SOLIDARITY.

Conceived in 1980 as the first autonomous labor union in the Soviet bloc, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity" (Niezal?zny Samoz?dny Zwi?zek Zawodowy "Solidarno??") challenged the authority of the one-party state in Poland and the communist system at large.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The direct origins of Solidarity date back to the 1970 workers' rising on the Baltic Sea coast and the birth of the democratic opposition in the mid-1970s. In broader terms, however, its emergence in Poland can be attributed to several essential features of twentieth-century Polish history. First, during the period of partitions (1795–1918), the Poles developed a strong sense of national identity, which included fervent nationalism, ardent Catholicism, and resistance to foreign domination. Second, the nation's cultural elite, the intelligentsia, enriched these values with the ethos of grass-roots activism. Finally, it was the failure of the communist regime to win total control over society that led to a series of political upheavals and crises culminating in the birth of Solidarity.

At the end of World War II, Poland found itself in the sphere of Soviet influence. Border shifts, population transfers, and the destruction of Jews had made Poland an ethnically homogenous and predominantly Catholic country. Polish Communists benefited from the help of the Soviet army and quickly consolidated power. However, in contrast to other communist states, the Communist Party—the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR)—never succeeded in conquering two vestiges of pluralism: private agriculture and the Roman Catholic Church. Recruited mostly from among peasants, the new industrial labor force held to its traditional customs including ardent religiosity, while the church preserved traditional values constituting an alternative community to the party-state.

The inability of the Communist Party to fully dominate society also stemmed from its internal divisions and relatively frequent changes of leadership. The immediate postwar period saw the ascent to power of Wladyslaw Gomulka (1905–1982), a Communist leader who advocated the "Polish road to socialism," acknowledging the country's national and socioeconomic specificities rather than mimicking the Soviet model. Persecuted under Stalinism, Gomulka returned to power in 1956. He halted collectivization, reinstated religious tolerance, relaxed censorship, and passed economic reforms. From the mid-1960s, however, Gomulka grew increasingly authoritarian. Having antagonized liberal intellectuals, party reformers, and the clergy, the regime embraced aggressive nationalism to legitimize its flagging rule. In 1968 it launched an anti-Semitic campaign and brutally suppressed student protests. The ideological and moral bankruptcy of communism in Poland paved the way for the birth of the new democratic opposition, no longer interested in reforming the system, but rather determined to pursue alternative solutions.

THE ROOTS OF SOLIDARITY: 1970–1980

The Gomulka government was toppled by the workers' strikes against food price increases of December 1970. After the massacre of strikers in the coastal cities of Gda?sk, Gdynia, and Szczecin, the party politburo ousted Gomulka. The new party leader, Edward Gierek (1913–2001), believed that consumerism, not ideology and coercion, was the key to winning social compliance. Loans from Western banks facilitated his ambitious program of rapid modernization, helped to increase wages, and brought greater availability of consumer goods. But overheated investment combined with incompetent management and rampant corruption soon led to an economic slowdown. In June 1976, after the announcement of food price increases, strikes and social protests erupted in several cities, most notably in Radom, where demonstrators besieged and burned party buildings. The government rescinded its plans but suppressed the riots with utmost brutality. Hundreds of workers were beaten, jailed, and sacked from their jobs.

The pacification of protests mobilized dissident intellectuals, who in September 1976 formed the Komitet Obrony Robotników (Committee for the Defense of Workers, or KOR). The original task of assisting arrested workers soon broadened into the promotion of human and civil rights, underground publishing, and the creation of free trade unions. Among its leading activists were the dissidents Jacek Kuro? and Adam Michnik, the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski, the literary scholar Jan Józef Lipski, and the Catholic priest Jan Zieja.

Above all, the KOR sought to build a civil society and ensure an independent and democratic public active outside of state control. The group's agenda was elaborated in essays by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, Kuro?, and Michnik, who argued that while a socialist system would not be democratized from above, it could be transformed by pressure applied from below by self-organized social groups. Soon KOR members made forays into the working class helping to organize the Free Trade Unions of the Coast in Gda?sk in 1978. Among the union's most outspoken activists was a young electrician, Lech Wa??sa. An employee of the Lenin Shipyard, Wa??sa took part in the 1970 strike. In 1976 he was fired for vehement criticism of the state-sponsored unions, democratic agitation, and calls for the commemoration of fallen workers. Introduced to the Gda?sk opposition milieu by a KOR member, Bogdan Borusewicz, Wa??sa joined the Free Unions in 1978. In 1979 he was one of the signatories of the Charter of Workers' Rights, which called for the right to strike, independent labor unions, and just wages.

In addition to the KOR, other groups emerged, including the Movement for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO), and the Confederation for an Independent Poland (KPN). The alliance of intelligentsia and workers that began to materialize under the tutelage of the KOR was boosted by the rapprochement between opposition intellectuals and the Roman Catholic Church, the strongest autonomous institution in the country. These developments coupled with the leniency of Gierek, who was careful not to alienate Western creditors by brutalizing dissidents, transformed Poland into a major center of opposition to communism in the Soviet bloc. As the opposition provided revolutionary cadres, the Roman Catholic Shipyard, Wale Church offered spiritual mobilization. The naming of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Kraków, as Pope John Paul II in 1978, followed by his visit to Poland in 1979, brought about sense of moral reawakening and transformed the Polish public. In his farewell address, the pope urged his compatriots to "have the courage to go the way no one has followed before" (Luxmoore and Babiuch, p. 217). It was not long before the country experienced a cataclysmic political upheaval in 1980.

