A Trade Union and the Pope versus Communist Dictators
A wall cannot be demolished with butts of the head. We must move slowly, step by step, otherwise the wall remains untouched and we break our heads.
Lech Walesa1
Solidarity2 is the amazing story of how daring Polish shipyard builders defied their Communist rulers, developed the first independent trade union in the Communist world, and eventually played a key role in the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.3 And, after the failure of violent methods in 1970, they did it with nonviolent protest. The Polish Solidarity movement is stunning evidence that nonviolent forms of resistance and protest can be successful even under a totalitarian regime. Solidarity’s victory did not occur overnight, but it demonstrated that courageous workers united by a common cause and conviction ultimately wielded more power than ruthless Communist dictators.
Poland under Soviet Control
Poland has suffered a long, painful history of invasion, occupation, and control by foreign powers. During World War II, it endured brutal German and Soviet invasions. Poles initially resisted Nazi invasion violently in the famous Warsaw Uprising. But Hitler’s armies prevailed after two months, and Hitler ordered the destruction of Warsaw, killing two hundred thousand people. Soon after World War II ended, Stalin’s army and pro-Soviet Polish Marxists established harsh Communist rule.4 They implemented Stalinism based on the Soviet model. Poland underwent industrialization and collectivization under a totalitarian regime marked by bureaucracy, suppression of individual freedom, and terror.5
Economic reforms initially created high growth rates in the 1950s. When growth rates started to taper off in the 1960s, the party tried to correct the problem by increasing investment in the agricultural sector. However, the party invested mainly in unproductive state farms, in an effort to drive out private farmers. In 1969, the harvest failed. In 1970, the party discontinued importing grain for feedstock. Food supplies dropped drastically, creating a national crisis.6
The regime responded by increasing food prices without raising wages. Workers, who already spent nearly half of their income on food, were enraged.7
An (Unsuccessful) Violent Protest (1970)
The party-dominated “official” unions did nothing about the situation, but workers at the Lenin shipyard launched a strike. A young electrician, Lech Walesa, was one of the leaders. Without central organization, the strike caught on and spread quickly. Workers gathered in front of the shipyard director’s building and used the PA system to announce their demands: cancellation of the price increases, reform of the pay system, and “‘resignation’ of the ruling regime.”8
After an hour with no response, they headed downtown to the Communist Party headquarters to announce their strike to the whole town. About one thousand workers marched out of the shipyard heading toward downtown Gdansk, armed with tools and clubs in case the militia should attack them. On the way, others joined them.9
When the crowd, now swelled to three thousand, approached party headquarters at 4:00 p.m., they met a motorized militia demanding that they disperse. When the workers disobeyed and pushed toward the headquarters, the police obeyed orders to use their nightsticks. Angry workers responded by throwing stones at the police. Police reinforcements soon arrived, attacking the crowds with clubs and gas grenades. The people then attempted to burn the headquarters. The riot spread, and workers engaged in acts of sabotage by destroying anything that symbolized state power or status and privilege.10
The following day, the workers declared a general strike, and people from other factories joined those in the streets. The crowd grew to fifteen thousand. Fired on by police, the strikers set fire to the party headquarters. Local security forces retreated, but only to await the arrival of the army. The strike spread to the nearby city of Gdynia.11
By the next day, thirty-five thousand well-armed troops had arrived ready to squelch the rebellion with force. They shot and killed as many as two to three hundred strikers and wounded more than a thousand in several cities.12 The workers’ revolt collapsed.
