asks us to inform Italian workers that trade unions in Poland have claims which don’t exist neither in capitalistic Countries: week of five days, assemblies on labour time, strike days with salary.
This is a Polish crisis and must be resolved by Poland, without external pressures. It’s urgent to support the moderate line within PUWP and make pressures on Italian Government for a delay of payments from Poland. It occurs to talk with Manca (Enrico Manca, Minister of Export, of Socialist Italian Party).
In those months, an agreement on Naval Commerce was also reached, between Italy and Poland.
1981
On January 11, 1981, Antonio Rubbi reported the visit of Krzysztof Ostrowski (Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Mirosław Brych (Minister of Social Affairs).
A delegation of Solidarność visited Italy in the same days, visiting Cassino, the cemetery of the General Władysław Anders’ Polish Army, who freed Italy, then the Pope, Assisi, the city of St Francis, and a workers’ assembly.
In a letter of January 18, 1981, Francesco Demitry, “Christians for Socialism”, wrote that DC was losing consensus in Italy, specially on moral question. Demitry said he followed, with great interest, the Polish facts and the dialogue between Church and PUWP.
On February 12, 1981, Antonio Rubbi met Polish Ambassador and wrote to the Secretary:
The news is that the day before, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, prayed for months to accept the charge of Prime Minister, finally accepted. Jaruzelski is described as a moderate, loyal to Kania and has the trust of Moscow. Jaruzelski declared that would resign after the emergency. The Ambassador thinks that Jaruzelski will order the apparatus and will make people work.
Mieczysław Rakowski, became Vice-Premier, giving hope to improve the deal between intellectuals, trade unions and Government, Mieczysław Jagielski, First Deputy Prime Minister, who made the agreement of Gdańsk with the strikers, was elected President of the Economic Committee. These people could resolve things without a fight.
It seems strange that the PUWP Plenum did not talk about Economy, and Rubbi notices it.
The Ambassador says that it’s urgent to support Lech Wałęsa against extremists. Wałęsa himself is in danger, between the extremes. A Solidarność delegate participated, in Rome, at a UIL (Italian Union of Labour) meeting proclaiming: Communists out from Solidarność, Jews out from Solidarność, and other things like this. Luigino Scricciolo, leader of UIL, told everything to the Ambassador, and probably the Polish delegate was a provoker (maybe sent by Moscow to defame Solidarność).
Some Bishops, states the Ambassador, like Bronisław Dąbrowski or Franciszek Macharski, are troublemakers for peasants. They should be controlled more by the Church. The strong measures against KOR (Workers’ Self-defense Committee) were not avoidable, in Ambassador’s opinion. Also ICP looked suspiciously to them, thinking they were expelled from the Party, in 1968, for “excess of communist zeal”.
Rubbi refers, at the end of the message, the Ambassador’s anger for Minister Manca, because promised aids, never sent to Poland.
We should talk with Manca, states Rubbi at the end.
On February 18, Gian Carlo Pajetta referred to Berlinguer on the visit of “Italian Forum”, independent christian Left, in Czechoslovakia, Italo Avellino, Enzo Maggi and Ruggero Orferi, of ACLI (Association of Catholic Labour).
The intense dialogue between communists and catholics in Italy had probably his most important origin with the entrance of Franco Rodano’s Movement of Catholic Communists in the ICP, in 1945, promoter of an improvement in the relations between Holy See and USSR.
They met Bohuslav Kučera (Minister of Justice during 1969 purges, eminence of the Czechoslovak Party), Vice-Chairman of the Federal Assembly.
Czechoslovakia is opening gradually to foreign relations.
For Kučera occurs to rationalize the polemics on human rights, to support rapprochement (Jan Patočka and others died few years ago, under his police’s tortures). Kučera says they are not worried by Polish research of a national way to Socialism, they are worried by external pressures of the enemy. Poland can not jump out from the system. If Moscow is oriented to a gradual resolution, we can not instead forgot our recent and past history. (The historical rivalry between the Central European Countries survived also under Communism).
The leit-motiv of the conversation is about the fear of encirclement by USA: euromissiles and other similar weapons given or sold to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Japan.
Kučera says no one Czechoslovak peasant preferes to work by himself (as in Poland) and renounce to free weekend. Each hectare in Czechoslovakia produces the double than in Poland.
(Each hectare in Czechoslovakia was collective in those years)
Kučera: Poles criticized us, the facts demonstrate who was wrong. It’s not in Polish competencies to resolve their own problems (!).
These words by Bohuslav Kučera are meaningful because the Czechoslovak leadership represented in those years the most othodox side of Real Socialism, even going further than USSR. It’s clear that if Moscow could also think to a gradual resolution, Czechoslovakia could not. Because Poland was the fruit of an opposite path, in comparison with Czechoslovakia’s normalization.
Already when Imre Nagy, in Hungary, in 1956, a honest everyman elected as the Secretary of the Party, like Kania, decided for the reform of the system in his Country (mainly concerning rural property), Władysław Gomułka was doing the same in Poland (and in facts defended the Hungarian Secretary, executed in Moscow), but Warsaw Pact opted to punish Hungary, instead of invading Poland, as, in the opinion of many, should happen. So Poland was at the origin of the different ways to Socialism and dogmatic leadership of Czechoslovakia could not accept to forgive Poland again, just for its position of strenght in Eastern Europe.
Czechoslovak pure way to Socialism, led by Gustav Husak, seemed in danger of encirclement, between Hungary and Poland.
On February 18, Giorgio Napolitano met Yugoslav Premier, Aleksandr Gilickov, in Belgrade, and sent a secret telegram, to Berlinguer, on day 19. Yugoslavia after Tito’s death had a lot of home problems to resolve and showed no much interest in Polish crisis, even though ICP tried to stimulate the Yugoslavs.
ICP, as showed by Napolitano’s words, lived a great debate about the necessity to preserve the communist identity of the renovation in Poland and save the dialogue, using the last chance of a Country in the Real Socialism to renovate itself and show the human face of Socialism, revitalizing international Communism and the 1968 dream, brutally suppressed by Czechoslovak leadership.
For the Yugoslav Party the crisis is a Polish matter alone. Poland can come out from it on a Polish way, nor Hungarian nor Yugoslav. In other case they would provoke the Soviets. I showed my disapproval when Gilickov defined the movement of renovation in Poland as an “expression of anti-socialist groups”. In any case also Gilickov agreed on the point that a Soviet aggression would only make stronger the anti-socialist elements.
It occurs to observe the new deals between socialist Countries: the erosion of State bureaucracy and the revolt against the classical satellite States system. In this contest also USSR, Czechoslovakia and DDR should consider the reactions to an invasion of Poland.
The situation is extremely delicate, we must give the news first (on L’Unità), reply to Pravda and make pressures on Government for alimentary aids to Poland. If Counter-Revolution wins everything is lost and also progressive forces will accept the Soviet intervention.
Kadar (with great esteem by Eurocommunism) declared that an intervention in Poland would bring Socialism to the past, while Ceausescu said “a disaster” an external military intervention, but not an internal one.
I had seven hours and half meeting with Marchais, who assured he would publicly proclaim his adversion in case of military intervention. (Napolitano complained about Marchais’ paternalism toward “bourgeoise” French Socialist Party).
Gilickov also talked about post-Tito problems, showing happiness for Church’s careful position toward Bishop of Zagreb (Franjo Kuharić). The Yugoslav Party expects from us to be promoter of a dialogue between communists, socialists and socialdemocratics in Western Europe.
Napolitano gives great importance then to the moderator role played by the Church and Wałęsa. Even if in his opinion Solidarność is not yet a “(pro)positive” movement. Obvious the Napolitano’s negative judgement on KOR. In his opinion, in Madrid (1980), an autonomous European Bloc rose, in the perspective of a definitve cut with USSR, in case of Soviet military intervention in Poland.
