Five years ago, Michael Szporer, the son of a defector wanted by the Polish political police, would never have believed he would be introducing former KGB spy and Major General Oleg Kalugin to a Library audience on May Day.
But, in a testimony to the end of the Cold War era, that is exactly what he did in a lecture sponsored by the Library of Congress Professional Association Polish Language Table in cooperation with Catholic University of America. Dr. Szporer, of the Copyright office, heads the language table along with Ronald Bachman of the European Division.
Mr. Kalugin spoke to an overflow audience on "Solidarity, the Vatican, and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire." As a spy for the KGB, he had been sent to Poland in the early 1980s to undermine the Solidarity union movement and the powerful influence of the Vatican over the Polish people.
"Poland was the weakest link in the Warsaw Pact," Mr. Kalugin said. "We knew that if Poland broke away, the damage would be contagious, with other countries falling like dominos," he said.
Poles had resisted Soviet pressure since the end of World War II when the country fell into Soviet orbit. Polish workers had rioted in 1956, and again in the ports during the 1970s, when the Soviets raised prices and changed salary levels. The Polish people also challenged the Soviets by not collectivizing agriculture, he said. Poles always looked to the West and to the Vatican.
He said that when the Soviets directed the Polish government to restrain the resistance movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some Polish Communist police agents deliberately underestimated the strength of the opposition movement. They told the Soviets that there were only a few dissidents.
"But all you had to do was look into the faces of the workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to realize the situation," Mr. Kalugin said.
But the KGB was not fooled. Back in Moscow, he added, after Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected as pope in 1979, Soviet officials were aware that the resistance movement was really much larger than Polish police agents had told them.
Mr. Kalugin said three characteristics of Polish national character -- pride, reckless independence and a refusal to submit -- strengthened the resistance movement. The Poles also listened to Radio Free Europe and had contact with relatives and friends living abroad.
The Soviet Union could not win their allegiance, but also could not risk another Afghanistan debacle, he said. The Soviet Union had a fragile detente with the United States that it needed to preserve. U.S. sanctions had begun to affect the Soviet economy. The Soviet policy was to encourage the Polish forces to restore order and threaten to crush the resistance if Polish Communist leaders did not, he said.
"In a 1981 Warsaw Pact meeting, the Poles were told to put their house in order and stop the counterrevolution," Mr. Kalugin said. He said that the declaration of martial law in 1981 by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, secretary of the Polish Communist Party, was orchestrated from Moscow to crush the initial outbreak of Solidarity.
But he added that when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko went to Poland in 1981, it had become obvious the Poles would not heed the warning. The Soviets felt they had to do something to tarnish the image of the Vatican.
Ninety-five percent of the Polish people were Catholic -- even Communist officials. He said that when Cardinal Wojtyla became pope, the balance of power had shifted away from the Soviet sphere of influence toward the Vatican. "In Moscow, Russian officials understood that the pope was a very cohesive force," he said.
By 1985 the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev's initiatives of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), coupled with the Afghanistan failure, led to a shift in focus away from Poland toward internal Soviet affairs, he said. "Poland began to be handled with kid gloves, as its leaders were welcomed in Moscow on a more equal footing," Mr. Kalugin said.
When Poland elected Lech Walesa, the former leader of the Solidarity movement, as president in 1989, Moscow was too busy with East-West relations to deal with the no-win Poland situation, he said. Soviet military intervention in Poland was out of the question because armed resistance was expected. The opposition was too big and vocal to be easily silenced, Mr. Kalugin said.
People inside the Soviet Union knew that the only way the restructuring movement could succeed was to eliminate one pillar of communism -- the secret police. Gorbachev eventually realized the KGB must be dissolved, which is what Mr. Kalugin said he had known since 1987.
When he opted out in 1989, Mr. Kalugin, the youngest KGB general in Soviet history, was stripped of his rank and privileges, but was still able to work for democratic reforms, he said.
In 1991 Mr. Kalugin was elected a People's Deputy to the Russian Parliament, where he witnessed the transfer of power from Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Communist Party, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Mr. Kalugin said that history will eventually prove that Gorbachev was a great man who gave his country a political, social and economic opening to the world. Until the end, he said, Gorbachev had hoped to reform the system from the inside out. What failed him, Mr. Kalugin said, was his indecisiveness.
He gave a different assessment of the current Russian leader. "Yeltsin, who we thought would do better, is power thirsty," said Mr. Kalugin. "He is not really a democrat and has his own agenda."
According to Mr. Kalugin, few of the Russian people now have faith in their leaders or in any government system. He said that the people are demoralized by an economy in shambles. There is no danger of a return to communism, he said, but because people perceive they are worse off now than before, a more authoritarian system may creep in. Mr. Kalugin said he doubted that Mr. Yeltsin would allow elections to take place.
"What is better?" asked Mr. Kalugin. "Money with nothing to buy, or no money and lots to buy?"
Under communism, people had little incentive to work hard. Mr. Kalugin said he now sees a new spirit under which eventually people will gain a work ethic and democratic reforms will take hold, but the transition will take at least a decade.
Although he is currently teaching at Catholic University, Mr. Kalugin, author of The First Directorate, a memoir of a spy who provides a detailed picture of the inner workings of the KGB, hopes to return to Russia soon to decide whether to run for office.
Asked if he had any remorse for his actions in the KGB, Mr. Kalugin said he regretted having wasted his life, but now hoped to have an opportunity to make democracy a reality in his country.
