On this day 40 years ago: the martyrdom in an icy river that helped lead to the freedom of Eastern Europe
Why it matters now, and why we need a Museum of Communism
Forty years ago today, on the night of 19 October 1984, a young priest called Jerzy Popiełuszko was driving back from celebrating mass. At around 10 PM, near Toruń in Northern Poland, he was flagged down by a group of men dressed as road traffic officers.
They were agents of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They abducted him and another man he was travelling with. The other man escaped by throwing himself from their moving car. Popiełuszko tried to escape too. The secret police beat him and threw him in the boot of their car. He tried to escape again, so they beat him yet again, gagged him and tied him up in the boot in such a way that any attempt to straighten his legs tightened a noose round his neck. Then they tied a weight to him, and threw him into an icy river, perhaps alive, perhaps already dead from the beating.
Presumably, he was meant to be just another person who disappeared.
His murder was the result of his support for the illegal trade union Solidarity. His involvement had begun when a delegation of striking steelworkers asked for a priest to come to their steelworks in 1980. He volunteered, and became one of the priests most involved with the union during its brutal repression by the state. When you see footage of that crackdown - of troops battering unarmed workers, and running them over with lorries - you can see why they wanted a mass and confession before going on strike.
The place Popiełuszko was preaching on the night of his murder was regarded as “Poland’s Bermuda triangle”, because so many Solidarity activists had disappeared there.
It was not the first time they had tried to kill Popiełuszko. His home had been bombed. He had been arrested and interrogated multiple times. Explosives and bullets had been planted in his home. In the days before his murder the authorities had attempted to kill him in a staged road traffic accident.
For ten days after Popiełuszko’s disappearance people waited for news. All over the country masses were said, and marches held for his safe return. Prime Minister General Jarulzelski was forced to denounce his kidnapping. Ironically, it was left to the Minister for Internal Affairs to announce a search for whoever had abducted him.
On the 30th October it was announced after evening mass that his body had been found:
“Nobody who heard it will ever forget the awful howl of agony that rose from the thousands waiting in the church of St. Stanislaw Kostka when a priest announced that Father Popiełuszko’s body had been found, a cry which went on for many minutes until it was joined by the tolling of the bells.” 1
His funeral was attended by at least a quarter of a million people - maybe substantially more. For the first time since the imposition of martial law in 1981, Lech Wałęsa was able to address the crowds there, during which he appealed for calm, and the resumption of talks with the government: “Let the silence of mourning reign throughout Poland, but let it also be the silence of hope.”
The regime had lifted martial law in 1983, and claimed the country was going though “normalisation”. But the murder of Popiełuszko showed things were anything but normal.
The regime was - extraordinarily - forced to put his murderers on trial. But this was a miscalculation.
As well as exposing the internal divisions of the regime it also drew the government further into conflict with the Church, with Solidarity - and essentially with the ordinary population of Poland.
In the dock, two of his murderers showed contrition. But another, Captain Pietrowski, slated the Church, denouncing priests who, “wear a cross on their chests and carry hatred in their hearts.”
The State Prosecutor drew a moral equivalence between the actions of his murderers and the supposed “extremism” of Fr Popiełuszko. The Judge, summing up, condemned the killers “excessive zeal” in eliminating, “an enemy of the state”.
Villagers sought to build a memorial where he was killed, but were refused by the authorities on the grounds that “he was not worthy of a monument”.
After his murder the regime was in a maze it could not escape from. The Church and Solidarity were pushed closer together, and the wedge between the regime and the people got bigger.
The next year saw the “war of the crosses,” with the regime mounting further attacks and murders on priests and Solidarity activists, with each murder and maiming triggering a further round of implausible lies and anger, further demonstrations, further arrests and further show trials. Meanwhile on TV General Jarulzelski hailed “how much calm and hope have come to Poland.”
The rest is history. In 1987 demonstrators clashed with police in all the main cities. In 1988 massive strikes paralysed Poland and the regime finally entered into talks. In 1989 the regime was forced to legalise Solidarity, which won 99 out of 100 seats in the Senate in the first partly-free elections.
