Background
• Long history of foreign domination – Partitions, bloody
uprisings against Russian authority throughout c19.
• 1956, 1968, 1970 and 1976 – series of challenges to the
system, occasional short-term gains, eventual defeats.
• Horrors of WWII – 200,000 killed in Warsaw Uprising 1944.
• Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968.
• Papal visit 1979.
Background (II)
• After 1976 strikes, formation of Workers’ Defence
Committee (KOR).
• KSS-KOR leader Jacek Kuron stressed nonviolence – any
social movement ‘must get rid of the use of force and
compulsion’.
• The Church – move to favour alternative to violent
insurrection. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski “The art is not to die
for the homeland; the art is to live well for it”.
Gdansk and Lech Wałęsa
• Price increase and widespread
discontent among workers from July
1st 1980.
• Occupation of the Lenin Shipyard.
• For the first time an ‘overarching
inter-enterprise organisation’, the
Strike Committee in Gdansk.
• Election of Lech Walesa
• Organisation of striking factories –
strict regulations for workers.
• Negotiations with government
officials in the shipyard – open
discussion for all workers to hear.
Twenty-one demands
• Despite the outbreak of the strikes in August 1980 as a direct
response to price increases, economic demands did not
occupy center stage in negotiations
• Key political demands;
- the right to form independent trade unions
- the right to strike
- the right to freedom of speech
- the release of political prisoners
• These fundamentally challenged the Party’s basis of power
and their claim to be the representation of the working class.
Solidarity
• By September 1981, Solidarity had a membership of 9.5-10 million,
1/3 of Polish total working age.
• Skirmishes followed a typical pattern – Party neglects some
element of agreements, Solidarity counters with threat of
nonviolent action, leading to negotiations and eventually
compromise.
• Objectives focused on key interests, generated wide support.
• Fundamental challenge to Party legitimacy – form of societal
organisation running parallel to government.
• October 1981 – ‘Self-Governing Commonwealth’.
•
'Registration Crisis’/Narozniak
Affair
Authorities behaved with lack of resolution following the
settlement of demands.
• Backtrack on sanction of independent trade union.
• General ‘warning strike’ – compromise negotiated
after threat of state of emergency.
• Arrest of print worker Narozniak in November – first
Solidarity activist arrested – led to widespread
striking and demands for measures to defend
population against police, look into killings
in 1970 and 1976.
• November 10th – Warsaw court recognised Solidarity officially.
Bydgoszcz crisis
• March 1981 local militia beat up Solidarity activists.
• National general strike announced after inadequate official
report of the incident.
• 4 hour ‘warning strike’.
• International impact – Eastern European media increasingly
critical of Solidarity while NATO held Atlantic Council meeting
to discuss situation in Poland,
Communist Party in Poland
• Internal weaknesses
- desertion of members to Solidarity
- unsympathetic public
- Party tensions - ousting of premier Gierek
- economic crisis
• Friction with USSR – condemnation of the
movement in Russian paper Pravda. Debate
over extent to which USSR were responsible
for declaration of state of war.
• Western pressures – Poland’s reliance on
West economically, as well as for technology
and supplies.
• Importance of the image of the regime to the
outside world.
‘common road, common goal’ –
alliance with USSR
The Catholic Church
• Uncommon alliance between
workers, the intelligentsia and
the Church was a key strategy
to power of Solidarity.
• ‘be not overcome by evil, be
overcome by good’.
• December 1981 – primate
urged an end to social conflict,
Council of Bishops sent
appeals to parliament.
State of war
• Polish military forces introduced a ‘state of war’ in December
1981 – censorship, curfews, raids, arrests, military courts.
• The first people to be killed in sixteen months since the
‘revolution’ began were workers shot by armed police in the
first weeks of the ‘war’.
• Solidarity’s ‘very greatness undermined the possibility of
equilibrium between the communist state and a society in
search of liberty’ (Aleksander Smolar).
• People of Poland believed that the regime’s crushing of
Solidarity saved them from more extreme Soviet military
danger – ‘self-limiting counter regime’?
Tactics
• Strikes
• ‘Self-limiting revolution’
• Inclusive nature – intellectuals, clergy and workers
• Press – foreign
• Collective organisation, on a national level
• Personal discipline (eg sobriety in factories) echoing Ghandian
principles
Legacy
• The peaceful strategy of the opposition from the 1970s
helped reconstruct social ties, from the regime’s policy of
atomization and control.
• With the state of war millions of people were forced out of
public life, but tensions remained – by the mid 80s ‘the
profound crisis of “real socialism” was evident even to the
authorities’.
• Poland was the first of the Eastern European countries leading
the downfall of communist regimes.
• The rapid, peaceful decomposition of communism –
evolutionary model of transition.
Lech Wałęsa and Mitt Romney
“I wish you to be successful because this success is needed to the United States,
of course, but to Europe and the rest of the world, too. Governor Romney, get
your success, be successful!” – Lech Wałęsa to Mitt Romney in July 2012,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/post/lech-walesa-toromney-get-your-success---be-successful/2012/07/30/gJQAAwgYKX_blog.html