Lech Wałęsa

Lech Wałęsa is a Polish shipyard electrician who led the Solidarity trade union, the first independent mass movement allowed to exist in the Soviet bloc. His role in strikes and negotiations helped bring about the peaceful end of communist rule in Poland in 1989, and in 1990 he became the country's first president chosen by popular vote. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

Wałęsa was born on 29 September 1943 in Popowo, in a part of Poland then annexed by Nazi Germany. His father, a carpenter, had been held in a German forced labour camp and died soon after the war. Lech trained as an electrician, worked as a car mechanic, did his military service and in July 1967 joined the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. In 1969 he married Danuta Gołoś; they had eight children.

Wałęsa took part in the 1970 shipyard protests against food price rises, which ended with the deaths of more than 30 workers. In 1976 he was sacked for his union activity and campaigning to commemorate the victims. Watched by the secret police and repeatedly arrested, he moved between jobs and joined the underground Free Trade Unions of the Coast in 1978.

When food prices rose again in August 1980, a strike broke out at the Lenin Shipyard on 14 August. Wałęsa climbed the fence to join it and became its leader, then headed a committee coordinating strikes across the region. On 31 August the government signed the Gdańsk Agreement, conceding the right to strike and to form free unions. The resulting movement, Solidarity, with Wałęsa as chairman, soon claimed more than 10 million members, over a quarter of Poland's population.

On 13 December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Wałęsa was interned for 11 months and Solidarity was banned in 1982. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, he sent his wife to Oslo to accept it, fearing he would not be allowed back into Poland. Through the 1980s he kept the movement alive underground and in 1988 led new strikes at the shipyard.

Economic crisis and strikes pushed the communist party into talks with the opposition from February to April 1989, with Wałęsa as the informal leader of the non-government side. The Round Table Agreement legalised Solidarity again and allowed partly free elections in June 1989, in which Solidarity candidates won every seat open to free contest in the Sejm and all but one in the Senate. Poland's change of regime became one of the first of the Revolutions of 1989 across eastern Europe.

Wałęsa won the presidential election of 1990 and served from December 1990 to December 1995. His term saw a rapid transition to a market economy under the Balcerowicz Plan, Poland's first fully free parliamentary elections in 1991, a turn towards the West and the negotiated withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1993. Critics faulted his combative style and frequent clashes with governments, and the hardship of economic reform cost him support. He narrowly lost the 1995 election to the former communist Aleksander Kwaśniewski, with 48.28 per cent in the run-off, and won barely 1 per cent in 2000.

Since leaving office Wałęsa has lectured widely and founded the Lech Wałęsa Institute. For years he has faced allegations that he informed for the communist secret police in the early 1970s under the codename "Bolek". A special court cleared him in 2000, but documents seized in 2016 from the home of the former interior minister Czesław Kiszczak were judged authentic by a handwriting study. Wałęsa has admitted signing papers under pressure in 1970 but denies ever informing, and the question remains debated by historians.

Our 1985 map shows Poland within the Soviet bloc during the years when Solidarity was banned, and the 1994 map shows the independent, post-communist Poland of his presidency, after the Cold War.