The Polish Solidarity Movement

Podcast Transcript

In 1980, a former electrical worker at the Gdansk Shipyard did the unthinkable. He led a large group of workers in a labor strike in a communist country.

Rather than being ruthlessly crushed, the strike won concessions and began a social and political movement that changed Poland forever.

This was not only the beginning of the end of communism in Poland, but of the entire Cold War.

Learn more about the rise of Solidarity and the beginning of the end of the Eastern Bloc on this episode of Everything, Everywhere Daily.

During the final year of World War II, the Soviet Union claimed to liberate Poland as it advanced toward Germany.

However, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin had no intention of restoring Poland’s pre-war independence. The Soviets believed Poland was essential to their security interests as a buffer zone separating them from Germany.

The Polish people were denied free elections after WWII to ensure communist rule. There was no communist revolution like there was in Russia. It was imposed top-down by an outside power.

At the foundation of the Polish communist state in 1947, the Soviet Union saw the mismatch between Poland and one-party communism. Stalin said, “Bringing communism to Poland was like putting a saddle on a cow.”

The Soviet leaders were faced with the realization that Poland was intensely Roman Catholic, and the introduction of communism would contradict Polish values. Furthermore, the Polish people also had shown very little support for communism before or after WWII.

The main challenge was building loyalty to support the transition from a fiercely nationalistic and independent nation to a one-party communist state. To ensure loyalty in Eastern Europe, Stalin often resorted to force.

It was in this environment that Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement emerged during the Cold War.

During the 1970s, attempts at refo were met with military force, and dissenters and sympathetic church leaders were greeted with jail time. Eastern Bloc communist leaders of the late 70’s early 80’s had a long history of ignoring public pressure to reform.

Economically, Poland was in dire straits, leading the Eastern Bloc in borrowing from the West during the 1970s, which ultimately fueled an economic collapse.

The loans taken out by Poland funded industrial projects and hoped to modernize the country’s economy. This was sustainable so long as the investments actually worked.

However, these investments did not yield the returns necessary to cover the mounting interest costs. Poland’s debt to Western creditors quickly escalated, reaching $25 billion by the early 1980s, up from under $900 million in 1970.

By the early 1980s, surging inflation, widespread job losses, and persistent food shortages placed tremendous pressure on the regime

These economic hardships made it increasingly difficult for the government to control prices and maintain supply availability, further eroding public trust in the system.

The Polish people sought political liberalization but were also driven by the reality of rising food prices and worsening shortages linked to the failing economy. For example, inflation was about 10% in the early 1980s, soaring to 200% by the end of the decade.

Years of one-party control had stifled any chance at market competition, halting Poland’s economic progress, while state subsidies kept inefficient, party-loyal businesses open.

As shortages grew worse, it became clear that the system was on the verge of collapse.

The first real hope for Poland came in 1978 with the election of the Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II.

His election was a monumental boost to Polish nationalism, and John Paul II became a symbol of hope against communist oppression in Poland.

The Pope, for his part, viewed the Polish struggle against communism not as a political battle but as a spiritual one. John Paul electrified crowds and inspired all nations, but it was in his homeland where he had the biggest impact.

While John Paul inspired hope for change from abroad, it was an electrician from the Gda?sk Shipyard, Lech Walesa, who led the difficult process of reforming the Polish system from within.

On August 14, 1980, Lech Walesa led nearly 16,000 workers in a strike at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards, which built some of Europe’s largest ships.

The strike started simply enough after the dismissal of crane operator Anna Walentynowicz. Wa??sa, a former shipyard electrician who had been fired years earlier, famously climbed over the shipyard fence that day and emerged as the leader of the strike committee.

The Gdansk strike was a violation of the law, and those workers who went on strike did so at great personal risk. Oddly enough, the government said it was illegal because the communist government represented the workers, so there was no need for unions.

Driven by rising food prices and diminishing purchasing power, the striking workers issued a series of demands. The workers demanded the right to form free trade unions, freedom of speech, economic reforms designed to encourage competition, and the release of political prisoners.

The Gdansk strike would last 18 days. During this time, the workers who had laid down their tools began to call themselves “Solidarity.” A name that would reflect a growing sense of unity.

After 18 days, the government agreed to terms with the striking workers. The Gdansk Agreement, signed by Walesa with a large pen featuring a picture of Pope John Paul II, would expand unionization rights and foreshadow greater political freedoms.

Perhaps the most unlikely victory in the agreement was the legal right to strike in pursuit of collective bargaining.

In a one-party dictatorship, like Poland, this represented a transformative moment. The Iron Curtain now had a crack in it.