On March 27, 1981, Antonio Rubbi met the Polish Ambassador, and reported to the Secretary:
The situation is very dangerous. Fight between the line Kania-Jaruzelski and the line Olszowski-Grabski (civil war). Probably Moscow will put in a corner Kania, Jaruzelski has gone alone to meet Wyszynski. The Ambassador said Wałęsa is a moderate but the extreme line of the Party and extreme line of Solidarność are reciprocally enforcing. The Polish Government met the Ambassadors of the Western Countries to declare bankrupcy. State will be able to give foodstuffs only for twelve days.
Positive: Mieczysław Jagielski is in the USA83, Church made positive declarations, Wałęsa on one side and the Union of Journalists on the other side work for peace. Factories stopped but transports work.
What can we do in the opinion of the Embassy? Pressures on Italian Government in order to convince the Minister to send the rise and the oil promised four months ago, criticize the extreme positions, intervene on Vatican (!).
The Ambassador clearly asked the ICP to intervene with the Holy See and clearly believed in the moderator role played by the Pope and by Eurocommunism and in the real possibility of Poland to reform itself. But everything had to happen gradually and instead everything seemed to precipitate.
On March 30, 1981, Rubbi sent his wishes, for a fast recovery, to USA President, Ronald Reagan, who already complained, through the USA Ambassador in Rome, for some critical articles of L’Unità.
On April 13, 1981, Giuliano Pajetta, brother of Gian Carlo Pajetta, with a short message, proposed to Berlinguer to read an article from Financial Times, attached to the message, interesting and serious: Poland between East and West, by Ian Davidson. Where the main question is: The Soviets know what to do? Did they decide a plan in last nine months? Apart from ceasing military operations on the border. The Western banks on the other side hope that the anti-Soviet provocations do not go too far, because they can not afford to lose their big debtor: Poland.
On April 23, 1981, the reportage by Pio La Torre, ICP’s delegate for Culture, after his travel in Poland (from 9 to 16 April).
He met Ostrowski, the Secretary, the Office of Propaganda, the Department of Culture, local Secretaries, directors of kolchozy, he visited Warsaw, Gniezno, Poznań, Kraków.
For La Torre the PUWP is intent to recover the trust of its three millions members (quite a third of them is also member of Solidarność). Solidarność asks socialization and local autonomy.
He defines meaningful the meeting with Kania, who advocated with him, the need of a reduction of bureaucracy, of apparatus; the delegates at the next extraordinary Party Congress will be elected in open lists, with secret ballots. So many cadres feel threatened, but the process seems impossible to contain. Solidarność has eight millions members. In the Hilary Minc’s communist utopia Nowa Huta, the 90 % of the metallurgic workers, in the biggest factory in the Country, is a member of the independent trade union, and with them are also students, journalists, peasants.
La Torre observes that workers in Poland have many rights on paper: house, public services, milk and meat, a small piece of land to cultivate for the family. But in the reality there is a big absence of things of large consumption. A house or a car has to be asked years before receiving one, with a consequent decrease of weddings. Endless queues in the shops are another evidence.
Industry misses raw materials, some factories fail, some reduce the production, some convert itself. In Poland there is some freedom of enterprises to buy and contract directly with the sellers and the buyers. But there is no renovation in production. For La Torre only Solidarność seems to understand the situation. The fast Gierek’s industrialization left not only a big debt, but also an agriculture, in many cases, without electricity, aqueducts, machines, fertilizers. Just the 5 % of the industrial production is dedicated to agriculture and many dairy products are imported (increasing the prices because State can not subsidize for longer). The 70 % of lands is familiar and not productive, still ploughed by horses, while the majority of young people leaves the rural places.
For La Torre, the Polish crisis is somehow similar to the Italian economical crisis, the ICP should learn from it. He observes a deep imbalance between city and countryside, industry and agriculture, with the aggravating of a bigger bureaucratic close apparatus which rules everything, being out of any democratic control.
Comrade (Jerzy) Kusiak, First Secretary of Poznań Region, elected after the last summer crisis, told me: It is a progressive movement of the mass against the errors committed in the building of Socialism. It’s not an anti-socialist protest!
La Torre states that there are three groups that try to influence Solidarność: First the nationalist group of Right “Independent Poland”, second, the KOR, similar to our Lotta Continua84, third, the Church. It’s useful to remember that the Church gained a wide liberty, in last thirty-six years they built more churches than in the whole Polish History, and also catholic schools, seminars, catholic periodicals, a newspaper, and recently you can find also L’Osservatore Romano in Polish, weekly. The Church has been the main catalyst of Polish discontent against the power, but has also a serious dialogue with the Government. Even in critical moments showed a responsible and patriotic attitude.
The pesants’ trade union has been legalized, avoiding a new crisis, La Torre says. The decisive matter is if the PUWP will be able to control the renovation process. The threaten from Moscow generated a strong sense of solidarity and responsibility among the main players of this process, who all accepted the guide-role of the Party. There is a great displacement and removal of old chairmen, accused and sentenced for corruption.
For example, in Kraków, the Major of the City and Minister of Public Works, built for himself a big house, with the public money. He was asked to resign and was expelled from the Party. In the same city, other functionaries, received money illegally. The situation described by La Torre shows a sort of bureaucratic anomy, where every little regional chairman had his little personal power to abuse of.
A system that Pio La Torre, Secretary of the ICP of Sicily, knew very well in his region, having been the first promoter of laws for mafia felony and for the confiscation of mafia properties, and he was in facts killed by mafia on April 30, 198285.
The Polish system of control of institutions is improving and rivitalized, La Torre confirms, specially through a new role and new functions for Councils, such as the Sejm, which has again its autority. Trybuna Ludu, Polityka, Życie Warszawy everyday finally publish free letters of denounce of abuses committed by local Secretaries.
At the end of the very long letter, La Torre, states that the process in Poland is very different from the Czechoslovak one, in 1968, it is wider, intellectuals and workers together, an entire new leadership inside the Party ready for change. They accused us to attempt to strumentalize Polish facts for our eurocommunist strategy, and for the pressure received from Moscow, Polish comrades had to criticize us. They appreciate our careful position now. They have a positive concept of ICP. It’s necessary to improve the relations.
On April 29, a delegation of PUWP travelled to Rome and met Rubbi and others from ICP, as Rubbi takes note, exchanging holidays reciprocal invitations. A system very much used, between communist parties, the exchange of visits for vacations as instrument to improve the relations and to go deeper in the reciprocal knowledge. ICP Secretary and Central Committee members never rested. While on May 13, the extraordinary sitting of the Secretary, for the assassination attempt against the Pope, stated to talk about referendum on abortion on the first page of L’Unità of the next day and to express, in Parliament, contrariety to the procrastination of referendum.
On May 25, Trepczyński sent meaningful birthday wishes to Berlinguer:
Best wishes to you, for further successes in your generous activity. May your passionate contribute to the proletarian cause last for many years.
Among the papers of May there is a tanslation in French, received by Antonio Rubbi, of the Solidarność’ political thesis of February-March, particularly underlined by the Secretary is the declared attitude not to be a political party and the will not to substitute the State autorities, but to protest against unjustices, humiliations and an apparatus out of central control. And then the attention for the best traditions of the Nation: moral principles of Christianism, the Democracy and the socialist thought…fused within European Culture. There was no return, stated the leadership of Solidarność. The main economical proposals of Solidarność concerned the development of an industry able to satisfy the demand and also the necessity of development of agriculture, while the majority of industry in Poland produces machines to produce other machines.
On June 3, an urgent message for Berlinguer from Rodolfo Mechini, Vice of Rubbi.