The workers’ action in 1970 demonstrated that striking citizens had real power. But the workers also learned a painful lesson: the Communist rulers would not hesitate to employ violence against them, and in a battle of force the police and army would surely win. Rocks and tools could not compete with guns and tanks. This realization helped nurture a new, more patient, nonviolent movement.13
Church, Workers, and Intellectuals Unite
The Communist Party named a new leader in an effort to neutralize the discontent. His economic reforms led to improved living conditions in the early 1970s, but in June 1976, in an effort to stave off impending economic difficulties, the government raised food prices. Workers promptly went on strike across the nation. The government fired thousands of workers, arrested at least two thousand, and beat untold numbers. But the government also promptly reversed the price increases.14
One result of the brief 1976 strike was that dissident Polish intellectuals decided to support the cause of the workers. The Committee for Defense of Workers (KOR) was formed. KOR defended imprisoned workers, began circulating underground workers’ newspapers, and helped with underground efforts to organize free trade unions,15 effectively raising consciousness among the proletariat.16
The Roman Catholic Church also spoke out in defense of workers. In September 1976, Cardinal Wyszynski (the primate of Poland) insisted, “It is the clergy’s duty to defend the workers’ interests against hasty and ill-considered government measures. . . . It was painful that workers should have to struggle for their rights against a workers’ government.”17
For years, another Polish Catholic leader, Cardinal Wojtyla, had been engaged in church renewal, energizing church-based movements independent of the state. In 1978, the world’s Catholic cardinals stunned almost everyone by naming Cardinal Wojtyla as the new pope. Pope John Paul II’s visit to his homeland in June 1979 attracted millions of Poles. In his many speeches at historic religious and national sites, he defended the right to dignity for individuals and workers.18 His words evoked a deeply emotional response with his listeners as he appealed to their religious and national identity. He inspired new hope that there was a morally legitimate way to defend human dignity: “The antipoliticians [e.g., KOR] had begun the process of creating a civil society in which such a moral change could occur, but John Paul II’s visit to Poland suddenly jolted millions of Poles to their first awareness that this was indeed a proper sphere in which to begin a hopeless enterprise.”19
The workers, the intellectuals, and the church united behind a common cause in a way never before seen in Polish Communist history or the Soviet bloc. They launched underground publishing houses and held unauthorized university lectures. The church often provided a safe place for opponents of the government to meet. Millions of Polish Catholics attended Mass each Sunday. The police spied on, arrested, and beat activists, but they failed to prevent a growing underground movement of resistance. This alliance soon grew into Solidarity.20
In 1976, Lech Walesa’s fiery tirades against official unions finally got him fired. For the next few years, Walesa was fired from one job after another. Courageously and persistently, however, he spread the vision of independent trade unions, surviving with support from the church.21
Formation of Solidarity (1980)
In August 1980, another wave of strikes broke out. The workers of the Lenin shipyard called in Lech Walesa to help lead them. In a sit-down strike on August 15 they demanded a pay raise. To their surprise, the authorities granted the pay raise the same day. But rather than accept it, some of the workers insisted on continuing the strike until other local workers’ demands were met. The following day, they formed the Inter-Factory Strike Committee, with 388 enterprises represented. The committee of nineteen delegates drafted a list of demands, the first of which was for a free trade union—something that did not exist anywhere in the Communist world.22
The following week, intellectuals extended their support and acted as political advisers to the Inter-Factory Strike Committee. Workers across Poland continued to mobilize and go on strike. The Catholic Church expressed support but called for moderation.23 From his powerful pulpit in Rome, Pope John Paul II spoke out on behalf of the strikers, declaring their demands to be legitimate. The Polish bishops cited teaching from the Second Vatican Council in support of strikers, declaring that workers had the right to organize.24
As strikes spread to other parts of the country, the authorities at the Lenin shipyards tried to complete a deal there. They almost succeeded, but at the last minute the workers there decided to stay on strike until the authorities dealt with other strikers. “We must continue the strike out of solidarity until everyone has won,” Lech Walesa announced.25 Delegates from many striking enterprises came to the Lenin shipyards, joining the Inter-Factory Strike Committee (MKS). Its central demand was free trade unions. More and more striking workers joined MKS. Strikes spread to more and more areas of Poland.
The government had to negotiate. When Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski met with Walesa and his colleagues, he offered to reform the official trade union. But the workers insisted on their own independent union. In Warsaw, the Politburo debated whether to accept a deal or use armed repression. To relieve some of their concerns, Walesa said that the striking workers were “not fighting against the socialist system” and would accept the “leading role” of the Communist Party.26 On Sunday, August 31, the government and the workers reached an agreement. Workers all over Poland would for the first time have a right to form their own free unions.
In the August 31 agreement, the government recognized the MKS as the representative of workers in the whole Gdansk-Gdynia region. The workers named their new union “Solidarity” and chose Walesa as their new chairman.
When the official media published the August 31 agreement, Polish workers everywhere discovered their new right to organize freely. All across Poland workers rushed to organize. On September 17, delegates from across the country met in Gdansk to form a National Coordinating Commission to guide the regional unions. They called the movement “Solidarity.” Already by September 17, it had three million members. By December, the number skyrocketed to ten million. Most Polish workers now belonged to an independent union. “Nothing like it had ever happened before in any communist-ruled society.”27
Most Poles were euphoric. But Walesa wisely cautioned workers that they would have to continue the struggle until the agreement was implemented.28 Repeatedly, in the fall of 1980, the government clashed with Solidarity, breaking promises and harassing workers.
The authorities had good reason to be worried. A million farmers had organized their own union, Rural Solidarity. University students established their own free union. Every regional branch of Solidarity published its own free newspaper.
Conflict between Solidarity and the government intensified in 1981. Walesa and some other Solidarity leaders tried to minimize direct confrontation with the government, fearing that it would lead to a violent response, even a Soviet invasion.29 But not even the Polish Communist leaders controlled the fate of Poland. In April 1981, top Soviet leaders from Moscow summoned the Polish leaders to a secret rendezvous just inside the Soviet border. They demanded a crackdown. “The Polish leaders stalled, but the question was not whether but when.”30 Final plans for the crackdown were in place by mid-September.