FIRST SOLIDARITY: 1980–1981

Rising foreign debt, economic slowdown, and an alarming discrepancy between imports and exports prompted the Gierek regime to introduce radical price adjustments for inflation and to cut down meat supplies for domestic markets in the summer of 1980. As work stoppages spread across Poland, free trade union activists from the coast and KOR members decided to launch a strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gda?sk. The shipyard went on strike on 14 August 1980. Workers combined economic demands with political postulates calling for the reinstatement of a free trade union activist, Anna Walentynowicz, and of Wa?/?sa; the erection of a monument to the victims of the 1970 shootings; and compensatory pay increases. Under the leadership of Wa??sa, the Mi?dzyzakladowy Komitet Strajowy (Interfactory Strike Committee, MKS) was formed in the Baltic region, demanding independent trade unions, the right to strike, freedom of expression, the release of political prisoners, and various economic concessions. By the end of August, political strikes had swept the entire country. On 31 August, Wa??sa and Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski signed the Gda?sk agreement, in which the government conceded to most of the strikers' demands, including the right to form independent labor unions. Similar accords were concluded in Szczecin and Jastrz?bie.

The August accords brought down the Gierek regime. The Soviets perceived the agreements as a temporary compromise and expected that the Polish Communists would gradually dismantle the workers' movement. But on 17 September 1980, delegates of thirty-five regional strike committees and several opposition activists set up the national federation of trade unions, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity," with Wa??sa as its chairman. After the government blocked its registration, Solidarity launched a general warning strike. Yielding to popular pressure, the regime agreed to legalize the union in exchange for Solidarity's recognition of the party's leading role in the state in November 1980. In December 1980, private farmers founded Rural Solidarity. By the end of that year, Solidarity had nine million members, and by the following spring ten million. It was a nationwide social movement functioning outside the party's control and encompassing all sectors of society including people from a variety of political persuasions.

Throughout 1981 Solidarity underwent increasing radicalization. The national congress of Solidarity, held in September and October 1981, adopted the program of the "Self-Governing Republic," in which citizens would take responsibility for various political, social, and cultural matters. The government, led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski (b. 1923), grew intransigently hostile toward the union. Subjected to pressure from Moscow and keen to reinstate the party's authority, Jaruzelski set about destroying Solidarity by force. On 13 December 1981 he imposed martial law. As the military and police took total control of the country, civil rights and all political and social organizations were suspended. Thousands of Solidarity activists, including most of its leaders, were arrested and detained. In October 1982 the Polish parliament formally dissolved the union.

1982–1989

After the imposition of martial law, Solidarity continued underground under the command of those leaders who had escaped arrest. The union launched political strikes, organized campaigns of civil disobedience, and built a framework of independent institutions. Still, the underground Solidarity failed to mobilize the weary population. The lifting of martial law in 1983 indicated the regime's self-confidence. However, in the same year the government suffered a major blow when Wa??sa received the Nobel Peace Prize. Even more devastating was the brutal assassination of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a staunch supporter of Solidarity, by a group of security policemen. In a desperate face-saving gesture, Jaruzelski had the killers arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison terms. Following this period of immediate repression, the general softened his policies, releasing political prisoners, allowing channels of pluralism, and implementing economic reforms. With the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) to power in the Soviet Union, Jaruzelski followed and at times expanded the Soviet pattern of perestroika in the hope of winning society's compliance and achieving economic recovery while preserving the power of the party.

During the 1980s neither the underground Solidarity nor the Communist regime had enough power to eliminate its opponents. This stalemate continued until 1988, when government austerity measures sparked a wave of strikes. But the strikers' major demand was the re-legalization of Solidarity. The Polish Roundtable Talks between Solidarity and the government that concluded in April 1989 legalized the union and provided for its participation in parliamentary elections. In June 1989 Solidarity won 99 of 100 seats in the Senate and all of the 169 freely contested seats in the Sejm (lower house). The formation of the Solidarity-led coalition government led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki in August 1989 marked the end of communism in Poland and sparked the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe.

1989–2005

In 1990 Solidarity underwent political fragmentation over the issues of free-market reforms, decommunization, and Wa??sa's bid for the presidency. During the presidential elections of that year, Wa??sa defeated Mazowiecki, and the Solidarity parliamentary club split into new political parties. Solidarity continued as a trade union. Radicalized and discontented by rising unemployment and other side effects of the economic transition, the union brought down Hanna Suchocka's center-right coalition government in 1993, paving the way for the electoral victory of former Communists. In 1995 Wa??sa lost the presidential elections to Aleksander Kwa?niewski, a former Communist. Two years later, Solidarity helped to build the center-right Electoral Action "Solidarity," which won the 1997 election. However, in 2001 Solidarity gained only a fraction of the vote, failing to enter parliament.

Lech Wa??sa, whose popularity plummeted in the 1990s (in the 2000 presidential elections he received only 1 percent of the vote) reentered politics acting as a mediator in the Ukrainian political crisis in 2005. The parliamentary elections of September 2005 saw the victory of two center-right parties, partly recruited from former Solidarity members, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) and the Civic Platform (PO). In the October 2005 presidential election, Lech Kaczy?ski, a former Solidarity activist, defeated Donald Tusk, another veteran of the democratic opposition.

See alsoGierek, Edward; Gomulka, Wladyslaw; Jaruzelski, Wojciech; John Paul II; Perestroika; Poland; Wal? sa, Lech.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garton Ash, Timothy. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82. London, 1983.

Kubik, Jan. The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland. University Park, Pa., 1994.

Laba, Roman. The Roots of Solidarity. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Lipski, Jan Józef. KOR: A History of the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland, 1976–1981. Translated by Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore. Berkeley, Calif., 1985.

Luxmoore, Janathan, and Jolanta Babiuch. The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe. London, 1999.

Ost, David. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968. Philadelphia, 1990.

Paczkowski, Andrzej. The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom. Translated by Jane Cave. University Park, Pa., 2003.

Mikolaj Kunicki