Trepczyński informed of his next replacement, with Emil Wojtaszek, a man of Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of the Political Office of PUWP, who already met La Torre, during his visit to Poland, with already a good deal with Berlinguer. Kania presented in the military electoral lists (the Army supported him). The moderates are unfortunately divided in many political forums, while the Grabski line is all together in the Forum of Katowice. It’s difficult, in the opinion of the Ambassador, to forecast the future leadership of the Party, with a removal on such large scale, of the old cadres and a quite total change of chairmen. In the opinion of the Ambassador, the USSR just would like to count on a new man, able to set in order Poland, in one sense or in the other, maybe a military, better if someone out from the Party or marginal, with the support of the Church86.
The day after, Rubbi, one month before the IX Congress of PUWP, presented the thesis for the Congress, received from the Ambassador, to the Secretary, with his comments.
Themes declared: participation of the workers to the building of socialist Democracy, basical ethics, young generation, family, women, the new role of proletariat in the contemporary world.
(…)
For the first time in its history, the PUWP prepares an extraordinary Congress. The future development of socialist Poland depends by it and by the entente between the political parts. This is the ouverture of the Program.
The aim for the new statute of the PUWP is, for Rubbi, to reinforce the national Sejm and the local councils, and generally the political participation of people. The important news is that the Party declares to support and to sponsor the development of syndical movement, the Party defines “partnerska” the collaboration with the trade union.
The cadres have high moral dues: honesty, courage in the fight against social evils.
The PUWP is involved in the cultural and material growth of the standard of life of the workers.
Very important: the PUWP sees in the alliance of Poland with the first socialist Country, USSR, the condition (neutral, not with the adjective niezbędny indispensable, as was before) for the reinforcement of its independence. The adjective kierownik, guide, (from the verb kierować, to drag), is replaced with the adjective przewodnik (from the verb przewozić, to transport, to accompany)87, someone who accompanies the Party, the people and the Country, instead of a guide who drags something as a dead corpse. Rubbi continues: The PUWP expresses the will to represents the interests of all the classes. The myth of the fight of class is finally over.
For Rubbi there were all the conditions to hope for a future wide critical participation of the basis of the Party.
Particular attention was given by Rubbi to the first chapter: Dues and Rights.
To attract men who, with their work and their conduct, inspire the social respect, men who represent high values and political and moral ideals. The cadres must avoid dishonest and careerist men.
(…)
The Party fosters the workers’ participation to political, economical, cultural life of the Country and in any social activity.
(…)
For the first time it is stated the principle that guarantees no member of the Party can be submitted to disciplinary action for critical positions.
Each member can present candidates if he has been member for five years (before it was three years). The trial period lasts two year (before it was one year). All these measures were probably in order to filter the leadership and the members more than what done before.
Rubbi also noticed that the ballot would be secret and: Finally the Party states the division of the functions of chairman in the Party and chiarman in the State!
(…)
For the first time it is also formalized the role of the Party organization in the Army.
(…)
It is decided the due of the Central Committee to meet, at least, every three months (before it was four months).
It is sanctioned the universal right to formulate motions and to express opinions and proposals, ask informations, judge candidates, on projects and programs, directly to each instance.
(…)
Secretaries will be elected directly by the Party conferences, with secret ballot, at every level.
The Party recognises the role of trade union for the consolidation of Socialism. The renovation is for Socialism and for the Nation. The CC of PUWP launches an appeal to workers and to all the society to support the line of the Party. The end of the resume of the new statute proposed for the Congress.
Then it was also noticed the effective power given to the Commission of Control, in the new statute, and any future change would be sanctioned just by the Congress and it is needed the two thirds of the Congress to modify anything.
The will to follow the path of renovation and dialogue was recalled again, to Rubbi, but the endless crisis was seriously threatening the international credibility of Poland and of its leadership, and the Plenum emphasized that all the Poles should be conscient of the historical responsibilities incumbent on the Polish State and on the Polish people. The Secretary of PUWP wanted to be the guarantee and the przewodnik to renovation, but on the same time was very careful to reassert in each declaration the friendship with USSR and the principle of centralist Democracy and condemning the independent workers’ centres (like KOR), while out, everything was already precipitating.
On June 10, the CC of CPSU (led by Suslov and Ponomarёv, the Department of Foreign Affairs) wrote to CC of ICP and the letter was published by L’Unità, where the Secretary replied:
Comrades,
The CC of CPSU lives in a deep restlessness for the future of Socialism in Poland.
Soviets and Poles fought together against Fascism. Soviets helped their Polish comrades in the edification of a new life (one of those gifts which could not be refused!).
They did not listen to us, they gave endless concessions to the anti-socialist forces. They fooled the workers in a criminal conspiracy against people. The Polish media are anti-socialists. Improvised oportunists entered the Party. We will not abandon in the disgrace our brothers. We can not take time to rise against Counter-Revolution.
The Secretary of the ICP answered that there was no resolution for Polish crisis, except in renovation and dialogue. Giulietto Chiesa, ICP man in Moscow and correspondant for L’Unità, noticed that TASS was not saying a word about the works for the IX Congress in Poland. While Rude Pravo was intent in insulting Andrzej Wajda, who in those days won the Golden Palm in Cannes.
We see a CPSU divided in itself, taking time and wondering what to do in face of the realization of its worst fear, to be defeated by the basis, by a popular action, as was happening in Poland, with the danger of a domino effect. At least the old Soviet chairmen saw their positions in danger.
On June 23, the Polish Embassy noticed with a message the Secretary of ICP, that the shops in Poland were empty. A generational fight was getting form because the new delegates elected for the Congress are 30-35 years old and don’t want old aparatcziki. The death of Wyszynski (happened on May 28) was an aggravating, together with the assassination attempt against the Pope, whose conditions seem more worrying than what it is announced. On May 27 the Polish Episcopal Conference decided the successor of Wyszynski, and the Embassy announced Macharski was not probable.
Embassy also thanked the ICP for its careful solidarity. Particular appreciation for Romolo Caccavale’s articles on L’Unità.
On July 2, Rubbi wrote to the Secretary the news received from Renzo Foa, just back from Warsaw.
The 80% of delegates is young, new to politics, and condemns the past of the Country, since 1948…… Kania and Jaruzelski are very popular among the basis members, because they were personally attacked by the declarations of CC of CPSU and they stood against dogmatic positions. But their popularity does not go together with the popularity of the Party, and this remains the fundamental problem. Kania, in his moderator role, defended also the re-election of Stefan Olszowski and Stanisław Kociołek88. Rakowski was one of the most voted. Gromyko travelled to Poland and Suslov declared that Polish leadership is beyond the borders of ideological safety. It seems that the Soviet journalists received the order to moderate the attacks. Could also Moscow consider the Polish case as a laboratory? A military intervention would be an international catastrophe and both Hungary and DDR, for different reasons, already declared they would not participate to the intervention. The risk consists in the discouragement in front of the economic paralysis. Big difficulties in Silesia, Solidarność is doing a lot of work to provide food-stuffs in Gdańsk. The Soviets announced to do all the possible to avoid a complete paralysis. We hope in a painless transition and it depends by the forces on the field: the Church and Solidarność.
The PUWP asks ICP not to intervene in their clash with CPSU, they said they know how to defend themselves!
On July 8, Francesco Demitry wrote to Enrico Berlinguer:
Glemp was elected Archbishop of Gniezno, it is a wonderful choice. He is the most wyszynskiano of all the Bishops and can help the efforts of PUWP to resolve the crisis. It is an unexpected election, also for the Pope.
On a note of July 4, is reported that Rodolfo Mechini went to Budapest, to meet Andras Gyenes, Secretary of the CC of Hungarian Party, and Janos Berecz, the Hungarian Party’s delegate for Foreign Affairs, in order to speak about Polish situation.
On July 13, Berlinguer wrote a letter addressed to the PUWP, published on L’Unità, recalling the old values and links between Poland and Italy, since 1800.
