On August 14, 1980, the electricians of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk walked off the job and refused to go back. Within days the strike had spread across the Baltic coast, and on August 31 the government signed the Gdańsk Agreement, legalizing the right to form independent trade unions outside the Communist Party. The union that emerged, Solidarity (Polish: Solidarność), was the first free labor organization in the Soviet bloc, and at its 1981 peak it had roughly 10 million members — about a third of working-age Poland.
The standard English-language study is Timothy Garton Ash’s The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980–1982 (1983), written during the period he was covering. Padraic Kenney’s The Burdens of Freedom (2006) is the best shorter treatment. The Polish-language scholarship is large; among the most useful accounts is Jerzy Holzer’s Solidarność 1980–1981 (1990).
The Origins
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Polish workers. The Gdańsk shipyard strike of December 1970, which protested a sharp increase in food prices, had been suppressed by the security forces; 41 workers were killed and more than 1,000 wounded. The trauma left a deep mark. The new strike committee in 1970 had included a young electrician named Lech Wałęsa.
The next major event was the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in October 1978. The Polish Pope made his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979, and the crowds he drew — roughly 250,000 in Warsaw, 1 million in Kraków — were a public demonstration that the regime could not match. The Church, which had been a quiet presence in Polish public life, became an organizing force.
The summer of 1980 produced the strike wave that led to Solidarity. The immediate trigger was another price increase. On July 1, 1980, the Polish government raised the price of meat, the staple of the Polish diet. Strikes broke out at the Lublin railway works, the Świdnik helicopter factory, and then, beginning on August 14, at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. The Gdańsk strike was led by Lech Wałęsa and a group of younger workers, including Bogdan Borusewicz, Bogdan Felski, and Andrzej Gwiazda. The strike committee issued 21 demands, the most important of which was the right to form independent trade unions.
The strike spread to other shipyards, to the railway, to the coal mines of Silesia. By August 21 the Gdańsk agreement of August 31 had been signed. The principal provisions were: the right to strike, the right to form independent trade unions, the right to express opinions in the workplace, the release of political prisoners, the broadcasting of Catholic Mass on state radio. The new union, founded on September 22, 1980, took the name Solidarity.
The Solidarity Moment
Solidarity grew rapidly. By 1981 it had roughly 10 million members, organized in regional structures and federated nationally. The union was not a political party, but it was a parallel political space. Local chapters organized discussions, published newspapers, and pressured local governments. The national leadership, including Wałęsa and the intellectual advisers around him, developed a sophisticated program of self-limiting reform. The union did not seek to take power; it sought to make the regime negotiate.
The regime, under Stanisław Kania and then General Wojciech Jaruzelski, lost the capacity to respond. The economy was collapsing; the political class was divided; the Catholic Church was supporting Solidarity; the Soviet Union was unwilling to intervene directly. Jaruzelski imposed martial law on December 13, 1981, arresting some 5,000 Solidarity leaders, including Wałęsa, and killing at least 9 workers at the Wujek coal mine on December 16. The union was banned. The official strike was broken.
The underground preserved the union. Solidarity continued to publish, organize, and maintain its structure. The Catholic Church, led by the primate Józef Glemp, served as a quasi-protector of the underground. The “interned” Solidarity members, when released, became a national register of dissent. By the late 1980s the union was ready to take advantage of any opening the regime offered.
The Round Table and the 1989 Elections
The opening came with Gorbachev. The new Soviet approach removed the external constraint on the Polish regime. Strikes broke out again in the spring of 1988. The regime entered into talks with Solidarity in August 1988, with the Catholic Church serving as mediator. The Round Table talks opened on February 6, 1989 and ran until April 5. The agreement provided for partially free elections to the Sejm, with 35 percent of the 460 seats to be contested and 65 percent reserved for the Communist Party and its allies. The Senate would be fully elected. A new office, the President of Poland, would be created.
The elections of June 4, 1989 produced a Solidarity victory that the regime had not anticipated. Solidarity candidates won 99 of the 100 freely contested Sejm seats and 92 of the 100 Senate seats. The Communist Party, demoralized, was unable even to fill its reserved slots. In August 1989 the regime made Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Catholic intellectual associated with Solidarity, prime minister. The Communists held the presidency; Jaruzelski was elected by the rump Sejm. The transition was under way.
Solidarity’s Legacy
The Polish transition was the model for the rest of Eastern Europe. The Round Table process, the negotiated transfer of power, the central role of the Catholic Church — these became templates. Other countries adapted them; none copied them exactly. The Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution was the closest in form. Hungary’s was closer to a self-orchestrated regime change. East Germany’s was the closest to a collapse. Romania’s ended in violence.
Solidarity also produced a generation of political leaders. Wałęsa, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, was elected president in December 1990. Mazowiecki led the first non-communist government. Many of the figures of the 1989 Polish transition remained active in Polish politics for the next two decades; the political effects of Solidarity are still visible in the divisions of contemporary Poland. The Law and Justice party, founded in 2001 by Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, has been one of the dominant forces of Polish politics since 2015; the close relationship between Solidarity-era Roman Catholic values and the Kaczyński project is a direct inheritance of the 1980s.
Solidarity as a trade union never recovered its membership of 1981. The workers of 1980 had become middle-aged; the workers of the 1990s worked in a market economy, not a planned one; the union movement fragmented along the usual lines. The 1980 union was the union of a particular Polish moment — the moment passed. What survived was the symbol — and the symbol was potent enough to set the terms of the country’s politics for a generation.