"One could say that Poles tried not to be afraid before, in 1970 and 1976," he continued, referring to earlier democracy uprisings in Poland that were violently crushed by the Communist authorities. "But in 1979, the pope's message was that a Communist regime cannot work without social approval, and he was saying, 'Don't approve."'

When, the next year, Solidarity was formed in Gdansk and organized a strike at the Lenin Shipyards there, one of the movement's first gestures was to hang a picture of the pope at the shipyard's gates.

"I was in Krakow in 1980," said Klaus Ziemer, the director of the German Historical Institute in Poland. "I saw the speeches of the pope from the year before that had been printed, when he said, 'Don't be afraid; the fate of Poland depends on you,' and this was taken as an instruction for direct action." Remarkable in this is that John Paul followed a policy that was at variance with many senior figures in the Polish church as well as with many leaders elsewhere in the world, especially in Western Europe. The Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, who had earlier played an important role in identifying the church with support for democratic freedom, took a cautious approach to Solidarity, fearing that it would provoke another Soviet military invasion.

But the pope's support for Solidarity never wavered, even if he stated it in coded language. When he returned to Poland in 1983, with martial law still in effect and some democracy leaders like Mr. Geremek still in prison, he praised Poles for the "solidarity" they had shown people who had suffered, and his use of the word had a galvanizing effect. He also met with General Jaruzelski and with Lech Walesa, Solidarity's leader.

"I remember pictures during the 1983 pilgrimage, of a trembling Jaruzelski, who stood before the pope like a pupil before his teacher," Mr. Ziemer said. "The body language was very important, because it showed who was the real master of Poland, and every Pole could see that."

Through those years, the pope, like the governments of the United States and Britain, implicitly rejected the caution of figures like Cardinal Wyszynski. Maybe in a way he was lucky. The Soviet Union, which historians believe had tanks ready to roll after August 1980 when the Solidarity strike got under way, did not use military force then, and there is strong evidence that they were, at least in part, responding to threats from the Carter administration of economic sanctions if they did send troops.

Still, it seems that all along, the pope wanted Poles to persist in the democracy movement even in the face of the possibility of Soviet military intervention. Mr. Geremek, who discussed the issue with the John Paul in Rome in 1981, said that even though the pope meant for the movement to remain nonviolent, "he felt we should still refuse our participation in the Communist regime, because he knew that without the participation of society, the Communist system couldn't continue."

Christian Ostermann, the director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said: "Poland is often overlooked as the first crack in the Iron Curtain. We're so focused on the events of 1989 that we forget that Poland in 1980 and 1981 showed the unwillingness and inability of Soviet military force to maintain hard-line rule. That's what marked the demise of the Brezhnev doctrine that had legitimized Soviet intervention since 1968."