Dear Comrades,
in the occasion of the IX Congress of our Party, may reach you our fraternal greetings and wishes that the conclusions of the Congress will confirm and consolidate the politics of socialist renovation begun by the Direction of your Party. The Italian communists followed with great attention, not without restlessness, the troubled evolution of the events (…) and appreciated your effort on the hard path of renovation.
In his memories about his last travel to Poland, Rubbi remembered he was received by Ostrowski on a maluch, in order to avoid to be noticed by people, and at the Secretariat they could offer him just pepsi, instead of vodka89.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski was also, for many Italian communists, one of the symbol of the suppression of Prague Spring, in summer 1968.
On July 15, Romolo Caccavale wrote an article for L’Unità, with the title: Kania: fermezza e rinnovamento (Kania: strenght and renovation), in which talked about the line given to the Congress by Kania.
The general principle is to resolve the social conflicts by agreements between the parts, respecting the socialist character of the State. Kania spoke against both the Czechoslovak model, of rural cooperatives of State and the proposal of Polish trade unions for the property of the enterprises shared by the trade unions proportional to the number of members for each trade union, obviously advantaging the major one. The Polish people will be able to exit from the tunnel of the crisis, through its own forces. Kania declared to be always open to the proposals from the trade unions, useful to resolve concretly the crisis.
In addition to Caccavale, also Renzo Foa wrote the article: Come eleggere il Segretario? (How to elect the Secretary?). It seemed that within the Congress took place a fight about the rules for election. The fight was incredibly resolved just by the intervention of Viktor Grišin, sent to Warsaw by the Political Office of CPSU, who declared: It’s impossible to ask USSR to remain indifferent, but Polish communists and Polish workers must resolve their problems by their own.
The moderator message was deeply appreciated by the moderates. Appreciated also the speech of Ferenc Havasi, Political Office of the Hungarian Party and Janos Kadar’s assistant, who helped Kania very much. Ovation for the Vietnamese delegate, General Giap, a socialist myth alive. While Antonin Kapek90, the Czechoslovak representative, was received by a very cold audience who listened to his speech, in which said to see in Poland in those days again the same “servants” of West, of 1968.
Kania spoke then for two hours and half.
On July 16, Renzo Foa wrote: Il Congresso vota su tutto: maggioranza schiacciante per il rinnovamento (The Congress expressed on every subject: enormous majority for renovation).
1962 delegates, the 91 % participated for the first time. 20 % from Solidarność, 56 % independent trade unions, 24 % PUWP (clerks, workers, peasants, students). The motion advanced by Tadeusz Grabski against the secret vote was rejected by 1500 votes, the same votes were also for expelling Gierek out from the Party.
In the next days had to be elected the 25 % of the CC, which had to elect the new Political Office and the Secretariat. The First Secretary had to be elected by the Congress. Particularly appreciated Rakowski’s speech: We can be the hope of Socialism, not the ill part of Socialism.
Caccavale commented Rakowski’s words, like this: This is the way to defeat in facts the enemies of Socialism.
The following day the works of the sixteen commissions began.
L’Unità of July 18, published an interesting article by Foa: Attacchi delle minoranze a Kania (Attacks from the minorities to Kania).
There is a false letter by Gomułka, which accuses Kania to be the responsible of the tragedy of 1970.
In Foa’s opinion the extreme wings were punished, in facts, Grabski was not elected and neither Tadeusz Fiszbach, the most progressive Secretary, from Gdańsk. Kania was the most voted, with Jaruzelski. Someone accused falsification of elections. The socialist Professor Henryk Jabłonski, for Foa and Caccavale, is the guarantee for averybody, at the head of the State.
On July 19, the title of L’Unità, was: Kania rieletto Segretario. Nel POUP va avanti la linea del rinnovamento (Kania elected again First Secretary. In the PUWP renovation line goes on), by Renzo Foa, who, with Romolo Caccavale, followed the operations in Warsaw, both as correspondants of L’Unità.
The report said: Kania elected by the Congress, with 1311 votes.
Andrzej Żabinski and Albin Siwak91 (“the marble-man”, for Foa) were imposed by Moscow, in the Political Office, as guarantee, in place of Grabski.
Kania advocated the right of each Country to find and follow its way to Socialism. At the Sejm, observed Foa, there are people who would politically disappear at next elections, but would concretly oppose to change during the following months.
The following day Foa wrote also another political analysis, with the meaningful title: A renovation speaking to all Europe.
And a telegram to Kania, from Berlinguer, underlined the victory:
Comrade Kania, First Secretary of PUWP,
May reach you our happiness, and my personal happiness, for your election. I wish you success in your works of high responsibility. We wish to your people and to your Party, to resolve positively the difficult situation by consolidating the process of socialist renovation, in a contest of peace in Europe and in the world.
These wishes appeared then on L’Unità, on July 21.
On August 30, Lorenzo Sintini, a member of the CC of ICP, from Moscow, reported that Soviets refused categorically to talk about Poland and Afghanistan.
One month before, Rudolf Battek, received great attention by ICP and L’Unità. He was condemned to 7 years of prison for “resistance to police”. He was a 56 years old Czechoslovak socialist, historian and sociologist, member of Charta 77, who in 1978 wrote to Bruno Kreisky, Willy Brandt and Olof Palme a letter about the persecution suffered by people who commemorated the 100° anniversary of the birth of Socialdemocracy in Czechoslovakia.
On September 16, Mechini and La Torre met the Director of Trybuna Ludu, Wiesław Bek, who said that in despite of the election of workers, peasants and syndicalists in the CC (just one woman from Solidarność, Zofia Grzyb) Solidarność continued to keep a negative conduct, with strikes and slogans on hunger, while Bek said there were a lot of problems in his Country, but not hunger. Kania proposed a compromise, proposing a management of enterprises shared by State and trade unions together, refused by Solidarność, divided within itself, which for Bek had access to radio and tv, a periodical, and the 70 % of the trade union were not workers. Even the appeal to the peoples of the East went beyond the decency, for Bek. They were anyway against everything coming from the Government. Kania met Soviets in Crimea and they were bothered by the Solidarność appeal to Eastern peoples. In Bek’s opinion, they wanted to probe the Soviets.
On October 14, Pajetta and Bufalini, as to say number two and number three of the Secretariat of ICP, met Józef Czyrek, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was in Rome to visit the Pope. Four days later Kania resigned.
One month before, on September 15, Kania called Brežnev to talk about the Moscow’s protest note received on September 13.
Brežnev said to Kania: It seems to me that you are still in the grip of an illusion. Sometimes you wake up and wonder who is the master of the situation in Poland, and has power already changed hands there? The leaders of Solidarność act too freely not to ask oneself this question92. The same day Ryszard Kuklinski referred to CIA, after Homeland Defense Committee, that Kania was surprised by the course of the session93. On September 17, Kádár tried the last move to support the Polish friend, through a letter to the CC of PUWP via Kania. He wrote: The supporters of Socialism in Poland-amongst them the international powers of Socialism and Progress-can rely absolutely on the international help of Hungarian communists and the fraternal Hungarian people, in their fight to protect their people’s power94. The same day, at the CPSU CC Politburo Meeting, Brežnev said Kania is displaying an intolerable liberalism (…) Honecker put forward this proposal: to invite Kania and tell him to submit his resignation, and in his place as First Secretary of the PUWP to recommend Stefan Olszowski95.
On September 18, Kania met the Hungarian Ambassador in Warsaw, Jozsef Garamvölgyi, in order to reply to Kadar’s letter. Kania said: The martial law would provoke today a widespread national strike and it would certainly bring the masses out on the streets too. In that case, however, force would have to be used not against the hostile elements only, but also against the masses (…) it would assume nationwide proportions (…) we could do more harm to ourselves than the enemy (…) the enemy has to be isolated first of all politically96.
