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Putting out those fires kept Walesa busy through much of the year. Since he hates to fly, he crisscrossed Poland in a union-owned white Polski-Fiat 125 P driven by his personal chauffeur and assistant, Mieczyslaw Wachowski. Walesa was at his best plunging into a midnight meeting of angry workers and then persuading them, by force of rhetoric, shouting or cajolery, to end a strike. He made the 340-mile round trip between Gdansk and Warsaw countless times, tires screeching as Wachowski dodged plodding farm wagons. During those drives Walesa would spend his time catching up on his sleep, or tuning in to rock played by Radio Free Europe. Lately, he had been listening to English lessons on his tape recorder in preparation for a trip that he had planned to make to the U.S.
But for all Walesa's skill as a moderator, Solidarity was increasingly forced into the path of contentious political activism by the regime's failure to deal with its fundamental problem: the economy. The authorities could not act effectively because the party and government had fallen into a state of near terminal paralysis. Decades of blatant propaganda and economic failures had long since discredited the rulers in the eyes of the public. If the government had actually produced a golden egg, gibed Dissident Kuron, "people would say that it was not golden; second, that it was not an egg; and third, that the government had stolen it." Some 900,000 Poles quit the Communist party after August 1980, reducing its strength to a mere 2.5 million, only 7% of the population. The resignations increased in October when the Central Committee urged party members, about 1 million of whom belonged to Solidarity, to quit the union. In a strikingly candid statement, Central Committee Member Marian Arendt recently told a Polish weekly: "Mostly it is workers who are leaving [the party]. Once I was so naive as to think that a few evil men were responsible for the errors of the party.
Now I no longer have such illusions. There is something wrong in our whole apparatus, in our entire structure."
The party was on the verge of total collapse. What was more, Solidarity's surge had started another surprising movement in Poland: a grass-roots crusade for reform that sought to democratize the party from within. Adopting the workers' slogan of ODNOWA (renewal), party reformers tried to make the leadership more responsive to the rank and file. Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, a pragmatic politician who had replaced Gierek in September 1980, shrewdly adopted the cause of renewal in the hope of controlling it from the top and limiting its scope. At the same time, he cooperated with Solidarity to avoid a possibly disastrous confrontation.
All the while, the Kremlin watched with rising anxiety. Solidarity's very existence was incompatible with the Communist Party's monopoly of power. But perhaps even more important, the drive for democracy within the Polish party challenged the Leninist doctrine of centralized party discipline. Poland's festering economic crisis also put a drain on the whole Soviet bloc, whose member nations' economies were interlocked within the COMECON trade organization. And in