By mid-December, all the troops were in position. On December 12–13, they struck, arresting thousands of Solidarity leaders, intellectuals, and activists. Tanks smashed through walls and gates to expel remaining strikers inside the shipyards. The authorities justified the violent takeover by falsely claiming that Solidarity had planned to use violence to take over the country.31 They banned public meetings, forbade strikes, “suspended” Solidarity, and censored all mail and telephone communications. By the end of December, the government was in complete control—at least on the surface.
In the early years of martial law, there was a great deal of disagreement over what approach the underground remnants of Solidarity should take in continuing the struggle. Jacek Kuron, a prominent intellectual in the movement who had previously promoted nonviolent struggle, wrote a letter from prison suggesting that, given the circumstances, he would support collective violent action on behalf of the people.32 Zbigniew Bujak, who avoided arrest and became a key leader in underground Solidarity, disagreed with Kuron and instead argued that “local groups and social circles in the community should organize . . . to build a system of social structures independent of the state.”33
Bujak and others who agreed with his approach created the Temporary Coordinating Committee (TKK) to organize underground union activity. Other underground organizations formed. Solidarity soon began to put out numerous underground newspapers, reaching over one million Poles by 1984.34
Pope John Paul II pointedly expressed his solidarity with the Polish people in his visit to Poland in 1983. He publicly declared that he spoke for those “who are acutely tasting the bitterness of disappointment, humiliation, suffering, of being deprived of their freedom, of being wronged, of having their dignity trampled upon.” When the government responded with promises of returning to “appropriate humanitarian and legal solutions,” the pope insisted that meant honoring the agreement made with Solidarity in August 1980.35
On their way to an open-air Mass, thousands of Poles passed the riot police (who were armed with guns) chanting, “We forgive you.” Hundreds of thousands of Poles showed up at the Mass, while many millions more watched on television. The visit of the courageous Polish pope served to help resurrect Solidarity and restore hope to continue the struggle nonviolently.36
The pope had insisted that he would not visit unless he was allowed to meet with Walesa. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the top Communist leader, did not want to allow it, but the meeting finally took place. The act of the meeting itself sent the message that Solidarity was still alive and had the backing of the pope.37 That same year, Walesa received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Solidarity’s activities remained clandestine. Activists who struggled to keep Solidarity alive in its underground form paid a price. Slowly, however, Jaruzelski began to permit some pluralism by allowing for allegedly “self-governing” unions in an attempt to win over workers. But most workers did not join, nor did intellectuals buy into the party’s attempt to look as if it were implementing the values of Solidarity.38 Jaruzelski even released Walesa from prison in November 1982.
The economic recovery that Jaruzelski had hoped to achieve under martial law did not take place. Solidarity put out a report documenting the economic crisis. The West would not offer aid as long as the regime refused to negotiate with Solidarity.39
Meanwhile, Jaruzelski began to imagine himself as a Polish Gorbachev, introducing reform. In an attempt to demonstrate his tolerance of pluralism, he released all political prisoners in August and September 1986, including key Solidarity leaders. Shortly after the amnesty was announced, Walesa formed the Solidarity Provisional Council (TRS). Although Solidarity was still not legal, the TRS was out in the open, unlike its underground counterpart, the TKK. Some regional councils came out in the open by joining Walesa’s organization, but others remained underground with the TKK, making Solidarity very decentralized at this point.40 Walesa later merged these organizations to form the National Executive Commission (KKW), which was tolerated, although it remained illegal.41 Solidarity was not a powerful union with millions of members; rather, it was a “small but still-prestigious political front.”42
When the party responded to another economic crisis with price increases in 1988, workers went on strike in the spring and again in August. The strikes forced the party to negotiate. On August 31, a key Communist leader met with Walesa and agreed to roundtable negotiations that would include Solidarity. The strikes were called off when the party promised to make Solidarity a legal entity once again.43
Roundtable Negotiations and Electoral Victory
Hardliners in the Communist Party delayed negotiations for several months. But on February 6, 1989, twenty-six party representatives met with twenty-nine delegates from Solidarity, plus observers from the church, in a roundtable to discuss the future of Poland. By April 6, they had reached a historic agreement: free unions, expanded freedom of the press, an independent court, even free parliamentary elections.44
Everyone made compromises. In order to gain official union status, Solidarity agreed that the majority of the seats in parliament would go to the Communist Party and only a minority would be open to free election to be held in two months.45
Solidarity was officially registered as a union on April 18, 1989, in keeping with the roundtable agreements. On election day, Solidarity candidates were overwhelmingly victorious, winning all but one of the contested seats in both houses. In the ensuing months, a coalition government was formed, and on August 24, 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister in a Solidarity-led coalition government. He was “the first non-Communist prime minister of an East European state in almost forty years.”46
To the world’s surprise, Gorbachev shrugged, and the Soviet Union did not invade. Poland was free to continue down the path of democracy. Other Eastern bloc countries, encouraged by Poland’s example and the Soviet Union’s new policies of glasnost and perestroika, soon followed suit.