On October 19, Jaruzelski answered Brežnev, as new First Secretary: I want to say to you openly that I agreed to accept this post after a great internal struggle97.
After the coup of December 13, on January 15, 1982, there was an implementation of Martial Law98.
REAL SOCIALISM AND THIRD WAY-THE DEBATE ABOUT POLISH FACTS WITHIN THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY.
The debate took place in the days of January 11-13, 1982, one month after Jaruzelski’s proclamation of Martial Law.
It is useful, at this point, to remember preliminarily, some important facts, some of them learnt from Francesco Cataluccio.
It seems that in 1979 the Secretariat and the CC of ICP were quite completely changed, on Moscow’s indication. The most meaningful replacement was at the Foreign Affairs, where Sergio Segre, an elevated man of high culture and a lifelong communist of Jewish family (and this had a strong impact in a pro-Pelstianian ICP), with a brother living in Israel, and good contacts with liberals (he met Brzezinski in 1976), was removed and replaced by Antonio Rubbi.
The CPSU often showed its disapproval for journalists linked to the ICP and for some ICP’s prominent members, through Rubbi (and maybe Gian Carlo Pajetta or Paolo Bufalini), via Giulietto Chiesa (the correspondant from Moscow, nowadays permanently living in Russia and working for Russian State TV), and sometimes also occurred that for Ambassador’s protest a conference could not take place and was cancelled, as happened for the conference mentioned by me for the leaflet among the papers of the ICP’s archive. Moscow disliked the subjects brought by Adriano Guerra and by Francesco Cataluccio, the two organizers, and Pajetta decided to cancel the conference at Fondazione Gramsci, in Rome.
The young Francesco Cataluccio, son of an important Italian historian, did not renuvate his membership in ICP, but someone continued to control him and to follow his moves, probably from the Centre. When he often travelled to Poland by train, as a turist, in order to write what he saw, just after his return, he had always some trouble, people who had something with him were also arrested, accused and queried, specially after the December 1981. An article by Cataluccio, appeared on the Italian press, was translated and published by a clandestine paper like Po Most, without informing the author, who was in facts stopped by police and did not receive his passport to go back in Italy, for some days.
The Italian Embassy in Warsaw was the only one defended by soldiers, in order to remain close to refugees. Francesco Bigazzi, correspondant of ANSA (National Agency of Information of Italy) from Gdańsk, tried to bring Geremek, the most direct contact of dissidence with the Vatican there, but Geremek was discovered, refused and consequently arrested by Polish police. Minister of Foreign Affairs in Italy was in those years Giulio Andreotti, publicly accused by Bettino Craxi to be “Ponomarёv’s best friend”.
Even if it remains a historical mistery, it seems that both USSR and P2 (most important Italian Lodge, with international political links, from Argentinian Generals to Nicolae Ceausescu) were implicated in Aldo Moro’s assassination. There are strong evidences of Andreotti’s links with P2 and the journalist Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, who wrote similar accuses directed to Andreotti, was misteriously killed one year after Moro. He also wrote that Andreotti (who was Prime Minister in 1978) was noticed by General Dalla Chiesa (he was killed too, years later), about the place where Moro was kept prisoner by terrorists, but Andreotti refused to intervene and ordered the General to keep the secret. What is sure, beyond any “conspiracy theory”, is that Andreotti, more than ICP, was a promoter of good relations with USSR and its allies and a public defensor, within NATO, of USSR’s international role.
Francesco Cataluccio, by the way, worked in those years also in the direction of an alliance between the Italian communist trade union CGIL and Solidarność and he sometimes brought aids from CGIL to syndicalist leader Zbigniew Bujak (who was escaping capture), even after December 1981, while inside ICP, Giorgio Napolitano, the last “liberal” within CC, organized many conferences with Włodzimierz Brus, a notorious Polish dissident living in England, often invited in Italy by Napolitano and Guerra. Brus, whose wife was later discovered as one of the Bierut’s Poland cruel judges and not allowed to return to her country, wrote essays on Marxism, as From Marx to Market, about the communists’ research of new alternative economical models, some translated in Italian and prefaced by Napolitano as well.
The morning of January 11, 1982, in front of the Central Committee and the Commission of Control, Enrico Berlinguer sentenced:
It’s present in the public opinion the question if the military intervention and the recourse to martial law were unavoidable in the Polish current situation (…) We believed and we are convinced that not to express an immediate and strong condemn would be a capital error, not only under the profile of principles and ideals we believe in, not only for the future of Socialism and not only for our responsibility in face of Italian people and workers’ class, but for the needs of Poland (…) The necessary renovation was weakened by persisting dogmatic and conservative positions, and by contrasts between the chairmen in the Party (…) We did not fall silent in the course of this troubled and difficult test (…) We intervened, and I don’t fear the use of this verb, because I believe we should not be stopped by the hypocritical confusion between the necessary refusal of ingerence (but who seriously did respect it?) in the internal affairs of parties and States and the suspension of judgement, the silences are other ways to take position, we intervened with a constant sense of responsibility and measure (…) the coup and that military suppression occurred in a Country directed for years by a communist party, in name of Socialism, in name of those ideals that belong to us and that we deeply feel (…) The reason of State can justify, but we are among those ones, re-called by President Pertini, who never and nowhere tolerated attempts against the freedom of people and in this case the condemn and the protest become dues and they must be clear and strong, because we are called to reply for our history and our ideal (…) we are contrary to American attempt to impose to EU a policy of sanctions against Poland and USSR (…). Zbigniew Brzeziński was a supporter of sanctions.
It is by the evidence of facts that we proclaim the end of the phase of development of Socialism, started from the October Revolution, the end of its propulsive momentum, that in those same countries the possibility of political, economical and cultural renovation is in crisis, with the risk of further armed conflicts between riformers and autoritarians and of heavier future episodes of involution.
(…)
But, let’s wonder, it was possible to hope for a positive evolution of Polish facts? Cast the first stone who did not trust the possibility of a new phase, a change in a democratic sense in the life of Poland (…) because the propulsion for renovation came from the basis and had mass dimesion, because all the forces were implicated, from the PUWP to the Church, and for this reasons we hoped and thought as possible an evolution to a democratic and pluralistic character of Polish Socialism99.
Without leaving the marxist way to read the world, the mass dimension of Polish protest (ten million people) was considered as the most historically relevant fact in the Polish crisis; without refusing the entire past of Communism as a chain of errors and keeping the distances from the advocates of sanctions as solution (as already done in defense of Argentina, at the time of Falklands War), as from who wanted to distinguish the world in Goodness and Evil, as US President Ronald Reagan. Berlinguer claimed the rightness of his own positions, even the silences are other ways to take position, and in other words stated that it did not seem for dreamers to hope in a pluralistic and democratic change in Poland, before December. But the time to cut with USSR and Real Socialism had come.
The most important antecedent of this tear with Moscow was unpredictably offered by former Secretary Palmiro Togliatti’s last document: The Memorial of Yalta, of August 1964 (year of Togliatti’s death), even if on different perspectives. Togliatti, who was in better relations with Mikhail Suslov, than with Nikita Chruščёv, wrote in that secret memorial to the CC of his party, later published by his successor Luigi Longo, that the position taken by USSR towards China was wrong, they should not take the same Chinese attitude to attack the adversary on irrational statements and convictions, but it was necessary, instead, to isolate China politically and with apparent calm, opening to the chance of national ways for all the other communist parties around the world and forming blocs of communist parties operating compact in each continent, facing the national and practic troubles of their regions, on more autonomous paths100. This critical statements could also be inserted in a larger scale strategy to weaken the already weak First Secretary of CPSU and Prime Minister of USSR, who would be replaced in few months (14 October 1964).
