The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer Page B

communists, as well as the presidency—presumably Jaruzelski, who announced at the conclusion of the talks that Poland was “on the road to becoming a socialist parliamentary democracy.”
    Evidently he believed it. Nothing suggests Jaruzelski had the least doubt that the party would retain power—that is, he chose to emphasize the “socialist” before “parliamentary” when it came to democracy. Perhaps he was seduced by his political experts’ polls, purporting to show that Solidarity’s popularity was declining as his own was rising. More likely, he simply couldn’t imagine a different outcome. These elections would be like any other communist vote, he not illogically presumed: the results foreordained, the people grateful to participate and show their support for their government’s leadership, which after all had only their best interests at heart. Not even the nation’s dyspepticpost-1981 mood, nor the economic hard times, appeared to shake his confidence.
    The party rank and file did not share his optimism, Kat among them. As the Round Table progressed, his mood steadily deteriorated. “Socialism in Poland is being dismantled,” he complained bitterly late one night, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was full of dark foreboding. The party was colluding in its own demise, he said. Jaruzelski and his men deluded themselves if they thought they could control events they were about to unleash. Kat had just learned with astonishment that the government itself had proposed that Solidarity field candidates for the June election. The opposition hadn’t even asked for it. Talk about an instinct for self-destruction! “What a spectacle,” he declared, shaking his head in perplexity and contempt.
    He guessed that, in a genuinely free election, the party would be lucky to retain a majority in Parliament. At a recent briefing for top communist officials, the government negotiator, Czeslaw Kiszczak, had been hooted down. “Attitudes within the party were hostile,” he reported. “The old guard, especially, asked, ‘Why do this? We risk sacrificing all our privileges, without any gain.’ ” Even party liberals felt they were being dragged along against their will and own best interests. Hard-liners were angry enough, Kat believed, that they might try to oust Jaruzelski—a “traitor,” this time, to their cause.
    As the Round Table neared its conclusion, I invited Solidarity’s chief strategist in the talks, Bronislaw Geremek, for dinner at the Victoria Hotel in central Warsaw, facing the gargantuan square where Poland’s communist elite staged their annual May Day parades. Ever the academic, in his mothy tweed jacket and well-worn sweater, he could not have afforded on his own to eat in such an establishment. Yet there he was, having just helped engineer one of the most extraordinary diplomatic coups in modern European history.
    Like Jaruzelski, he too was full of confidence. It did not matter whether the communist party liked the deal or not. “The army is the true power in Poland,” he said. “Jaruzelski will deliver. The conventional wisdom that the party would step in to prevent an erosion of its power is wrong.” Of course, he added, the general would be named president. Though elated at all that Solidarity had won, Geremek did not foresee a dramatic change in Poland’s political landscape, letalone a rapid transition to democracy. The June elections would merely be a prelude to fully free elections four years later. It would be a decade, he suggested, before Poland might actually see a noncommunist government.
    Never did he imagine it would be four months.
    On January 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush was sworn in as the forty-first president of the United States. Shortly after taking office, he ordered a strategic review of U.S.-Soviet relations. It arrived on the president’s desk in