Solidarity succeeded for many reasons: the incredible courage of hundreds of thousands of Polish workers; the brave support of the Catholic Church and a brilliant Polish pope; the cooperation of intellectuals and workers; the patience to build underground alternative structures when public resistance was largely impossible; Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union. Perhaps most important was the firm resolve after the failure of violent rebellion in 1970 to use nonviolent methods. This decision was partly pragmatic, partly principled. As George Weigel says, “The bad guys had all the guns, and the good guys knew it.”47
Lech Walesa, however, seemed to go beyond mere pragmatism in his response to a question after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:
Question: You’ve chosen the course of nonviolence. Isn’t this a form of weakness, of your inability to achieve freedom or independence by other means?
Walesa: It’s the course chosen by the majority of Poles, and the majority of people worldwide. And it’s probably thanks to nonviolence that I am where I am now. I’m a man who believes in dialogue and agreement. I strongly believe that the twenty-first century will not be a century of violence. We’ve already tried and tested every form of violence, and not once in the entire course of human history has anything good or lasting come from it.48
In 1991, Pope John Paul II wrote in praise of the nonviolent means successfully employed by Solidarity:
The protests which led to the collapse of Marxism tenaciously insisted on trying every avenue of negotiation, dialogue and witness to the truth, appealing to the conscience of the adversary and seeking to awaken in him a sense of shared human dignity.
It seemed that the European order resulting from the Second World War and sanctioned by the Yalta Agreements could only be overturned by another war. Instead, it [was] overcome by the nonviolent commitment of people who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth. This disarmed the adversary, since violence always needs to justify itself through deceit, and to appear, however falsely, to be defending a right or responding to a threat posed by others.49
In Poland, nonviolent action defied and defeated ruthless Communist dictators.
1. Quoted in Michael Dobbs, Dessa Trevisan, and K. S. Karol, Poland, Solidarity, Walesa (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 104.
2. I thank my Ayres Scholar, Stefanie Israel, for her excellent research on this chapter.
3. Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 182; James DeFronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 54–55; Michael Meyer, The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York: Scribner, 2009), 48. Archie Brown observes, “The example of Solidarity, which began as an independent trade union and then became a mass political movement, was not followed by any other country in the world” (The Rise and Fall of Communism [New York: HarperCollins, 2009], 437), but the success of Solidarity exposed the weakening grip of the Soviets and gave an example of what was possible. See also the detailed analyses in Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 113–74.
4. Dobbs, Trevisan, and Karol, Poland, 19–24.
5. Ibid., 26–27.
6. Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 15.
7. Ibid., 18–19.
8. Ibid., 21–23.
9. Ibid., 23.
10. Ibid., 26–28.
11. Ibid., 30–39.
12. See the differing estimates in Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17; Michael D. Kennedy, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity in Poland: A Critical Sociology of Soviet-Type Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35.
13. Alain Touraine et al., Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement; Poland 1980–1981, trans. David Denby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 186; George Weigel, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 53; Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful, 119–21.
14. Kennedy, Professionals, 38, 40; Stokes, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 26; Laba, Roots of Solidarity, 104.
15. Touraine et al., Solidarity, 35–36; Kennedy, Professionals, 41.
16. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 27.
17. Ibid., 22–23.
18. Stokes, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 33.
19. Ibid., 34.
20. Ash, Polish Revolution, 27.
21. Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful, 137.
22. Touraine et al., Solidarity, 37.
23. Ibid., 37–39.
24. George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 402.
25. Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful, 144.
26. Ibid., 151.
27. Ibid., 152.
28. Touraine et al., Solidarity, 39–41.
29. Stokes, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 39–42.
30. Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful, 160.
31. Ash, Polish Revolution, 300.
32. Stokes, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 105.
33. Ibid., 105–6.
34. Ibid., 106–7.
35. Jonathan Kwitny, Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 476–77.
36. Ibid., 477–78.
37. Stanislaw Dziwisz, A Life with Karol: My Forty-Year Friendship with the Man Who Became Pope, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 150–55.
38. Ash, Polish Revolution, 367–68.
39. Ibid., 368–69.
40. Stokes, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 115.
41. Ash, Polish Revolution, 369.
42. Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful, 170.
43. Ash, Polish Revolution, 370–71.
44. Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful, 170–71.
45. Stokes, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 124–26.
46. Ibid., 130.
47. Weigel, Final Revolution, 53.
48. Lech Walesa, A Way of Hope (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 287.
49. Quoted in Weigel, Final Revolution, 53.