It must be also remembered that just eight years before, in 1956, hundreds of communists left the ICP, and among them many prominent figures, as the internationally known Italian writer Italo Calvino, who wrote on L’Unità that the support of ICP to the violent bloody suppression of Hungarian youth and Hungarian worker class and the attack to their will to renuvate the Party and the State represented a lost historical occasion for Communism and for ICP101. Also 1968 was a lost occasion, just lately partially recovered by new Secretary Berlinguer, and Poland could not be added to the number of lost occasions, drawing the recent History of Italian Communism. The successors of Berlinguer, retroceding on predecessor’s footprints, showed they did not get the lesson of History.
There is a decisive passage in Berlinguer’s speech to his comrades, of January 11, 1982:
If we analyse objectively the 1970s, the detente was not the responsible of current international crisis, but the lack of will to aplly it beyond the appearences. Togliatti told twenty years ago that detente should give space to a new chapter in internal and international relations and in the relations between the two blocs, forwarding the overtaking of blocs, not representing a danger for the security of them and opening instead the way to the research of new forms of political and economical cooperation between the two super-powers, specially in order to emancipate the underdeveloped and hungry areas in the world. Instead we saw just agreements on the respective nuclear potential (…) even for the weak initiative of EU and its weak unity, the international crisis is aggravating102. In this statement it is to notice the trust of Berlinguer, i.e. of Eurocommunism, in the role of EU in the balance of the world and of the Blocs, in its due to emancipate the Third World.
Brzezinski was convinced that a much stronger EU, opened to East, was the best ally for detente. Moscow often used detente, as a political weapon to attack NATO through false pacifism (like arming Warsaw Pact with new missiles, but criticizing, then, the balance with new NATO euromissiles as an American attempt against Peace).
Berlinguer continued by precising: We said that the propulsive momentum of models of Socialism realized in USSR and Eastern Europe are exhausted. This does not mean the end of the reasons and material, political, ideal needs of Socialism realized in the most various ways, as happened and happens in post-colonial countries (…) We must study and defend these experiences (…) and work to bring Socialism to the highest levels of capitalistic development, beginning from Western Europe103. The Thirdworldism, could not bring the clever and careful Enrico Berlinguer to admit that, even if ICP, breaking with Moscow, should now look at the examples of Socialism realized out of Moscow’s control (at least apparently), in the Third World, those post-colonial countries lived in better social, economical, cultural, political conditions than Italy and Western Europe. Berlinguer refused the belief in the possibility to export the October Revolution in the West and that the Real Socialism built later could be exported in Western Europe: it was a negative model to take the distance from104. At the same time the new rise of extreme Capitalism on the other side, with the new US Presidency, showed, for Berlinguer, all the lacks and dangerous mistakes of crazy Consumerism, generating shorter and shorter cycles of growth and decrease, inflation and recession, in Western World, focusing on the original prediction of Marx, about the fundamental anarchist and dishuman nature of Capitalism, and its contradiction with Democracy (as a political and not simply arithmetical concept)105. But the European Capitalism of welfare, for Berlinguer, was very different from American or Japanese Capitalism, it was also the result of the social struggles and political, economical, cultural conquests of masses and workers106.
The replies were various: for Cesare Fredduzzi USSR is not an imperialist power107, for Lucio Lombardo Radice the only security was in the European disarmament108, while for Giuliano Pajetta the situation had to be treated with caution, knowing that there were only bad compromises possible and was unrealistic to believe to influence the political development of Eastern Europe109.
For Anselmo Gouthier for thirty-five years the Warsaw Pact Countries and USSR went in an opposite direction from the masses conscience, the main problem was the weakness of European political institutions110. In the opinion of Marisa Rodano, Movement of Catholic Communists and prominent feminist of the Party, the matter was a historical problem, to be searched in the break of the alliance for Anti-fascist Resistance, between the political forces allied during the war, happened after 1947-48, in Eastern Europe, as on the other side, in Western Europe: for this reason it was not possible, for her, to state that in the West wonderful democracies had been established, while in the East dishuman socialist tyrannies111.
For Antonio Rubbi was possible to find entente with other political forces, abandoning the identification of CPSU and USSR with Internationalism112. When Armando Cossutta stated that Eurocommunism would be damaged by the abandon of USSR, because it meant to abandon the heritage of the October Revolution and of the idea of world revolution, as to say to abandon all the international social and political conquests obtained by it until that moment, Pietro Ingrao, Togliatti’s director of L’Unità, replied that in last years USSR, with its conservatism and its imperialism, lost the support of great part of Third World Countries and post-colonial Democracies113.
The position kept by Giorgio Napolitano was the most corageous: it was a due to support the changes in Eastern Europe in all the possible ways and it was not an utopia to take a Third Way, alternative to Soviet Communism114.
For Guido Cappelloni the new prospected position of ICP meant the negative renounce to communist culture and communist traditions115 and Paolo Bufalini, the number two of the Secretariat, sentenced and “predicted” that the defeat of USSR would represent in the world the end of Peace and Civility, it was not possible to renounce to the conscience of October Revolution. He stated it was necessary to work for disarmament and detente, to realize soon the third phase of Socialism, to avoid provincialism (a common accuse used against the modernizers and the supporters and promoters of the Third Way)116. The long Bufalini’s speech was followed by Achille Occhetto’s speech, future Secretary, who claimed that Berlinguer’s assertion did not mean the abandon of the class-struggle-ground117.
Sergio Segre, former delegate of the ICP for Foreign Affairs, began his speech saying that in Western Europe too there were ten millions of unemployed, in addition to a deep ethical, cultural, economical, political crisis, but no one could now claim that the solution would be to import the Eastern model. The necessity was, for him, to isolate the conservatives, to call for unity and decision in the Party, to dialogue with socialists and to realize in Western Europe a communist force, deeply founded on the values of democracy and freedom, a leading force in the direction of renovation and transformation of society, in Italy and Europe118. Emanuele Macaluso, one of the modernizers, observed that both USSR and USA, led by old and conservative politicians, lost the great historical occasion, on the side of USSR to encourage and exploit a renovation attempt coming out from a communist party within its bloc, while on the side of USA was also lost the occasion to offer a strong cultural political alternative in values and to encourage and strenghten a Western European bloc, able to attract the East119.
Gian Carlo Pajetta made an ambiguous speech, advocating on one side the fact that the faith in the propulsive momentum of October Revolution was not based on a myth of more material wealth but on a real struggle for justice (as to say, it remained a revolution superior in concepts to the latter ones, in his opinion probably founded on the struggle for “more material bourgeoise wealth”), on the other side Pajetta himself claimed quite polemically for renovation inside the ICP (a typical conservative strategy to change everything in order to change nothing?), as something to realize and not only to export120.
Berlinguer made the conclusions, claiming for unity within the ICP.
The appeal for peace, freedom and democracy, of December 13, 1981, to Left forces, workers and Church, was repeated by ICP, on December 30, and again after the meeting of 11-13 January.
The first reaction to the ICP’s meeting, even if the Italian Party showed to be quite devided within itself, arrived on January 24, from Pravda. An anonymous article with the title: Against the interests of Peace and Socialism, accused the ICP to oppose to the struggle of peoples for Peace. Specially mentioning Napolitano and Ingrao. The ICP, for the article of Soviet newspaper, attempted to weaken the “peaceful” vital Soviet influence in the effort of the Countries of “Victorious Socialism” for disarmament, an effort that everybody knows and the ICP ignores. They try to change the nature of Capitalism and American Imperialism, but they instead refused to be among the forces for Peace and Progress in the world and betrayed the Italian worker class. The accuse was that ICP chose to help Imperialism against Socialism.
