Solidarity (Polish trade union)

Based on Wikipedia: Solidarity (Polish trade union)

The Shipyard That Shook an Empire

In the summer of 1980, a crane operator named Anna Walentynowicz was fired from a shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. She had five months left until retirement. Her crime? Participating in an illegal trade union.

This single act of petty vindictiveness by management would trigger a cascade of events that helped bring down the Soviet empire.

Within weeks, a movement called Solidarity would emerge from that shipyard—the first independent trade union ever recognized by a communist state. Within a year, it would claim ten million members, roughly one-third of Poland's entire working-age population. Within a decade, it would help end communist rule not just in Poland, but across Eastern Europe.

How did a labor dispute at a shipyard become a revolution? The answer involves an electrician with a walrus mustache, a Polish pope, smuggled cash from the Central Intelligence Agency, and a philosophical essay about hope that circulated in underground copies across a nation yearning for change.

Poland on the Edge

To understand Solidarity, you first need to understand Poland in the 1970s.

The country was technically independent, but in practice it was a satellite of the Soviet Union—part of what was called the Eastern Bloc, a collection of communist states that Moscow controlled through a combination of political pressure, economic integration, and the implicit threat of military force. When Hungary had tried to break free in 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. When Czechoslovakia attempted reforms in 1968—the famous Prague Spring—Soviet-led forces invaded and crushed the movement.

Poland's own government had shown its willingness to use violence against its people. In 1970, when workers protested rising food prices, the authorities responded with machine-gun fire. More than thirty people were killed. Over a thousand were wounded.

So Poles knew what happened when you challenged the system. They knew, and for a while, they stayed quiet.

But the economy kept getting worse. The government raised food prices while wages stayed flat. By 1979, something unprecedented happened: Poland's economy actually shrank for the first time since the devastation of World War Two. The country owed foreign creditors around eighteen billion dollars. For context, that was an astronomical sum for a nation whose citizens couldn't freely buy basic goods.

Underground networks began to form. Intellectuals and workers started organizing, monitoring the government's behavior, and sharing information. One group called itself the Committee for the Defense of Workers—known by its Polish acronym, KOR. These networks laid the groundwork for what was to come.

The Spark

When the shipyard management fired Anna Walentynowicz in August 1980, they thought they were eliminating a troublemaker. Instead, they created a martyr.

Her fellow workers walked off the job on August 14th, demanding her reinstatement. But what began as a strike over one woman's firing quickly transformed into something larger. Walentynowicz herself, along with another organizer named Alina Pienkowska, helped turn a dispute about specific grievances into a movement of solidarity—workers at the Gdańsk shipyard striking not just for themselves, but in sympathy with workers across Poland who were facing similar conditions.

This distinction matters. A strike over bread-and-butter issues—wages, working conditions, wrongful termination—is a negotiation. A solidarity strike is an act of collective defiance. It says: we are all in this together, and we will not be divided.

On August 31st, 1980, the communist government of Poland did something remarkable. It signed an agreement acknowledging the existence of an independent trade union.

This had never happened before. Not in Poland. Not anywhere in the Soviet bloc.

The Man with the Mustache

The face of Solidarity became Lech Wałęsa, an electrician at the Gdańsk shipyard who emerged as the movement's leader. Wałęsa was not an intellectual or a politician. He was a worker, with calloused hands and a thick mustache that would become iconic. He spoke the language of ordinary Poles, and he projected an image of working-class authenticity that the communist authorities found difficult to counter.

Under Wałęsa's leadership, Solidarity grew with astonishing speed. By September 1981—just over a year after its founding—the union had ten million members. To put that in perspective: Poland's total population was about thirty-six million. Solidarity represented roughly one out of every three working-age adults in the country.

The movement was deliberately broad. It included devout Catholics and secular leftists. It attracted nationalists who resented Soviet domination and liberals who admired Western democracy. What united them was opposition to the authoritarian system under which they lived and a commitment to nonviolent resistance.

