The Anoshkin Notebook on the Polish Crisis, December 1981

44 COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT BULLETIN 11
Presumably we would be able to see signs and portents
locally in Warsaw.
As it happened, the instructions came in when we
were in the final stages of an embassy paddle tennis
tournament, not the biggest thing in the world of sport but
an event taken with commendable seriousness in the local
US community. Washington would probably not have
been greatly amused to know we finished the tournament
first before setting about the duties that had been laid upon
us, but I like to think we showed a proper sense of
proportion at a tense moment.
It was one of those raw, bone-chilling nights you get
in Eastern Europe as embassy officers made their way
across town in twos and threes, some on foot, others
driving. I saw the teams as they returned, tired,
half-frozen. <strong>The</strong>y all told the same story. <strong>The</strong>y had seen
absolutely nothing. Government buildings were pitch
black, with the normal complement of semi-comatose
guards. Ministry of Defense, Foreign Ministry, Party
Central Committee building, railroad stations, airport,
barracks areas, Soviet embassy and housing area—all
quiet as was usual in Warsaw on a freezing Sunday night
in December. <strong>The</strong> only unusual activity in the entire city,
they reported dryly, was the American embassy, lit up like
a transatlantic liner on a dark and empty ocean. We fired
in a late-night message to the Department, knowing wiser
heads would make sense of these unremarkable findings.
In part because the November and December scares
came to nothing, in part because of what I had heard from
Brzezinski and Davies, in part because of my own
developing sense of the realities around me, I soon found
myself almost completely preoccupied with the Polish
domestic political situation and less intent on the Soviet
military threat. From what we continued to hear and read,
Moscow seemed deeply frustrated over Poland,
exasperated at the inability of the Polish party leadership
to grasp the nettle and put Solidarity in its place with
whatever means necessary. <strong>The</strong> Soviets seemed unsure
themselves of the course they should take. Sending troops
in looked more and more problematic as time went on.
While I grew skeptical about Soviet intervention in
late 1980 and impressed as the various crises came and
went in the succeeding months with their concurrent
difficulties and uncertainties, I have to say I thought
Soviet intervention was again in the cards in the fall of
1981. <strong>The</strong> Polish leadership looked increasingly
feckless—[Stanis»aw] Kania’s replacement as First
Secretary by [Wojciech] Jaruzelski did not seem to
indicate a radically new course. I ruled out the possibility
that Moscow was prepared to lose control of Poland—just
to let it go, like that. If the political slide continued, if
Solidarity won a substantial measure of power, if Soviet
strategic interests were seriously threatened, then it
seemed to me they would send in troops.
With these judgements in mind, I find the record of
the Soviet Politburo 10 December 1981 session contained
in the Jachranka documents quite extraordinary—I feel I
owe an apology for the dark thoughts I used to harbor
about what I now see was an amiable, laid-back bunch of
geriatric Rotarians. Who could have imagined, apart
maybe from his mother—she knew her boy had a heart of
gold—[KGB chief Iurii] Andropov saying that “even if
Poland falls under the control of ‘Solidarity,’ that’s the
way it will be”? (Had no one ever bothered to tell him
about the Brezhnev Doctrine?)
Equally curious is the absence of any dissent from this
revolutionary (better, counterrevolutionary) view on the
part of the others. It is true, the records of earlier 1981
Politburo sessions document a temporizing, undynamic
Soviet leadership, but it is a revelation to see they had
become such complete pussycats. And if that was their
shirokaya natura showing, and they were all that relaxed
about Poland doing its own thing, it sure would have made
things an awful lot easier for Kania and Jaruzelski if they
had told them earlier, instead of doing things like sending
that nasty June [1981] letter.
I find equally striking, suspicious even—which shows
I am geriatric Soviet hand myself—the unanimity with
which the Politburo rejects at the same meeting the idea of
military action in Poland, without anything resembling
real debate. Admittedly they knew by now they had bitten
off more than they felt like chewing in Afghanistan, and
could not have relished the risks a massive Polish
operation would have brought with it. Even so, to read in
the record someone of [Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A.]
Gromyko’s steel declaring that “there cannot be any
introduction of troops into Poland” has a surreal quality.
Just as mind-bending is the fact that someone with
Suslov’s curriculum vitae is reported as speaking after
Gromyko of only press handling of the Polish
“counterrevolutionary forces.” Press handling? Did he
hear what Gromyko said?
I was struck by Jaruzelski’s reaction—as noted in
Raymond Garthoff’s report 1 —to Kulikov’s insistence that
the USSR at no time had plans to intervene militarily. It is
not difficult to imagine the reasons for Jaruzelski’s
exasperation. If anyone on the Polish side could judge the
reality of the Soviet threat, it must surely be he. Of
course, the General wanted the threat to be seen and
accepted as real so that he could sell the Polish people, and
the world at large, the patriotic explanation for martial
law, so he might not have been wholly candid. I still
think, however, that his exasperation springs from
experience of how close the threat came at times.
Brzezinski was a central player in the late 1980 events
and his views on Carter’s hot line message of December 3,
as a factor in the Soviet decision not to intervene, have to
be given due weight. I can only say that the US warnings,
in general, struck me as largely pro forma exercises. It was
right for us to do it—we had to do something—and I have
no doubt the Soviets took them seriously, as they took any
major US statement seriously. However, I would judge
the imponderables of taking military action in Poland as