46 Years Ago, the Soviet Empire’s End Was Set in Motion

On Oct. 16, 1978, the cardinal electors of the Roman Catholic Church elected Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to sit on the Chair of St. Peter. Wojtyla took the name Pope John Paul II, having succeeded John Paul I, who died suddenly after serving as Roman pontiff for only 33 days. Though few recognized it at the time, the papal election of Karol Wojtyla was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.

As George Weigel explained in The End and the Beginning, John Paul II, only eight months after his election, “ignited a revolution of conscience in his native Poland — a moral challenge to the Cold War status quo that helped set in motion the international drama that would culminate in the collapse of European communism in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.” Wojtyla and his countrymen and countrywomen had suffered under the twin evils of 20th-century totalitarianism: Nazism and Communism. He was, wrote Paul Johnson in John Paul II and the Catholic Restoration, “the first pope from the Slavic east and the first pope with direct experience of the greatest challenge Christianity has ever faced, totalitarian atheism.”

Weigel notes that one person who did recognize the potential impact that a Polish pope would have on the Soviet bloc was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident and author of The Gulag Archipelago who, from his exile in Cavendish, Vermont, said of Wojtyla’s election: “It’s a miracle. It’s the first positive event since World War I, and its going to change the face of the world.” Solzhenitsyn understood better than most the political fragility of the Soviet system and the power of spirituality to move men.

Karol Wojtyla possessed intellectual curiosity, physical courage, and immense spirituality. He needed all three when he traveled to his native Poland on June 2, 1979, for a nine-day pilgrimage in which more than 12 million Poles came to see him in person. He broadcast to his fellow Poles and to the men in the Kremlin that “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe,” and “[t]here can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.” “That,” writes Paul Kengor in A Pope and a President, “was a shot heard in Moscow.” John Paul II, wrote Malachi Martin in The Keys of This Blood, “had opened the first effective challenge to the political order of the Soviet satellite system, and of the Soviet Union itself.” The Soviet empire had suffered the first tremors of a theological and political earthquake.

The atheists in the Kremlin understood the threat that Pope John Paul II posed to their East European empire and to the very survival of the Soviet Union. Wojtyla’s message did not stop at the borders of Poland — it reverberated throughout the enslaved nations of Eastern and Central Europe. Two years later, another tremor struck the evil empire when workers in Gdansk, Poland, founded the Solidarity trade union in a direct challenge to the so-called “workers’ state.” But even before the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the men in the Kremlin issued a directive to the secret police, quoted in Kengor’s book, that stated: “Use all possibilities available to the Soviet Union to prevent the new course of policies initiated by the Polish pope; if necessary with additional measures beyond disinformation and discreditation.” Kengor notes that the directive was signed by nine members of the Soviet leadership, including Mikhail Gorbachev. George Weigel writes that “within a year after John Paul’s election, the Soviet political leadership and … Soviet intelligence considered the Pope the single greatest threat to their position.” 

The Kremlin set in motion the assassination attempt against John Paul II on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square. Turkish terrorist Mehemet Ali Agca shot the pope. The late journalist Claire Sterling was perhaps the first non-governmental official to connect the dots, which led back to the Bulgarian secret police and ultimately the Soviet KGB. Sterling laid out the scheme hatched by the Kremlin in her book The Time of the Assassins, an example of investigative journalism at its best. Since then, other sources agree with Sterling that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on the pope. 

The assassination attempt failed. The Polish pope continued to send tremors throughout the Soviet empire. And he was joined in this by President Ronald Reagan, who rhetorically consigned Soviet communism to the “ash heap of history,” and substantively implemented policies — economic, military, technological, geopolitical — that further undermined Soviet power in the satellite empire and within the Soviet Union itself. No one tells that story better than Paul Kengor in his book A Pope and a President. 

Joseph Shattan in his book Architects of Victory named John Paul II as one of the heroes of the Cold War. Shattan notes that even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that, “Everything that happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years would have been impossible without the presence of this Pope and without the important role — including the political role — that he played on the world stage.” 

The unraveling of the Soviet empire had many other causes, including its own systemic weaknesses, both economic and political. But that unraveling can all be traced back to Karol Wojtyla’s election as pope. Which means, Catholics believe, the hand of God was involved.

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