The reply of ICP, on L’Unità, appeared on 26. All the positions expressed in the final documents of the meeting were articulated and motivated a and was re-called the Memorial of Yalta, where Togliatti complained about the total absence of open debates cadres-people, in USSR. It was also ridiculized and defined worrying the Soviet attitude to consider Anti-Soviet any critic and the fact that CPSU was not able to learn from the past political defeats because it refused to analyse the facts121.
The Political Office of CPSU went on in a campaign to defame and divide the ICP, culminated in a short letter (defined top-secret), directed to Berlinguer and misteriously arrived to Italian periodical Panorama, published on February 12, probably through the Soviet Ambassador Leonid Popov, and signed Brežnev, speaking about the deep divisions within the ICP122.
The Kommunist, official newspaper of DDR, defined a slippy way the line taken by ICP.
THE ITALIAN TRADE UNIONS AND SOLIDARNOŚĆ.
Francesco M. Cataluccio, friend of Geremek, Michnik, Kuroń, wrote that the KOR, founded by a group of intellectuals protesting against the abuses of the State, in Poland, among them Michnik and Kuroń (taking origin from an important tradition of scoutism, alternative to communist youth, “pioneers”), Committee for Workers Defense, became soon the main unofficial form of opposition against the Regime, the structure that materially supported the organization of workers councils, the voice of workers struggles, alternative information, contact with the western trade unions123.
There was a historical ideal and practical link between Poles and Italians, since the Independence Wars of XIX, developed during the Great War and then during the period of Resistance (for example intellectuals like the Italian journalist Mino Pecorelli fought in the Army of Anders), and many Poles died in the several battles fought to free Italy by Nazis.
In 1976, an unitarian delegation of CGIL, CISL, UIL (the Italian major trade unions, respectively inspired by Communism, Social Catholicism, Socialism), was invited at the VIII Congress of CRZZ (the Polish Central Union of Trade Unions) and, after the bad episodes of repression of the workers, expressed solidarity to the Polish workers and dissidents. The KOR asked the public support and funding from Western European trade unions. ROPCIO was founded, on the example and inspiration of the ETUC (the Federation of European trade unions)124.
Sauro Magnani, responsible of the CGIL Office for Foreign Affairs, was in contacts with Kuroń and Michnik, but did not show such interest towards the suppression of 1976 strikes. CGIL showed in those years a political attitude of neutrality, while FLM (Federation of Metal Workers), autonomous part of CGIL, denounced and criticized publicly the suppression of workers in Poland, as the Independent Left and all the extreme sectors of Italian Left also attacked the Direction of ICP and CGIL, initially on pro-Moscow, or at least cautious positions.
The most active movement in the activity of denounce of violent suppression of strikers in Poland, was Lotta Continua (Endless Struggle), an extreme appendix of Italian Communism, which on its omonymous newspaper gave great relevance to the Polish dissidence, with an article like L’Eurocomunismo degli operai polacchi125, the Eurocommunism of Polish Workers, was a polemical and meaningful accuse against the shy positions of official Eurocommunism, stating that the real eurocommunists were fighting in the Polish streets.
On August 21, 1980, the Federation of CGIL, CISL and UIL of Piedmont (Piedmont was the first industrial region in Italy), issued a communiqué declaring the total and complete solidarity towards Polish workers and their claims, with the declared intention to join their assemblies in Poland in order to bring from Italy a physical support and aids, to promote a national meeting on Polish facts and to promote the information on those facts and the moral participation of Italian workers, through every possible media126.
In the period of October 22 to 27, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, journalist and leader of Solidarność (then the first democratic Prime Minister of Poland), was invited in Italy and met the leaders of CISL. While on September 30, UIL organized a national round table with the main Italian political forces (ICP and DC), about Polish crisis, inviting the Italian Government to take clear positions and to work to help Poland to avoid a disaster like Spring of Prague. UIL was eventually still looking for an alternative to support in Poland, like KOR, instead of catholics. At the round table was invited, in facts, Aleksandr Smolar, delegate of KOR, and UIL leader, Luigi Scricciolo, visited Ursus factory in November, where he met several leaders and Lech Wałęsa too.
In the critical months of September-October, of negotiation: Italian trade unions-FIAT, then interrupted, for the reduction of work and workers, thousands of strikers occupied the industrial plants with the slogan: Danzica, Stettino come Torino! (Gdańsk, Szczecin like Turin!), followed by more courageous words pronounced by Berlinguer at the ICP Feast, in October, talking of Gdańsk negotiations Wałęsa-Jagielski as a good model and example to follow in Italy. In the same days also the new Secretary of CGIL, Luciano Lama, who was a partisan during the war, openly declared his own support to Polish workers, in name of Democracy and for workers’ participation in social and political life127.
On January 13, 1981, the Soviet Ambassador in Rome was on alert for the arrival of Wałęsa and Mazowiecki, waited at the airport by Pope’s secretaries. The USSR Embassy later noticed Moscow that in Vatican, the two Polish leaders met the Brazilian miners’ leader Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, later President of Brazil, who in the same years was undermining the Brazilian military dictatorship, taking space to the Communist Party of Brazil128.
The Federation of Trade Unions of Piedmont published a pamphlet: Polonia ’81: Solidarność, autogestione, appeared in February 1981, of one hundred pages about, distributed to thousands of workers. It contained political documents and the thought of some dissident Polish intellectuals.
For the reason that FIAT was born and developed in Turin and Piedmont, and FIAT had some important industrial plants in Poland, the Polish facts were particularly felt and participated by the workers of that Italian region. The reason in Piedmont was also in the most important and active Polish community in Italy.
In October 1981, the leader of CGIL, Lama, travelled to Gdańsk for the First Congress of Solidarność, when it was made the appeal to the Eastern Countries129.
Another interesting fact is that during the summer 1981, for the efforts of Krystyna Jaworska, now Professor of Polish Language at the University of Turin, with the active help of the Polish community of Turin and the sponsor of the trade unions, many families of Italian workers hosted more than one hundred children coming from famnilies of workers of FSO-Warsaw, in order to create stronger links and solidarity between the workers and the families of the two nations. The action had the blessing of Wyszynski as well, who asked some sister to accompany the children in Italy130.
Marek Majcher, of Solidarność, often visited, in 1980 and 1981, the Polish community of Turin (founded in 1949), and its President, Jan Jaworski, an engineer who fought as Captain, in the Polish Army of General Anders, who worked as link between Solidarność and the trade unions in Piedmont, as for the fund-raising from the Poles and workers of Turin to help the activity of Solidarność131. Also a Committee of Solidarity with Solidarność was founded, together with the Polish Community, the university and the help of some Amnesty International and CGIL activists.
On November 24, 1981, after the Wałęsa’s appeal, the Federation of CISL, CGIL and UIL of Piedmont, met at the Palace of Regional Council and expressed the necessity to establish soon a channel Piedmont-Mazowsze in order to send, often as possible, necessary supplies and provisions; on the same day, the national Foreign Affairs delegates of CGIL, CISL, UIL, spread a telex to notice that they asked Premier Giovanni Spadolini (a repubblican), the immediate intervention in order to help Poland with supplies132. For some irony of the fate the first (and last) cargo of supplies left from Turin on December 12, the syringes for a children hospital in Warsaw arrived just one hour before Martial Law. On December 10, a telex from Zbigniew Bujak to Fausto Bertinotti, of CGIL, Giovanni Avonto, of CISL, Corrado Ferro, of UIL, had noticed that the passports, for the syndicalists waited in Turin, were not given133. The delegates should participate to workers assemblies at FIAT, Michelin, Olivetti, and formalize the twinning between Piedmont and Mazowsze.
Already on December 14, the Federation of Trade Unions of Piedmont, demonstrated in Turin, in Piazza Castello, the protest against Martial Law and the solidarity to Poles, asking the immediate liberation of the thousands of activists arrested, together with the declarations of protest of all the Italian Parliament. On RAI 1, Italian State Tv, was transmitted the documentary Robotnicy 1980, about August 1980 strikes and its tragic antecedents of 1956 and 1970s.
