B2-38 · Poland on the Front Page: 1979 and 1989

Poland on the Front Page: 1979 and 1989

Countries behind the Iron Curtain rarely made the front pages of the world's newspapers. Poland did so many times in the 1980s, and two moments stand at the beginning and at the end of the story: a visit that gave people courage, and an election that ended communism. Looking at how the world reported them tells us not only what happened, but also how it looked from the outside.

1979: Nine days that gave people courage

In October 1978, the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, was elected pope and took the name John Paul II. The news was a shock in Moscow and a celebration in Poland. Foreign journalists wrote that the communist leaders had been given the worst possible surprise: a Polish pope whom the whole world was listening to.

In June 1979, John Paul II came home for nine days. The government did not dare to stop the visit, but censorship tried to control it. State TV broadcast the Masses, but the cameras were told to show the Pope and the old women in the front rows, not the huge crowds behind them.

Western reporters saw what the cameras were hiding. About thirteen million people, roughly a third of the nation, saw the Pope in person. On Victory Square in Warsaw, he prayed: "Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth – of this land." The crowd applauded for a long time. Millions of Poles heard those words as a message about their own country. For the first time in decades, people saw how many of them there were, and they stopped feeling alone and afraid.

Just over a year later, in August 1980, strikes began at the shipyard in Gdańsk, and the free trade union Solidarity was born. On March 27, 1981, a four-hour warning strike brought almost the whole country to a stop. But in December 1981, the government declared martial law. Tanks occupied the streets, phone lines were cut and thousands of people were arrested. The world protested, but no Western government was ready to risk a war. Poles resisted in their own ways: underground newspapers were printed in secret, and films and photos were smuggled out to the West. In the town of Świdnik, people went for a walk every evening when the official TV news began, to show that they did not believe a word of it.

1989: The year of the round table

By the late 1980s, the economy was in ruins, and new strikes broke out in 1988. The Pope came back in 1983 and again in June 1987, and the second visit was huge. In Gdańsk, about three quarters of a million people came to his open-air Mass near the shipyard, and he said the forbidden word "Solidarity" out loud again and again. On Westerplatte, where the Second World War began, he told young people that each of them would find their own "Westerplatte" in life – something worth defending. In Warsaw, he prayed at the grave of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, a priest who had been murdered by the secret police in 1984. The government finally understood that it could not crush Solidarity, so in February 1989 it sat down with the opposition at a large round table in Warsaw.

The talks led to an election on June 4, 1989, the first partly free election in the Soviet bloc. Only some seats were open to the opposition, but Solidarity won almost all of them. On the same day, Chinese tanks crushed the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and many newspapers put the two stories side by side on their front pages.

Foreign journalists could hardly believe how fast things were moving. In August 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist prime minister in the Eastern bloc for more than forty years. A few months later, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash joked that what had taken ten years in Poland took ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany – and might take ten days in Czechoslovakia. Poland had opened the door, and the others ran through it.

Because it happened through talks and not through violence, many reporters called it a "negotiated revolution".

Two stories, one lesson?

In 1979, the world watched a nation discover its courage. In 1989, it watched the same nation use it. Both times, the most powerful images were not of soldiers or politicians but of ordinary people: a huge crowd on a Warsaw square, workers at a shipyard gate, voters queuing on a June morning. Perhaps that is why these stories still appear in history books around the world. They remind readers that even when the odds seem impossible, the courage of ordinary people can matter.