The nation was energized like never before. If these workers at Gdansk could win these concessions, what other victories would follow?

With the concessions made in Gdansk, the Solidarity movement exploded in popularity. By spring 1981, Solidarity claimed nearly 10 million members, becoming a national union and moving well beyond shipyard workers.

What began as a free-trade-union movement soon evolved into a national conversation about freedom and the limitation or even the replacement, of communism.

However, the euphoria soon faded. The Soviets viewed the Polish government as weak after capitulating to Solidarity’s demands.

Leaders in Moscow saw this as a violation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that any threat to one socialist state in the Eastern Bloc was a threat to all of them.

The Soviets installed a more reliable Soviet style military leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Soviet position was clear: Solidarity was a threat and must be eliminated.

When events like this happened in the past, such as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, it resulted in Soviet tanks entering the country.

Jaruzelski obliged by declaring martial law, ending the strikes, abolishing Solidarity, and arresting its leadership, including Lech Walesa.

The Solidarity leaders imprisoned were committed to freedom, but also to non-violent reform, influenced by their strong Catholic faith.

Adam Michnik, one of Walesa’s closest allies, wrote from prison in 1981, reaffirming Solidarity’s belief that violence was not the path forward. He said, No one in Poland is able to prove today that violence will help us dislodge Soviet troops from Poland and to remove the communists from power. The USSR has such an enormous military power that confrontation is simply unthinkable.”

Michnik would note in his letters from prison that the movement drew inspiration from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., reaffirming Solidarity’s enduring commitment to peaceful change despite intense adversity.

The movement would moderate in the 1980s as Jaruzelski initiated modest reforms, and the threat of a Soviet invasion in Poland had passed.

Poland’s situation throughout the 1980s would also improve thanks to the support of Pope John Paul II. John Paul did not shy away from issues; he spoke with great influence about and faith about human rights.

He also spoke with great specificity about the Solidarity movement and was a frequent visitor to his native Poland, and often addressed the group directly.

During the imprisonment of Walesa and Michnik, while the nation was under Martial Law, the Pope offered these words: “In the name of the future of mankind and humanity, the word ‘solidarity’ must be pronounced.”

John Paul made little effort to hide his feelings about communism. Having grown up in Poland, he saw the struggle as personal and often used his platform to amplify Walesa’s and Solidarity’s voices.

While the Pope inspired the nation, Walesa did the heavy lifting in the political arena. Walesa’s Nobel Prize was awarded in 1983, amid increasingly difficult economic times in Poland.

The situation was so precarious that Walesa chose not to go to Oslo to receive the award himself; instead, he sent his wife, Danuta, for fear that the regime would not allow him to return if he left the country.

After the Nobel Prize, he returned to work at the Shipyard reinforcing his image as an everyman amongst the Polish workforce.

During times of trouble, Walesa would encourage prayer. After the murder of a priest and Solidarity member, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, by members of the regime’s security force, Walesa was careful not to incite violence.

The patience and consistency of the movement would be key factors in weathering the storms of difficult times.

The dynamic would change in the mid-1980s, when the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union.

In the USSR, Gorbachev launched his twin programs of Perestroika and Glasnost.

Perestroika offered Western-style economic reforms that would “open” the Soviet Union to Western investment and ultimately led to in the opening of a McDonald’s in Red Square!

Glasnost contributed to political reforms that would soften one-party rule in the Soviet sphere by opening the political system to discussion and greater freedoms of speech and the press.

Eastern Europeans held out hope that a softening of Soviet policies would trickle down to them.

Walesa and Solidarity bided their time and would re-emerge alongside Gorbachev’s reforms in the mid-1980s, which re-energized Solidarity.

Gorbachev’s programs signaled the possibility of major reform in Poland

After several large-scale national protest movements and strikes in early 1989, the Polish government and Solidarity sat down for what became known as the Round Table Talks.

The settlement included full legalization of Solidarity, the establishment of a president and a two-house legislature, with the Senate open to free and fair elections. Some seats in the lower house were reserved for communists, but the rest were open to Solidarity.

The election took place on June 4, 1989, with a second round on June 18, 1989. Solidarity won a landslide victory in the freely contested seats, including nearly all the seats it could win in the lower house and almost all the Senate seats.

It marked the victory of the Solidarity movement and the beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

Lech Walesa would go on to become Poland’s first democratically elected president in December 1990, a position he would hold for five years.

The transition to democracy in Poland took place peacefully without any widespread violence.

The fall of the Berlin Wall may be the most famous story from the end of the Cold War, but the real start of the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc began with a Pole who was elected pope and an electrician who formed a labor union.