Historians generally agree on Lech Wałęsa’s significance: he was the working electrician who forced the Soviet bloc to negotiate its own end in its first member state. He cofounded Solidarity at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as the first freely elected president of Poland from December 22, 1990 to December 22, 1995. Born on September 29, 1943, he was one of the most consequential political figures of the late twentieth century.
The standard biography in English is Lech Wałęsa’s own The Road from Gdansk (1988), an authorized account written with the journalist Michael T. Kaufman. Among the critical scholarly studies, see Lawrence Weschler’s Solidarity: Poland in the Season of Its Passion (1982) and Timothy Garton Ash’s The Polish Revolution (1983). The Polish-language scholarship is large; the most balanced is Wojciech Roszkowski’s Najnowsza historia Polski (2002), which gives a more skeptical view of Wałęsa’s political legacy.
Early Life
Wałęsa was born in Popowo, a village in northern Poland, into a family of small farmers. He had an uncle who was a schoolteacher and an uncle who was a policeman; the rest of his family worked the land. The war and the post-war transformation shaped his childhood. His mother was a single parent for several years; the family moved frequently.
He trained as an electrician at vocational school in Lipno and in the Szczecin vocational school, and he went to work at the Gdańsk Shipyard (formally the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Shipyard) in 1967. He had been a model young worker — Party membership, leadership of youth organizations — until the events of December 1970. The 1970 strikes in Gdańsk had been crushed; the workers killed and the survivors radicalized. Wałęsa, who had been active in the 1970 strike committee, was fired from his job and was blacklisted from the shipyards. He worked for a time as an electrician for other employers in the Gdańsk area. He was readmitted to the shipyard in 1974 after a personal intervention by a sympathetic party official.
The 1970s were a slow-burning decade for Wałęsa. He married Danuta Golos, the daughter of a Gdańsk family, in 1969. He was a working electrician with a growing family and a list of grievances. He became involved in the underground labor movement. He was fired again in 1976 for participating in protests following the Radom and Ursus strikes. He was readmitted again in 1977, after intervention by a Catholic priest.
The August Strike
The 1980 strike began in the Gdańsk Shipyard on August 14. Wałęsa had been part of a small group, with Bogdan Borusewicz, Bogdan Felski, and others, who had been planning for a strike for more than a year. The strike committee was established inside the shipyard; Wałęsa emerged as the leader because he was charismatic, present, and not yet compromised. The committee’s 21 demands included the right to form independent trade unions, the right to strike, the right to express opinions, the release of political prisoners — the broadcasting of Catholic Mass on state radio.
The negotiations with the government delegation lasted sixteen hours and ended in the early hours of August 31. The Gdańsk Agreement, signed that morning, legalized the right to form independent trade unions outside the party and the workplace. The new union, founded in September 1980, was named Solidarity after the union’s original Polish name, Solidarność.
The next eighteen months were Solidarity’s moment. By 1981 the union had roughly 10 million members, roughly a third of the working-age population. The regime, led by Stanisław Kania and then General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was losing the capacity to govern. The Church, led by Cardinal Józef Glemp, was a quiet ally. The Catholic Mass, broadcast on state radio, became a national ritual. Wałęsa traveled abroad, met with foreign leaders, and received international honors. In 1983 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Martial Law and the Underground
The regime imposed martial law on December 13, 1981, with Wałęsa among the first detained. He was held for nearly a year at a series of facilities, including the Bydgoszcz region internment camps, and was finally released on November 14, 1982. The price of release was a pledge not to lead the union. Wałęsa signed. The solidarity he had led was now illegal.
The underground, however, was the union in its second phase. Zbigniew Bujak, Bogdan Lis, Władysław Frasyniuk, and others kept the structure intact, with regional leaders in Gdańsk, Warsaw, Wrocław, and elsewhere. The underground published journals, organized demonstrations, and maintained contact with the Catholic Church. The political effect of Solidarity was preserved, even as the legal union was destroyed.
The Round Table and the Presidency
The Round Table talks of February–April 1989 produced the agreement that allowed Solidarity to compete in partially free elections. The June 4, 1989 elections were a disaster for the regime: Solidarity won 99 of the 100 freely contested Sejm seats. Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister in August 1989, the first non-communist prime minister in Eastern Europe since 1948. In December 1990, Wałęsa was elected president, defeating Mazowiecki in a runoff.
The presidency was a difficult period. The economic reforms of the Balcerowicz Plan, introduced in January 1990, produced a sharp recession, with unemployment rising from near zero to more than 16 percent by 1993. Wałęsa’s political style — populist, improvisational, suspicious of experts — did not fit the moment. He lost the 1995 presidential election to Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the former communist, in a runoff by less than three percentage points.
The Post-Presidency
Wałęsa remained active in Polish public life after leaving office. He supported Poland’s accession to NATO in 1999 and to the European Union in 2004. He was a critic of the Law and Justice governments of 2015–23, which he accused of undermining the liberal democratic institutions he had helped to build. He continued to make public appearances, including a 2017 speech at the European Parliament marking the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Gdańsk Agreement.
He has been the subject of a long-running controversy over allegations, drawn from the archives of the communist-era security services, that he had been a paid informant in the 1970s. The allegations were first made in 1992 by two historians, Jerzy and Joanna Potel, on the basis of documents they had obtained. Wałęsa has consistently denied the allegations. The Institute of National Remembrance concluded in 2000 that the documents were likely forgeries, and Wałęsa sued the publications that had made the allegations. The case remains contested, political divide it has produced is part of the present-day Polish political landscape.
Legacy
Wałęsa’s legacy, like Gorbachev’s, is contested. To most of the world he is the man who refused to be crushed, who stayed in the factory when he could have stayed in exile, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and was right about the regime in the end. To many Poles he is a divisive figure whose political instincts were erratic and whose moral authority has been damaged by the informant allegations. The two views are not mutually exclusive. The history of the 1980s in Poland is the history of Wałęsa, legacy of that history is still being written.