1979: The Great Backlash

But none of this compared with the backlash building in Afghanistan, where young intellectuals like Ahmed Shah Massoud had been reading up on Islamist classics such as the writings of Sayyid Qutb. Already in revolt against their own communist government, they would soon throw themselves into battle against the troops of the invading Red Army. Some of them would transform that war against the Soviets into a much broader global jihad—including a group of "Afghan Arab" sympathizers who would eventually form al Qaeda.

And the pope? The office of the Holy See had already been memorably dismissed as a political factor by Joseph Stalin. "The pope?" Stalin supposedly sneered to the French foreign minister. "How many divisions has he got?" When John Paul II made his epic visit to Poland in the summer of 1979, no one was crazy enough to predict that it would inspire the formation of the independent trade union Solidarity the following year, or that it would trigger a revival of civil society throughout Eastern and Central Europe, leading to the collapse of the communist order there less than a decade later. "[W]ithout the Polish Pope, no Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980," historian Timothy Garton Ash later wrote. "[W]ithout Solidarity, no dramatic change in Soviet policy towards eastern Europe under Gorbachev; without that change, no velvet revolutions in 1989.”

The key to the pope's spiritually motivated defiance of the Soviets was its nonviolence. During the nine days of his visit in June 1979, some 13 million Poles turned out on the streets and fields of the country to greet him—in direct defiance of a Soviet-backed government that had always treated the Catholic Church as a minor irritant. "We realized for the first time that 'we' were more numerous than 'them,'" recalls Radoslaw Sikorski in his memoir Full Circle (an anticommunist teen at the time, Sikorski is now the foreign minister of today's democratic Poland). It was a crucial realization, one duly noted by dissidents elsewhere in the region. As a result, religion remains a large but underappreciated ingredient in the peaceful uprisings of a decade later.

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