That September, Solidarity held its first national congress. The delegates elected Wałęsa as president and adopted a program they called the "Self-Governing Republic"—a vision of a Poland where citizens, not party apparatchiks, would control their own institutions.

The Crackdown

The government could not tolerate this. On December 13th, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law.

The timing was deliberate—a cold winter night, with telephone lines cut and tanks in the streets by morning. The authorities arrested the thirty-eight regional leaders of Solidarity along with thousands of other activists. The union was officially banned. Poland became, in effect, a military dictatorship.

There is still debate about whether the American intelligence community saw this coming. Some historians believe the Central Intelligence Agency was caught off guard. Others suggest that American policymakers may have actually preferred an internal crackdown to what they saw as an inevitable Soviet military intervention. Better a Polish general imposing martial law than Soviet tanks rolling across the border as they had in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Whatever the Americans knew in advance, they had certainly been paying attention. The Reagan administration had been working to support Solidarity, waging what one observer called a public relations campaign to deter any Soviet military move into Poland. A senior Polish military officer named Ryszard Kukliński had been secretly sending reports to the CIA. The lines of communication were open.

Underground and Abroad

Martial law did not destroy Solidarity. It drove the movement underground.

The union survived through a combination of internal resilience and external support. The Vatican—under Pope John Paul the Second, a Pole by birth—provided financial assistance. So did the United States.

The CIA's role was significant but deliberately indirect. Starting in 1982, the agency channeled roughly two million dollars per year to Solidarity—ten million dollars total over five years. But the money always flowed through third parties. CIA officers were specifically prohibited from meeting with Solidarity leaders. This arrangement allowed the American government to support the movement while maintaining plausible deniability.

The American labor movement also contributed. The AFL-CIO—the largest federation of unions in the United States—raised three hundred thousand dollars from its members and sent the funds directly to Solidarity. Unlike the CIA's carefully laundered contributions, the union money came with no strings attached and no oversight of how it was spent.

Congress got involved too, authorizing the National Endowment for Democracy to allocate ten million dollars to support Solidarity. This was part of a broader American strategy to promote democracy behind the Iron Curtain.

What did this money buy? Clandestine newspapers. Underground radio broadcasts. Printing equipment. Organizational support. The infrastructure of resistance.

The Pope's Return

Wałęsa himself credited another factor as crucial to Solidarity's creation: Pope John Paul the Second's 1979 visit to Poland.

This visit occurred before the shipyard strikes, before Solidarity existed as an organization. But its psychological impact was immense. Here was a Polish pope—Karol Wojtyła, born in the town of Wadowice—returning to his homeland. Millions of Poles turned out to see him. The communist authorities could do nothing about it.

The pope represented something the regime could not control. He was Polish, so the people could identify with him personally. But he was also the head of the Catholic Church, based in Vatican City, beyond the reach of the communist government. His very presence demonstrated that there were limits to the party's power.

For his role in supporting Solidarity during his pontificate—through both moral encouragement and financial assistance—John Paul the Second has been credited by many observers, including Wałęsa himself, as one of the primary causes of communism's collapse in Europe.

The Philosopher of Hope

Ideas mattered too. One unlikely intellectual influence on Solidarity was Leszek Kołakowski, a philosopher who had been expelled from Poland in the late 1960s and whose works were officially banned there.

Despite the ban, copies of Kołakowski's writings circulated underground. His 1971 essay "Theses on Hope and Hopelessness" particularly shaped the thinking of Polish dissidents. In it, Kołakowski suggested that even in a totalitarian state, self-organized social groups could gradually expand the spheres of civil society—carving out spaces where citizens, not the party, controlled their own lives.

This was not a call for violent revolution. It was a strategy of patient, incremental resistance. And it provided a philosophical framework for what Solidarity would eventually become.

Kołakowski found deep irony in what Solidarity represented. Karl Marx had predicted a proletarian revolution—workers rising up against their capitalist exploiters. But according to Kołakowski, no such revolution had ever actually occurred. The Russian Revolution of 1917, despite its Marxist rhetoric, had been driven by simple demands for peace, land, and bread, not by Marxist ideology.