Three ICP counsellors of the Turin City Council, Giuliano Ferrara, Renzo Gianotti and Giancarlo Quagliotti, together with Lama, drew the line of ICP for the following month.
The three counsellors formally asked to Rome to intervene immediately with all the necessary initiatives against USSR and against the Martial Law in Poland, without waiting other European partners.
In front of Colosseum, in Rome, Lama made his speech, on December 15:
I speak particularly to the comrades of my party, the communists. We are hardly beaten twice by the Polish facts. Together with all the Italian workers we know how much vital is the value of freedom and of trade unions autonomy. In Italy too, we want to build a socialist society, against the class exploitation and against Capitalism, together with the values of freedom and Democracy: so a Regime that establish a military power and takes the arms against the workers class, is not the State we want!134.
In Turin the Committee of Solidarity became the Committee of Aids, and was hosted at the see of CISL, where a Solidarność flag began to flutter for years. Krystyna Jaworska who was in Poland, in the days of the proclamation of Martial Law, came back to Italy with the will to go on in the work of the Committee, with meetings and conferences, open to the public and in order to inform Italian public, proposing in February 1982, for example, the Honorary Citizenship of Turin, for Lech Wałęsa (who went in Turin just in 2000), one year before his Nobel for Peace. The Committee was also able, during years 1982-1985 to send fifty-three cargoes of supplies, clothes and medicines, to Poland, with also the help of many parishes of Piedmont135.
While at Theatre alla Scala, in Milan, on February 13, took place a concert for Poland and a round table at the City Hall of Milan.
The local and regional pro- Solidarność activities of the Federation of Piedmont were exemplar also for the other regional trade unions, which took similar initiatives after 1985.
On December 8, 1983, Zbigniew Bujak wrote a letter to the trade unions of the Federations of Paris and Turin:
Your help is inestimable for our struggle. From the electronical pieces you sent us, we made the transmittings for Radio Solidarność. Thanks to your photocopiers we spread our independent press. 300 publications, 40,000 copies and more. Each photocopier received by you means a better circulation, better quality, a new publication, more members of Solidarność136.
This letter is a good proof of the importance of the support from the other European trade unions abroad, for the success of Solidarność, in continuity of the underground activities began by KOR, and the absolute prominence of Federation of CGIL, CISL and UIL of Piedmont, in this contest. They really put, in those years, the basis for a next EU opening to East. The Polish workers’ problems had become also problems of Italian workers (in the Anna Walentynowicz’s spirit). Even if not rarely the Italian trade unions were controlled by secret services, as was discovered later, in 1999, Paola Elia, Scricciolo’s wife (UIL), emerged from Mitrokhin’s archive, was a spy for Bulgarian security service (Corriere della Sera, Dec. 2, 1999).
An important testimony of this activity was also cumulated in the Archive of Fondazione Feltrinelli of Milan, since 1977, consisting in leaflets, posters and newspapers of the dissidence, brought in Italy by Italian students who visited Poland in those years, which, thanks to the activity of Francesco M. Cataluccio and Francesca Gori, culminated in the possibility to propose to the public of many Italian cities, those testimonies in exhibitions about Solidarność137.
The famous poster of Solidarnosc, for 1989, with Gary Cooper in High Noon, was printed by Cooperativa Rossi, in Bologna (as remembered by Prof. Krystyna Jaworska).
THE END OF EUROCOMMUNISM.
Alfredo Reichlin, partisan and prominent member of the CC of ICP, near to the anti-Soviet positions of Ingrao, in 1983, predicted somehow the imminent end of the “propulsive momentum” of Eurocommunism:
The most negative aspect is the conviction within and out the Party, that the Centre is paralysed, we don’t know on what, so political space is given to socialists and to external and internal forces, also the pro-Soviet forces which are attacking our courageous position on Poland (…) is it sectarian our position on Poland? (…) We rarely confront on serious problems and we are divided on sentences, articles, methods (…) the danger is to be put in a corner: becoming like Marchais or transforming in a servant force (…) the crisis of parties had to be overtaken by giving more space to the most democratic, riformer and modernizer political trends (…) we should stop to see only corruption and power games and we should confront with them, with our position, autonomous, if we don’t do this we will be late on new objective phenomenons of Italian society. Our alternative should be to assemble various forces for great reforms, peace, quality of development, employment, cleanliness of political life, our national destiny…has DC anything to say about these options? Craxi is taking DC in another negative direction138.
The pro-Soviet jump back made by the next Secretary, Alessandro Natta, confirmed the prediction and objectively compelled the ICP to definitively abandon Communism, in 1989, because fundamentally it never really transformed in Eurocommunism, in something really different from Moscow, because of the internal conservative resistances (reinforced after Berlinguer’s death) and for the evident diktats from CPSU. The ICP lose its possibility to be the only one, original, western communist force founded on freedom and Democracy, for too many compromises, and had to fuse with other forces and different instances, in order to survive as a major party in Italy.
The Polish Parliament voted the Martial Law, on January 26, 1982, with just one vote against. The USA ended so the alimentary aid, while the Polish debt increased day by day, becoming in 1984 one of the highest in the world. The repression was not only against the trade unions but also against many members of the PUWP. While Michnik, Kolakowski and Kuron, in line with the non-violence of Charta 77 (whose members, among them Vaclav Havel, met the Polish dissidents in the mountains on the border, in Krakonosze, in August 1978), were against an open war with the Government and stood for a spontaneous evolution from the basis, from the powerless, Zbigniew Bujak declared his “war of position” against the Government. It meant to go on with the protest in the streets asking for end of the Martial Law in change of the return of workers in the factories. People still died in those protests, and Popieluszko was killed also because he celebrated the funeral of a guy killed by police. Finally when Jaruzelski came in Italy, it seems he was very disappointed by the fact that neither the Pope, or the Prime Minister or the President of the Republic of Italy, complained so much about repression in Poland as the Secretariat of ICP. It means that even if ICP gradually renovated its pro-Moscow attitude after the death of Berlinguer and the victory of Gorbacev, Jaruzelski conserved his pure imagine of rotten corrupted militarism, for ICP, like Pinochet on the other side, and necessarily somehow also the “scapegoat” of a system where, as correctly observed by Havel in his 1968 speech for the independent Czechoslovak writers, titled About the Opposition, the institutions should open to a certain democratization, because otherwise a one party system can also renovate its ranks, but the same renovators would become in some decades corrupted for the absence of oxygen. In an authoritarian or dictatorial system in facts bureaucracy develops without limits, lacking a political and economical control of the people. It necessarily become a monster controlling everything, and the Party itself, and promoting the worst and most weak or corruptible members, as written by Ota Sik and Leszek Kolakowski.
What in facts Edward Gierek tried to do without success and without ability was to reduce the State subsidies and introduce some form of economical competition, but without a plan of development of the industrial production and without promoting a cultural liberalization. It seems interesting, to conclude this dissertation, to remember the mysterious conditions connected with the murder of Piotr Jaroszewicz, Prime Minister of Poland from 1970 to 1980, then retired from politics. In September 1992, little more than one month before the death of Dubcek (who died in a car accident, few days before the parliamentary vote for the division of Czech Republic and Slovakia, which he strongly opposed), the old Jaroszewicz and his wife were tortured and killed in their house in Warsaw by thieves who did not steal anything but documents.
Many things had to be hidden about the 1970s and the 1980s in Poland and probably will never be known, because someone, and it is possible that there was more than one double agent (as was found guilty and collaborator with the secret service, the historian and politician Leszek Moczulski, one of the author of the new Constitution of Poland), needed to hid his past to treat then, as Walesa wrote, Poland (as the other new democracies in Eastern Europe) as his own triumph, his own trophy.
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