Stanislaw Kania
Leader of Poland who steered a moderate course despite pressure from Moscow and strife at home
STANISLAW KANIA, who has died aged 92, was leader of Poland’s Communist Party for 13 months in 1980-81, during which time he attempted to head off a confrontation with the independent labour movement Solidarity and deter a threatened invasion by Moscow.
Kania did not reverse the economic slump or halt the endless strikes that had brought down his predecessor, Edward Gierek. The fact that he managed to hang on for as long as he did owed much to the back-room skills that had helped him rise from obscurity.
Widely regarded as a pragmatic functionary, Kania made a virtue of being colourless – and in communist terms middle-of-the-road. Where Gierek had led a conspicuously flashy life, Kania remained largely out of public view, living in the same modest Warsaw flat as he had before becoming First Secretary of the party in September 1980.
Born on March 8 1927, to peasants in Wrocanka, near Jaslo in south-eastern Poland, he was an apprentice blacksmith when the Second World War broke out. He fought in the Resistance, and after the war enrolled in what was then the Polish Workers Party.
He rose steadily through the ranks, becoming a full member of the ruling Central Committee in 1968. He was elected a member of the party’s secretariat in 1971 and of the Politburo in 1975.
After riots in 1970 pushed Wladyslaw Gomulka out of office, to be replaced by Gierek, Kania was chosen to replace Poland’s notorious chief of security, Mieczyslaw Moczar. His responsibilities included liaison with the powerful Catholic Church.
The visit of Pope John Paul II to his homeland in 1979 had the effect of galvanising Polish workers and when the following year strikes, originally against price rises, erupted throughout Poland, unlike on previous occasions the regime, largely at Kania’s urging, decided not to resort to force. And at the end of August 1980 Gierek signed the so-called Gdansk Agreement with strikers at the city’s Lenin shipyard, conceding, among other things, their right to strike – a development that led to the emergence of Solidarity.
But the concessions went too far for many of Gierek’s party colleagues and the Soviet Union, which indirectly attacked the agreement in the Polish official press. In September Gierek, in hospital after a heart attack, was visited in hospital by Kania, who told him bluntly: “I’ve got your job.”
It was widely assumed that Kania’s reputation as a hard-liner in the security apparatus played a role in his elevation, but his first speech as leader was seen as a sign that he would follow a moderate course and attempt to gain measure of popular support.
Party members, Kania declared, should be “faithful to socialist ideals’’ through modesty, simplicity of style and understanding for what offended the people’s “sense of justice” – an allusion to the corruption scandals that had exacerbated public anger.
While insisting that the Gdansk Agreement was “irreversible”, Kania cracked down on “antisocial’’ agitators who, he claimed, were responsible for the turmoil. “There are people who build on maintaining and fanning workers’ dissatisfaction,” he declared. “They parade their views in Western papers, which demonstrates their hostility toward socialist Poland.”
But he was unable to put together an economic programme to pull Poland out of crisis. As the economy headed inexorably downhill, both liberals and hard-liners demanded action. More ominously, Moscow began showing signs of a loss of confidence, urging Kania to impose martial law. On one occasion he was ushered into President Brezhnev’s office in the Kremlin to be shown a map of the route that Soviet troops would take into Poland. “I said that if there was such an intervention, then there would have been a national uprising,’’ Kania recalled. “Even if angels entered Poland, they would be treated as bloodthirsty vampires, and the Socialist ideas would be swimming in blood.”
In early June 1981 Moscow sent a stiff letter to the Polish party that effectively called for Kania’s dismissal, accusing him of surrendering to “counter-revolutionary activities” by the “extremist wing” of Solidarity.
At a Central Committee meeting in June Kania responded to a challenge by hardliners by calling for a vote of confidence to be conducted in a secret ballot. In July 1981 he was overwhelmingly re-elected by an emergency party congress – the first time that a secret ballot had been used in such a way in Eastern Europe.
But the end was not long in coming. As the economy continued to nosedive, there were food shortages, protests in the streets and renewed demands for a crackdown from Moscow. In October the hard-liners finally got their way. Kania was replaced by his prime minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who imposed martial law.
Little is known of Kania’s private life. A bulky man with receding hair, he had no known hobbies, and despite Kania also being the name of an edible mushroom, he was so colourless that it somehow failed to generate any popular puns.
He had been instrumental in the creation of the military unit that Jaruzelski later used in imposing martial law. In 2012 he was tried for his role in the crackdown, but acquitted.
Stanislaw Kania, born 8 March 1927, died March 3 2020