Free Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs Page B

new church, they joined a congregation of a quarter of a million people. The entire population of the “city without God” had turned out to greet the pope. Here was proof that history could not be reversed by tanks, internment camps, and corrugated iron fences, that martial law too would pass, and that Nowa Huta’s two-story monument to the founder of world communism would one day come down.
    T HE K REMLIN GREETED THE NEWS of Pope John Paul’s triumphant return to his homeland with ill-concealed fury. The Soviet mass media accused Polish priests of inciting parishioners to acts of “political hooliganism” and inspiring “counterrevolutionary disturbances.” Soviet leaders urged their Polish counterparts to crack down hard on the “reactionary” wing of the Catholic Church.
    “The Polish Communist Party isn’t putting much effort into the struggle with the church,” Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, complained to his Politburo colleagues. “Things have reached the point when thousandsupon thousands of people are crawling on their knees before the Roman pope.” 186
    Jaruzelski resisted Moscow’s advice to crack down on the church. He tried to explain that he needed the church as an “ally” in his campaign to ensure peace and quiet in Poland and regain respectability at home and abroad. The Kremlin potentates remained hostile. Their suspicions were voiced by the youngest member of the Politburo, who presented himself as an ardent believer in the monotheistic faith of communism. “Jaruzelski is trying to paint the situation in rosy colors,” he told his colleagues. “We must clarify his real intentions. We must find out whether he wants to introduce a pluralistic system of government in Poland.” 187
    Such were the views of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev a year before he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

II
REVOLT
OF THE MACHINES
In Poland, in August 1980, it was human beings who went on strike. In the Soviet Union, we are witnessing a strike of inanimate objects .
Adam Michnik
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance .
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

SAKHALIN ISLAND
September 1, 1983
    A FTER R ONALD R EAGAN’S ELECTION as fortieth president of the United States, the Pentagon began publishing annual reports on the Soviet military threat. Packed with color illustrations of missiles that could hit New York and Los Angeles, charts depicting the growing Warsaw Pact advantage in tanks and men under arms, and grainy photographs of nuclear submarines, the glossy brochures portrayed a world in which the balance of power was shifting inexorably in favor of the Communist superpower. With each edition of Soviet Military Power , an ever greater proportion of the earth’s surface was daubed in red. Sinister red arrows reached out across the world’s major sea-lanes, showing the Kremlin straining to achieve the goal of a thousand-ship navy. Much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was covered with blotches and symbols denoting the presence of Soviet, Cuban, or East German military advisers. No part of the globe, not even the United States, seemed entirely safe from the encroaching Red menace.
    Thanks to satellite technology, American military planners were able to observe a Soviet arms buildup that was unprecedented for peacetime. If anything, they underestimated the extent of the buildup, failing to detect many of the nuclear warheads that were rolling off Soviet production lines. There was something missing, however, from this bird’s-eye view: an understanding of ground-level reality.
    Viewed up close, the Soviet military machine was neither as awesome nor as efficient as it appeared from the sky. The military-industrial complex suffered from the same weaknesses as the rest of the Soviet economy: incompetence, waste, technological backwardness, bureaucracy. Despite devoting an ever-increasing proportion of their country’s economic