Solidarity Movement (1980–1989): Poland's Free Trade Union

The Solidarity movement (in Polish, Solidarność) was the independent trade union born in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980, the first free union in any country of the Soviet bloc. Within months it had around 10 million members, roughly a third of Poland’s working-age population, and it became a nationwide movement for civil rights. Crushed by martial law in December 1981 but never destroyed, Solidarity returned to negotiate the end of communist rule in 1989 and helped set off the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe.

Background: crisis in communist Poland

Communist Poland had a long history of worker protest. In June 1956 workers in Poznań rose against the regime; in December 1970 strikes over food price rises on the Baltic coast were put down by force, and dozens of people were killed in Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin. In June 1976 further price rises led to strikes in Radom and Ursus, followed by beatings and dismissals.

After 1976 dissident intellectuals, among them Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik, founded the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) to help persecuted workers with legal and financial aid. Small Free Trade Unions of the Coast appeared in Gdańsk in 1978, involving Lech Wałęsa, Anna Walentynowicz, Andrzej Gwiazda and others. KOR’s underground newspaper Robotnik spread the idea that workers could organise outside the party.

Under Edward Gierek, party leader from 1970, Poland had borrowed heavily from the West. By the late 1970s the foreign debt had grown to more than 20 billion US dollars, living standards were falling and shops were short of basic goods. The election of the Kraków archbishop Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in October 1978, and his pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, gave millions of Poles a new sense of shared identity and confidence.

The August 1980 strikes and the Gdańsk Agreement

On 1 July 1980 the government raised meat prices, and strikes spread across the country. On 14 August workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk stopped work, demanding the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator and activist who had been dismissed a few months before her retirement, and of Lech Wałęsa, an electrician sacked in 1976. Wałęsa climbed over the shipyard fence to join the strike and quickly became its leader.

When management offered concessions, the strike nearly ended on 16 August. Walentynowicz and others persuaded many workers to stay in solidarity with smaller factories that had joined them. An Inter-Factory Strike Committee (MKS) was formed, eventually representing several hundred workplaces along the coast. It drew up 21 demands, written on wooden boards hung at the shipyard gate.

The first and most radical demand was the right to form free trade unions independent of the party. Others included the right to strike, freedom of expression, the release of political prisoners, the broadcasting of Sunday Mass on radio and a memorial to the workers killed in December 1970. Similar committees formed in Szczecin and in the Silesian coal mines, while advisers from Warsaw, led by the Catholic journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki and the historian Bronisław Geremek, came to help the strikers negotiate.

On 31 August 1980 Wałęsa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczysław Jagielski signed the Gdańsk Agreement in the shipyard’s health and safety hall. The government accepted independent, self-governing trade unions, in return for the union’s recognition of the leading role of the Communist Party and of Poland’s international alliances. Related agreements were signed in Szczecin on 30 August and in Jastrzębie-Zdrój on 3 September.

On 17 September 1980 delegates from across Poland met in Gdańsk and created a single national union, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” (NSZZ Solidarność), with Wałęsa as chairman. After a dispute over its statute, the Supreme Court registered the union on 10 November 1980. Gierek had already been replaced as party leader by Stanisław Kania in September. A separate Rural Solidarity for private farmers was registered in May 1981.

Membership reached around 9–10 million, including about a million members of the Communist Party itself. Solidarity’s red logo, with its crowded letters suggesting a marching crowd, became one of the best-known political symbols of the decade.

Sixteen months of “carnival”

The period from August 1980 to December 1981 is often called the “Solidarity carnival”. Censorship loosened, independent publishing flourished and long-hidden subjects such as the Katyn massacre of 1940 began to be discussed. On 16 December 1980 a tall monument to the shipyard workers killed in 1970 was unveiled at the shipyard gate before a huge crowd.

The relationship with the government was full of crises. In March 1981 police beat Solidarity activists at a meeting in Bydgoszcz, and the union staged a four-hour nationwide warning strike on 27 March, among the largest in the history of the Soviet bloc. A general strike was called off at the last moment after a compromise, which angered radical members.

