Then, Now: Joe and Misha, 1988

Some of you have heard about my chance meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Kraków in 1988.  I was a co-director (with Sherry Stanford from the LBJ School) of the UT summer  program at the Jagiellonian University.

When we learned that Gorbachev was coming to visit on party business, and that he would be spending time at the historic Rynek Główny (the Main Market Square), near the place where his father was hospitalized during WWII, we tried to get passes to the square.  The University said, “Not possible.”  The Polish United Workers Party (“PZPR”) said, “Not possible.”

There were no classes that afternoon so Sherry and I decided to take the tram downtown.  I took my passport, some money, my camera, and a couple rolls of film.  There were police barricades everywhere, blocking all access to the square.  “Can we pass?”  “Not possible.”  I tried at several guard posts, and finally found one where the office in charge said to the guard, “Let them pass.”  Unbelievable!  We were in!

It was a festive crowd.  There were young Polish and Ukrainian dancers in folk costume, prosperous looking men and women who addressed each other as towarzysz and towarzyszka (comrade) wearing red rosettes and the PZPR lapel pin, vendors of flowers and snacks, guards, newspeople.

People were holding copies of “Przebudowa,” the Polish edition of Gorbachev’s “Perestroika,” hoping for an autograph.  We found those books at a shop on the square and bought a couple.  I had run out of film, so I bought a roll from a Polish news photographer.  Sherry is very tall and very blonde, and we pushed our way to the front of the crowd hoping to attract attention.  A canny Polish TV camera crew noticed that we were Americans, speaking Polish and Russian, and stationed themselves behind us.

Here they come!  Gorbachev, Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Schevardnadze, Raisa Gobacheva.  As they neared I started shouting in Russian.  “An American woman is asking for your autograph.”  He stopped.  We passed him the books.  And he said to me, “Откуда вы?”  (“Where are you from?”)  “Из Техаса!” (“From Texas!”)  And we exchanged pleasantries and good wishes.

I got a cassette copy of the TV newstape through a Polish friend, after learning about it later that evening from a Solidarity priest I knew.  “Tonight you’re at a Mass for the Fatherland (a protest Mass); earlier you were shaking hands with the devil.”   “How did you know, Father?” I asked.  “Everyone knows,” he replied.  Over the years the news clip traveled through PAL, NTSC, DVD, and finally… to YouTube.  (Thanks to my friend Pete Smith.)  Here’s the link.  I’m in the green striped shirt, holding the camera.

I was taking pictures while I was speaking with him. Back then, it was impossible to have color film processed in Poland; I would bring my exposed film back to the States for processing.  But by happenstance I had local black and white film in my camera, so I had it developed in Poland and mailed a couple prints to him (“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, General Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, The Kremlin, Moscow”) along with a note in Russian recalling the incident and asking for an autograph.  (The Polish postal clerk said, “Pan chyba żartuje?”  (“Are you perhaps joking?”)  “Just send it, sir.”)  That was in July.  (Strikes that began in the coal mines in Silesia that July led to official recognition of Solidarity the following year.)  My Poland program ended, I took the train to Leningrad for a few days’ vacation, then back to Austin and the fall semester.

Right before Thanksgiving, Judith phoned me at the University to tell me that there was a registered letter for me from the Soviet Embassy in Washington.  And inside was one of my black and white photographs.  Autographed.  (I can imagine the aide saying as they finished the day’s mail, “There’s one more thing, Mikhail Sergeyevich…)

Here’s the autographed photo.

It would be three more years before the Soviet Union collapsed, but Gorbachev was already setting a reformer’s tone.  In the Polish press reports of this visit, Gorbachev’s quotations stressed “glasnost’” (openness) and “perestroika” (rebuilding), while Jaruzelski preached the party line of “shining socialism” and resisting “Western interference in Polish affairs.”  The big signal that things had changed came when Gorbachev did not send Soviet tanks into Poland to squash the strikes.  Years later, Belarusian friends told me that those tanks had been mobilized at the Belarusian-Polish border, waiting for the orders from Moscow that never came.

This is a photograph I took during a Mass for the Fatherland (Msza dla ojczyzny) at the Kościół Arka Pana (The Lord’s Ark Church) in Kraków that summer.  A Mass for the Fatherland was a protest Mass, a Eucharist celebrated with strong political overtones.  Protest hymns were sung here, sermons were pro-union and anti-government, and worshippers greeting the consecrated Host by making the “V” for victory symbol.  (The letter “V” does not exist in the Polish alphabet, and government and party officials often cited this as evidence of “Western interference in Polish affairs.”).  The government could not intrude on the sanctuary that the church offered and barely tolerated the sermons they characterized as seditious.  Worshippers ad-libbed a banned phrase into the last line of the Polish patriotic hymn:  “Ojczyznę wolną racz nam wróćic Panie!”  (Return our free fatherland, Lord) instead of the officially-approved “Ojczyznę wolną pobłogosław Panie!”  (Bless our free fatherland, Lord).

Since then:  Gorbachev was the General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985-1991 and the last head of state of the Soviet Union.  He is still active in world affairs.  His wife, Raisa Gorbacheva, died in 1999.  Her body is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.  Shevardnadze served as the president of the Republic of Georgia from 1995-2003.  He lives quietly in retirement.  Jaruzelski was the last communist leader of Poland.  He was the head of state from 1985-1990, when he was forced to resign.

Joe