Solidarity, Kołakowski argued, was perhaps the closest thing the world had ever seen to Marx's predicted working-class revolution. Industrial workers, strongly supported by intellectuals, had risen up against their exploiters. The twist? Those exploiters were the communist state itself. And this solitary example of something resembling a genuine workers' revolution was carried out, as Kołakowski put it, "under the sign of the cross, with the blessing of the Pope."

The Round Table

By the late 1980s, the Polish government recognized it could not simply repress Solidarity out of existence. The economy was in shambles. Popular discontent was growing. And the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev was signaling that it would no longer use military force to prop up its satellite governments.

So the authorities did something remarkable: they started negotiating.

The Round Table Talks lasted from February to April 1989. Government officials sat across from representatives of the Solidarity-led opposition. The result was an agreement to hold partially free elections—the first pluralistic elections in Poland since 1947, when the communists had consolidated power.

The elections of June 4th, 1989 were not fully free. The communists had rigged the system to guarantee themselves control of most seats in the lower house of parliament, the Sejm. Only one-third of Sejm seats were open to genuine competition. But all one hundred seats in a newly created upper house, the Senate, were up for grabs.

Solidarity won ninety-nine out of one hundred Senate seats. It won every single contestable seat in the Sejm. The scale of the victory was overwhelming—a national referendum on communist rule, and the communists had lost.

By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government had formed. Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister—the first non-communist head of government in Poland since the 1940s. In December 1990, Wałęsa himself was elected president of Poland.

The Dominoes Fall

Poland's transformation triggered a chain reaction across the Eastern Bloc.

The very fact of Solidarity's survival had been unprecedented. Communist governments in the region had crushed every previous challenge with overwhelming force. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The 1968 Prague Spring. The 1970 protests in Poland itself. All had ended in bloodshed and repression.

But Solidarity had endured. It had outlasted martial law. It had negotiated with the government from a position of strength. And it had won.

Other nations took notice. Throughout 1989—the year that would become known as the Autumn of Nations—anti-communist movements swept across Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary. East Germany, where the Berlin Wall fell in November. Czechoslovakia, in what became known as the Velvet Revolution. Romania, where the transition was bloodier but the outcome the same.

One by one, the Moscow-imposed regimes collapsed. By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union itself had dissolved.

Historians debate exactly how much credit Solidarity deserves for this cascade of revolutions. The causes were complex—economic stagnation, nationalist sentiment, Gorbachev's reforms, Western pressure. But Poland was the first domino to fall, and Solidarity pushed it.

Complications of Success

Solidarity's victory contained the seeds of its own transformation—and, in some ways, its decline.

As an underground resistance movement, Solidarity had been a broad coalition united by what it opposed. But once the communists were gone, the coalition fragmented. People who had stood together against a common enemy now found they disagreed about what kind of Poland they wanted to build.

The transition to liberal capitalism in the 1990s was painful for many workers. State-owned enterprises were privatized. Unemployment rose. The social safety net frayed. Some of the very workers who had formed Solidarity's base found themselves worse off in the new Poland than they had been under communism—at least economically.

The union's membership plummeted. By 2010, thirty years after its founding, Solidarity had lost more than ninety percent of its original members. From ten million, the rolls had shrunk to around four hundred thousand.

Solidarity also evolved politically in ways that surprised some observers. In 2017, the union backed a proposal to ban Sunday shopping—a position supported by Poland's Catholic bishops. A new law implementing this ban took effect in 2018, closing large supermarkets on Sundays for the first time since the liberal shopping laws of the 1990s.

In recent presidential elections, Solidarity has endorsed candidates from Law and Justice, a right-wing nationalist party. This is a far cry from the broad anti-authoritarian coalition of the 1980s. Whether this represents a betrayal of Solidarity's original ideals or a natural evolution of a workers' movement is a matter of ongoing debate in Poland.

The Global Ripples

Solidarity's influence extended beyond Poland, though not always in straightforward ways.

