Solidarity

Solidarity (Solidarność) is the Polish trade union born in the strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980. It was the first independent union recognised by the state in any Warsaw Pact country, and within a year it had grown into a mass movement of around ten million people. Banned under martial law and driven underground, it re-emerged in 1989 to negotiate the end of communist rule in Poland, setting off a chain of changes across Eastern Europe.

Through the 1970s Poland suffered rising food prices, stagnant wages and growing foreign debt, and protests in 1976 were followed by repression. Dissident networks such as KOR began to link intellectuals and workers. Lech Wałęsa later credited the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, as an important spur. On 7 August 1980 Anna Walentynowicz, an activist in the illegal free trade union movement, was dismissed from the Gdańsk shipyard, and on 14 August its workers struck. Led by the electrician Lech Wałęsa, they demanded her reinstatement, a memorial to workers killed in 1970, and free trade unions. Strike committees from other workplaces joined them, and on 31 August the government signed the Gdańsk Agreement accepting independent unions and the right to strike.

On 17 September 1980 the new strike committees merged into one national union, NSZZ Solidarność, registered on 10 November. In barely a year its membership reached a peak of about ten million in September 1981, roughly a third of Poland's working-age population. It was organised by region rather than by trade, drew in Catholics, nationalists and parts of the left, and committed itself to non-violence. At its first national congress in September 1981 it elected Wałęsa chairman. Moscow pressed the Polish party to act, and in October 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski became party leader.

On 13 December 1981 Jaruzelski declared martial law. Union leaders were interned, thousands of supporters were arrested overnight, and strikes were broken by riot police. At the Wujek coal mine on 16 December security forces opened fire, killing nine. Solidarity was formally banned on 8 October 1982. It survived underground with clandestine newspapers and radio, helped by funds channelled from the United States and Western trade unions. Martial law was lifted in July 1983, and in October that year Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1984 the murder of the pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Popiełuszko drew huge crowds to his funeral.

By 1988 the economy was in deep trouble. A 40 per cent rise in food prices in February was followed by strike waves in spring and summer, and in August the interior minister, Czesław Kiszczak, offered talks. The Round Table negotiations ran in Warsaw from 6 February to 5 April 1989. Solidarity was legalised again on 17 April and allowed to contest the elections of 4 June 1989, in which it won 161 of the 161 Sejm seats open to it and 99 of the 100 Senate seats. In August Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist prime minister since the 1940s, and in December 1990 voters elected Wałęsa president.

The survival of an independent mass movement inside the Soviet bloc, and its electoral victory, helped trigger the Revolutions of 1989 across Central and Eastern Europe. After 1989 Solidarity became a more conventional trade union; its political offshoot, Solidarity Electoral Action, won the 1997 election but lost in 2001.

Our 1985 map shows Poland within the Soviet bloc alongside the Soviet Union, and the 1994 map shows Europe after the fall of communism. See also the history of Gdańsk.