And all over eastern Europe extraordinary things were happening.
The Baltic Way saw a human chain of two million people link arms in a 430-mile line across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. (A few years ago I met someone who had been a small girl in that chain.)
The Pan European Picnic saw people forcing open the border between Hungary and East Germany in a foreshadowing of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And eventually, across eastern Europe, a diverse cast of playwrights and former shipyard workers suddenly became Prime Ministers and Presidents.
Why write about this now?
It is impossible not to be in awe of the many ordinary people all across eastern Europe who risked their lives and suffered greatly in order to get basic freedoms and remove repressive governments - at a time when this idea seemed completely impossible.
The events that led up to 1989 are surely among the most inspirational in human history. Yet they happened only a few hours away from here, and when I was at school.
But these incredible events and people are now slipping out of popular memory. I wonder how many British undergraduates know who Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa are?
Yet the lessons of that period remain sadly relevant: for example, the Chinese regime currently has around one million Uyghurs locked up in detention camps, sterilising many, and is armed with population surveillance technology which the Stasi could only dream of.
Yet Britain’s current policy is to suck up to that regime as much as possible.
Yesterday the son of Jimmy Lai, a British national and pro-democracy activist jailed in China, called for "urgent" intervention from the UK as his father's health deteriorates after four years in solitary confinement.
All over the free world, Beijing tries to push around our friends - from Sweden and Denmark to Australia.
But apparently we should instead “engage more,” says the business secretary. After being critical, apparently we should “reset relations” in the (naive) hope of “more investment”.
Now, Britain has a Pencil Museum, a Dog Collar Museum, and a Museum of Garden History. But somehow we don’t have a Museum of Communism.
We should create one, for so many reasons. The way these regimes operated offers lessons, and their overthrow by people of incredible courage is inspirational. After the dramas of Brexit, it would be a fine project to work with our friends in Europe on.
Ultimately, the people of Eastern Europe freed themselves through great courage. And they were able to because of the unwillingness of Mikhail Gorbachev to butcher them in the way the Soviet Union had in 1948, 1956 and 1968 and on many other occasions.
But Britain also played a role in supporting those who worked for freedom in Europe, and rebuilding afterwards. This is true in ways great and small. The trigger event for our involvement in the Second World war was the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, something the Russian government lies about even now.
Nearly 50 years later Mrs Thatcher’s November 1988 visit to Poland helped pave the way for discussions between the Polish government and Solidarity the following year. She was right to oppose a plan inspired by Henry Kissinger to do a US-Soviet deal which would have legitimised the regimes of Eastern Europe, even as they started to crack. There was a poignant moment in 1992 when the Bank of England repaid the Baltic states for the gold they had deposited there before the Soviet invasions of 1940. From Karl Marx’s days in the British Library, we are bound up in this story in many ways.
A Museum of Communism would be a good way to build ties with our friends in Europe.
But the inspiring events of 1989 and the dismantling of murderous totalitarian regimes by heroic-but-ordinary people just obviously deserves greater commemoration. Not least because, sadly, so many people like Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko did not live to see those incredible days.
Links
BBC: On this day, 30 October 1984
BBC: People’ Century, “People Power” (section on Solidarity 18 mins in)
Polish Wikipedia Entry
Polish Culture and European Dialogue Centre
Quoted in Mary Craig (1986) “The Crystal Spirit”
More specifically about the actions of the British government on this occasion, the then junior Foreign Office minister Malcolm Rifkind visited Poland, coincidentally arriving on the day of Popiełuszko's funeral. Rifkind laid a wreath at the church in Warsaw before going on to have meetings with local leaders of Solidarity. This helped force the Polish government’s hand in its dealings with the union and set a precedent that was to be followed by other visiting Western politicians.
I was a young man working in London in my first proper job since leaving university. It was so clear that we were witnessing history in the making. They were extraordinary times.