Solidarity Founded in Poland

In August 1980, striking workers on Poland's Baltic coast forced the communist government to accept something unprecedented in the Soviet bloc: an independent, self-governing trade union. Known as Solidarity (Solidarność), it grew within months into a mass movement of around ten million members, roughly a third of Poland's adult population. Its rise showed that a ruling communist party could be challenged peacefully from below, and it became a template and inspiration for the opposition movements that helped bring communism in Eastern Europe to an end in 1989.

The background was economic crisis and accumulated resentment. Through the 1970s Poland's government had borrowed heavily from Western lenders to modernize industry and raise living standards, but the strategy faltered, leaving debt, shortages, and repeated attempts to raise food prices. Workers had risen up before, in 1956, 1970, and 1976, and the 1970 protests on the Baltic coast were put down with deadly force. Intellectuals, such as those in the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR), had built links with workers, and the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in 1978, followed by his visit to Poland in 1979, strengthened national and moral confidence.

The immediate spark came in July and August 1980, when price increases and the dismissal of the crane operator Anna Walentynowicz, a well-known activist, set off strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. Led by the electrician Lech Wałęsa, who had been dismissed from the yard in 1976, workers formed an inter-factory strike committee and drew up a list of demands. These included the right to form free trade unions, the right to strike, and the release of political prisoners. On 31 August the government signed the Gdańsk Agreement, and the union was soon registered as a single national organization.

Solidarity's strength lay in its blend of workers' demands, Catholic moral language, and intellectual advice, and in its commitment to nonviolence. Yet it operated in uneasy coexistence with a party that had never intended to share power, and tensions mounted through 1981 amid economic hardship and fears of Soviet intervention. In December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law, banned the union, and interned thousands of activists. Solidarity survived underground, supported by the Church and by foreign sympathizers.

Economic stagnation and political change in the Soviet Union eventually forced the government back to negotiation. Roundtable talks in early 1989 led to partly free elections in June, in which Solidarity candidates won nearly all the contested seats. A non-communist government took office that summer, and Wałęsa was elected president in 1990. Historians still debate how much weight to give Solidarity compared with Soviet reform, economic failure, and international pressure, but few doubt that Gdańsk marked the start of the unraveling.