The movement's relationship with Western trade unions was complicated. During the British miners' strike of 1984-85, Wałęsa offered characteristically careful comments: the miners should fight, he said, but with common sense, not destruction. He praised Margaret Thatcher as "a wise and brave woman" who would find a solution.

This was awkward. The leader of the British miners' union, Arthur Scargill, had actually criticized Solidarity as "an anti-socialist organization which desires the overthrow of a socialist state." Meanwhile, David Jastrzębski, the president of Upper Silesia Solidarity, broke with Wałęsa to voice support for the British strikers, declaring that neither truncheon blows in Britain nor rifle fire in Poland could break "our common will to struggle for a better future for the working class."

The disagreement revealed tensions inherent in Solidarity's identity. Was it a workers' movement in the traditional left-wing sense, allied with labor struggles worldwide? Or was it primarily an anti-communist movement, allied with Western governments that were themselves often hostile to trade unions?

The answer, uncomfortably, was both. And neither. Solidarity defied easy categorization.

In the late 1980s, the movement attempted to establish connections with the internal resistance to apartheid in South Africa. According to Wałęsa, these efforts were hampered by geographical distance and the difficulty of getting news about what was happening beyond Poland's borders. Little came of the outreach.

More durable legacies emerged elsewhere. In 2008, democratic opposition groups in Russia formed their own movement called Solidarity, explicitly invoking the Polish original. In the United States, the American Solidarity Party—a small Christian democratic political party—took its name from the Polish union.

Violence and Nonviolence

One of Solidarity's most distinctive features was its commitment to nonviolent resistance.

This was a strategic choice, not just a moral one. The Polish government had shown it would use lethal force against violent protesters—the 1970 massacre had proven that. And behind the Polish government stood the Soviet military, which had crushed armed uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. A violent confrontation was a fight Solidarity could not win.

But nonviolence was also woven into the movement's identity. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek later described Solidarity as one of the "free spaces at a distance from state power" that used what he called "defensive violence"—meaning the movement protected itself from state control without initiating violent action.

A conflict analysis commissioned by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict concluded that "Solidarity always pursued its political objectives with a high degree of nonviolent discipline as well as self-imposed limitations." The movement understood that its moral authority depended on maintaining that discipline even under severe provocation.

The Irony of History

There is something deeply ironic about Solidarity's story.

The communist states of Eastern Europe claimed to represent the interests of workers. Their ruling parties called themselves workers' parties. Their ideology held that the working class would lead humanity to a socialist utopia.

And then the workers actually organized. They formed a genuine, independent union. They made demands. They went on strike.

The communist government declared martial law to crush them.

This was the fundamental contradiction that Solidarity exposed. The regimes that claimed to rule in the name of the proletariat could not tolerate actual proletarian self-organization. When workers asserted their own interests rather than accepting what the party told them their interests should be, the mask slipped.

Kołakowski was right: if Marx's predicted workers' revolution ever happened, it happened in Poland. It was directed against a socialist state. It was carried out under the sign of the cross. And it won.

What Remains

Today, Solidarity is a trade union of modest size in a democratic Poland that is a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—outcomes that would have seemed like fantasy in 1980.

The union still maintains its headquarters in Gdańsk, where it all began. It still has a regional structure, though the membership numbers in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. It still endorses political candidates and advocates for workers' interests, though its positions would surprise many of its original members.

But Solidarity's greatest legacy lies not in its current activities. It lies in what it proved was possible.

An oppressed people, using nonviolent resistance, could force a totalitarian government to negotiate. A workers' movement, sustained by international support and philosophical commitment, could outlast martial law. A broad coalition of ordinary citizens—shipyard workers and intellectuals, Catholics and leftists, nationalists and liberals—could unite long enough to change history.

The Soviet empire seemed invincible until it wasn't. Solidarity helped reveal that the empire's foundations were rotting—that the system built on the premise of representing workers couldn't survive actual workers' organization.

It started with a fired crane operator and a struck match of outrage. It ended with the map of Europe redrawn.

That is the story of Solidarity: how a shipyard strike became a revolution, and how a word meaning "standing together" became a synonym for the end of an era.