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No one could deny that the union had made some tactical mistakes. The open letter that encouraged free union movements throughout the Soviet bloc last Sept. 9 was unnecessarily provocative. The hotheaded statements on "confrontation" by union leaders gathered in Radom on Dec. 3, including Walesa, proved to be a propaganda gold mine when authorities broadcast carefully edited tapes of the bugged meeting. Even more useful to the government was the resolution adopted at Solidarity's last session in Gdansk on Dec. 12, calling for a referendum on the competence of the Communist regime and a redefinition of Poland's military ties with Moscow.
Yet Solidarity's defenders insist, and most Western experts agree, that the preparations to declare martial law had been occurring long before these events. British diplomats and intelligence analysts believe that Jaruzelski decided to declare martial law within a week after he became party leader last October. Poland's former Ambassador to Tokyo, Zdzislaw Rurarz, said after defecting to the U.S. last month that he had been instructed in March 1981 to prepare for a declaration of martial law. That was just about the time of the Bydgoszcz incident, when police beatings of some union members threatened to spark a general strike until Walesa engineered a last-minute compromise. Says Piotr Naimski, a founder of the KOR dissident group and now a spokesman for the New York City-based Committee in Support of Solidarity: "The government decided after Bydgoszcz that there was no way to compromise with Solidarity and that the union represented a direct threat to its power."
Some analysts speculate that the government may even have infiltrated agents into Solidarity to encourage provocative actions and thus create an alibi for declaring martial law. But that theory is discounted by Piotr Gmaj, who heads a Solidarity exile organization in Zurich. Gmaj notes that Solidarity's leaders were all elected at the grass-roots level, where "everybody knows everybody else and knows who is to be trusted."
Even if no specific union action brought on martial law, it could still be argued that Solidarity's overall evolution made the crackdown inevitable. There is no question that as the months wore on, Solidarity took on a much more political role than the government or its own leaders originally envisaged. But that was not necessarily the result of union excesses.
Walesa and his fellow labor leaders had no intention of interfering with the government in the wake of the Gdansk accords that first recognized the union's rights in August 1980. Solidarity saw itself as a mass movement that represented Polish society and sought to make the authorities accountable to the people—particularly in the economic domain, where the government's failure was so spectacular.
What contributed most to the rising political tensions was not Solidarity's excessive ambition but the rapidly deteriorating economic crisis. Although the regime blamed that on the strikes, they in fact accounted for only 1.7% of all lost workdays in the first three-quarters of 1981. The main problem was that the government, alarmed by the near collapse of Communist Party authority, resisted all economic reform and refused to yield any real power during the stonewalling negotiations with Solidarity.