THE CURTAIN RISES: EASTERN EUROPE, 1989 : CHAPTER 2 POLAND : Solidarity Gets Its Foot in the Door : Once again, the Communist Party is ‘too late for its meeting with history.’

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the leader of the Polish Communist Party, was a curious phenomenon, even to those who worked closely with him: a man with dictatorial powers at his disposal but an odd reluctance to employ them. Under Jaruzelski, it was common for a weekly Politburo meeting convened at 10 a.m. to still be going 12 hours later. Any of the dozen or so men in attendance could carry an argument as far as he wanted, for as long as he wanted.

To some, Jaruzelski’s leniency was a sign of weakness; to others, it bespoke another characteristic: Above all, they felt, he wanted to be liked.

A Central Committee meeting of the Polish United Workers’ Party opened in Warsaw on Jan. 16 with the Communists facing their most important decision in 40 years. Jaruzelski was preparing to ask the party to endorse his plan to open talks with Solidarity, the independent free-trade union. In the process, he was about to test the limits of the Communist Party’s regard for him.

The reformers in the party, with Jaruzelski’s cautious, almost stealthy, assistance, had been in the ascendancy since 1986. By its nature, the party was conservative--to Bronislaw Geremek, an adviser to Solidarity, the party was always “too late for its meeting with history”--a trait that would plague it throughout the coming crucial months. It was still reacting to martial law, in the view of some members, as late as 1986, in a party congress that seemed to enshrine a hard-line resistance to Solidarity, which already had been closed off from legal existence for five years.

But 1988 had been horrendous for the party and the government. In April, a series of strikes broke out, so quickly they even surprised the union leadership.

Four months later, in August, more strikes occurred. Still, however, 1988 was not 1980, when Solidarity was born and labor unrest had swept Poland: The public, while generally sympathetic to the strikers, was in no mood to risk a return to a period of the same barren store shelves or some new form of hard-line crackdown. The strikers, therefore, stood alone.

The government, however, was in even worse shape. Despite an initial tough stance, its solution to any subsequent threatened work stoppage was a swift capitulation on pay demands. Some workers who threatened strikes in the morning saw their pay increased 50% by the time their shifts ended.

What had begun as a stopgap government measure had become the permanent solution. It could not go on.

To end the crisis, Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak went on television Aug. 26 and proposed a series of so-called round-table talks with “various social forces,” including Solidarity.

The banned trade union had won a major concession from the Communists, for Kiszczak made it clear that the government was willing to discuss, for the first time, Solidarity’s re-legalization.

But by last January, after initial meetings between Kiszczak and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and on the eve of a Central Committee meeting, matters were stalled. The new prime minister, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, had come into office feeling that he might be able to avoid the talks with Solidarity, a shot of optimism for the party rank and file.

Rakowski hoped his reputation as the reform-minded editor of the party’s weekly newspaper might lure support from the Polish intelligentsia--that part of it not already allied with Solidarity. But his efforts failed--and then came the crowning blow: Despite the general alarm of the entire Politburo, Jaruzelski allowed one of its members to debate Walesa on television.

The effect, as Kiszczak and others had warned, was devastating. For the first time in seven years, Walesa was seen on uncensored television, clearly outpointing a man who looked and sounded like a party hack. The debate set the country abuzz.

Alexander Kwaszniewski, who had become a Rakowski protege, saw the prime minister the following day. Rakowski was furious--and he knew his initial strategy of avoiding talks with Solidarity was now dead.

With the debacle still ringing in his ears, Rakowski made his shift and presented the Central Committee with a choice: The party could dig in its heels and attempt to solve the economic crisis in spite of an obvious lack of public backing, or it could face the new reality, deal with Solidarity and hope to pull the union into the system just enough to give the Communists a measure of support.

In short, it was a plan to co-opt Solidarity. Rakowski and the party knew the danger. After 10 years of sparring with the Communists, the Solidarity leadership would not be easy to co-opt. The 120 members of the Central Committee were to come back in January with an answer.

Now the showdown had come. “The atmosphere was very tense,” said one newly appointed Politburo member. “The discussion was extremely critical, not only on the proposition made by Rakowski but toward the leadership in general.”

Kwaszniewski, there as an observer, saw an entire party apparatus in frightened rebellion. “Imagine a long room,” he said, “a long table on one side where the Politburo sits, a statue of Lenin at one end. There was a joke that if the Politburo got any bigger, Lenin would have to go. And the entire leadership sat there under attack.

“In one moment, the whole Politburo left the room and went into its own meeting. And then it was announced that Jaruzelski, Rakowski, Kiszczak and the defense minister were ready to submit their resignations if the Central Committee did not deliver a vote of confidence. Then we were told the entire Politburo would resign with them.”

The tone of the debate suddenly shifted. The conservatives, Kwaszniewski realized, had the balance of votes in the room but no leadership, no single voice to rally around. The meeting’s presiding officer let the talk go on--in Kwaszniewski’s view, the more ventilation the better. The discussion ran to nearly 1 a.m. The last moment of tension came on the vote procedure.

“If it was a secret ballot,” he said, “I knew we (the liberals) would lose it. Jaruzelski had put it all on the line. It was true that the conservatives had no leader, but nothing was sure. It was a gamble. If he lost, we could be headed for an explosion.”

The call came for an open vote of confidence. It passed.

“That was the shadow line,” Kwaszniewski said. “We crossed it.”

Prague in the dead of winter seemed a worthy backdrop for a capital city tightly run by Communists.

On a spring day, it could vie with Paris for the title of Europe’s prettiest. In a leaden winter, it fit the prevailing politics--the towering hilltop Hradchany Castle, seat of government, the blackened saints lining the Charles Bridge, the swans in the dirty Vltava or, sometimes, flying in line, bright against the dark, bare trees of the opposite bank. It was a town of secrecy, crumbling masonry in the alleyways, long shadows under the street lamps, wet cobblestones, the sound of unseen footsteps forever echoing around a corner.

On Jan. 15, a crowd of about 5,000 people converged on Wenceslas Square in the late afternoon to commemorate the suicide of Jan Palach, a young student who had burned himself to death in 1969 to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia the year before.

Police used tear gas and water cannon to break up the march. The demonstrators returned the next day. Among them was Czechoslovak playwright Vaclav Havel. He and 13 other opposition activists were arrested, and police again used tear gas and high-pressure hoses to drive the demonstrators off the square. It was the same the next day.

On Jan. 18, the demonstrators came again. This time, the police did not interfere. And the demonstrators chanted, “Where’s Havel? Where’s Havel?”

He would remain in jail until May.

On Feb. 7 in East Berlin, watchtower guards at the Berlin Wall shot at two 20-year-old East Germans making a run across the no-man’s land to the Wall, wounding one and killing the other. The victim, Chris Gueffroys, was buried in a grave half a mile from the Wall. At his state-controlled funeral, the cause of his death was described as a “tragic accident.”