Moscow and the other Warsaw Pact governments watched with alarm, and large Soviet military exercises were held near Poland’s borders. In February 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the defence minister, became prime minister, and in October 1981 he also replaced Kania as party leader.

Solidarity’s first national congress met in Gdańsk in two rounds in September and October 1981. It adopted a programme calling for a “Self-Governing Republic” and sent a message to working people across Eastern Europe encouraging free unions there, which the Soviet leadership denounced. Wałęsa was re-elected chairman with about 55 percent of the vote, ahead of more radical rivals.

Martial law and the underground

Before dawn on 13 December 1981 Jaruzelski declared martial law (see martial law in Poland). Solidarity was suspended, communications were cut and thousands of activists were interned, including Wałęsa. Strikes in mines and factories were broken up, and at the Wujek coal mine in Katowice police fired on strikers, killing nine.

Solidarity survived as an underground movement. A clandestine Temporary Coordinating Commission was formed in 1982, underground newspapers and books circulated in large numbers, and Radio Solidarity broadcast occasionally. The union was formally dissolved by a law of 8 October 1982. Wałęsa was released in November 1982 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983; his wife Danuta collected it in Oslo because he feared he would not be allowed back into Poland.

In October 1984 the pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was kidnapped and murdered by officers of the security service. Hundreds of thousands attended his funeral, and the officers responsible were put on trial, an unprecedented event in the Soviet bloc.

The road to 1989

By the late 1980s Poland’s economy was in deep trouble, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in Moscow made Soviet intervention unlikely. Waves of strikes in April–May and August 1988, led largely by young workers, pushed the government to talk. After a televised debate in November 1988 in which Wałęsa clearly outperformed the head of the official union, the regime agreed to negotiate.

The Polish Round Table talks ran from 6 February to 5 April 1989. Solidarity was legalised again on 17 April. The agreement allowed partly free elections: 35 percent of seats in the Sejm (the lower house) were open to free competition, while a new Senate of 100 seats was elected freely.

In the elections of 4 and 18 June 1989 Solidarity candidates won 160 of the 161 contested Sejm seats and 99 of the 100 Senate seats. After the party’s allies switched sides, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister on 24 August 1989, the first non-communist head of government in the Soviet bloc since the late 1940s. The revolutions of 1989 soon followed in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania.

Key people

• Lech Wałęsa (born 1943): shipyard electrician, strike leader and Solidarity chairman; Nobel Peace Prize 1983; President of Poland 1990–1995.
• Anna Walentynowicz (1929–2010): crane operator whose dismissal sparked the August strike; she died in the Smolensk air crash of 2010.
• Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014): general, prime minister and party leader who imposed martial law and later negotiated the transition.
• Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1927–2013): Catholic intellectual, adviser to the strikers and prime minister from 1989.
• Bronisław Geremek (1932–2008): historian and adviser, a key negotiator at the Round Table.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

A common belief is that Solidarity was simply a workers’ movement. In fact it was a broad alliance of workers, intellectuals, farmers, students and the Catholic Church, united by demands for dignity, truth and civil rights as much as for wages.

It is also sometimes said that Solidarity alone brought down communism. Its role was central in Poland, but the outcome also depended on Poland’s economic collapse, Gorbachev’s decision not to intervene and developments across the bloc.

Timeline

• 1980, 14 August: Strike begins at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk.
• 1980, 31 August: Gdańsk Agreement signed by Lech Wałęsa and Mieczysław Jagielski.
• 1980, 17 September: Delegates found the national union NSZZ Solidarność.
• 1980, 10 November: Supreme Court registers Solidarity.
• 1981, 27 March: Nationwide four-hour warning strike after the Bydgoszcz beatings.
• 1981, 13 December: Martial law declared; Solidarity suspended.
• 1982, 8 October: Solidarity formally banned.
• 1989, 5 April: Round Table agreement signed.
• 1989, 4 June: First round of partly free elections; Solidarity wins a landslide.
• 1989, 24 August: Tadeusz Mazowiecki becomes prime minister.

Why it matters

Solidarity showed that a peaceful mass movement could force concessions from a communist state and survive repression. Its victory in 1989 opened the way for the fall of communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, and its methods of non-violent organisation have inspired civic movements around the world.