Some of the halls were made of brick, lit from above by iron-framed windows dating back to the times of the German Schichau-Werke shipyard in the Free City of Danzig. Others, built later, after the war, were made of concrete. In the interiors of these enormous halls, workers were busy at work with their machines. Crowds of people streamed into the buildings in the morning. The Gdańsk Shipyard was like a city, with several thousand workers, foremen, engineers and clerks inhabiting it. It took some twenty minutes to walk from the historic Gate No. 2, where shots were fired at strikers in December 1970, to the most distant hall on Holm Island.
I wandered around this vast area in the company of shipyard workers who, at my request, recalled its former topography from memory. They showed me where the hull departments (these were in the largest halls), engine departments and equipment departments were once located. Not far from the third gate, the one closest to the Tri-City Electric Railway station, was the Construction Office. The engineers there wore white aprons, while the workers wore grey-blue overalls: it was easy to tell who was who. You could see the shipyard’s concert hall from the windows of passing trains. Overhead were huge cranes, constantly in motion, as ubiquitous seagulls circled.
Between the buildings were tidy avenues, along which the trees, bushes and grass were well maintained. Flowers had been planted to make sitting in the sun during breaks from work more pleasant. ‘Please don’t forget,’ one former shipyard engineer appealed for people to remember that, ‘the shipyard produced not only heroes, but ships as well. Along the long canal that divided the shipyard in half, ship hulls were lined up, one after another. You could cross over from one to the next without touching land.’
The medical clinic and canteen were located right next to Gate No. 2, and a few hundred metres further on was the small OHS building with a radio telephone-equipped conference room and the management’s impressive offices. A large square surrounded by trees stretched between these buildings. For more than two weeks during the Great Strike of August 1980, this was the main stage for the historical drama that played out in Poland that summer.
‘No one can be free except among their peers,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in On Revolution. ‘The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom and equality in Greek political thought was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together – the agora, the market-place, or the polis, that is, the political space proper.’1 The shipyard square, and later the OHS hall, became an agora of freedom and equality, filled with hundreds of strikers and people supporting them, people who were arriving in ever greater numbers from all over Poland. This site was in the media spotlight throughout the democratic world, due to which –ironically – other strikes, including a major protest taking place simultaneously in Szczecin, were non-existent in the mass imagination. As the people in the shipyard came to know one another, they shared their experiences, built new ties in the shipyard’s agora, and unleashed the energy that gave birth to a great social movement, which almost from the day of its birth, has fascinated researchers all over the world – as has the question of whether the strike was the beginning of a revolution, as Jadwiga Staniszkis called it, a ‘self-limiting’ revolution.2 Regardless of how these events are defined, the constitutive feature that gave a historical dimension to them was, as Hannah Arendt noted, the human ability to start things anew.3 And the Great Strike, centred in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and which ended with the signing of an agreement with the authorities, initiated a change – it changed Poles and the course of Polish history in a way and at a pace that nobody could have imagined.
Every event begins ‘somewhere’, and this revolutionary geyser had many sources. This story, like almost any major event, must by definition be multithreaded and include many protagonists. This was also the case here. In this book, I look for an answer to the question of why the strike broke out with such force in the Tri-city, and how it transformed its participants; first the inhabitants of the Coast, and later, people throughout the country. Could the strikers who forced those in power to sign an agreement feel they had achieve a real victory? Did the authorities, who had to accept the conditions dictated by the strikers, expect the changes that ensued? I deliberately avoid using the word ‘workers’ here because behind the strike stood all those who wanted change.
The square stretching between the management building, the OHS hall and the historic Gate No. 2 no longer exists. Nor does the shipyard itself, which can be seen in the background in photographs documenting the Great Strike of August 1980. In 2015, the space where this former agora was situated was dissected by an asphalt road, and all that remains of the shipyard today are a few lofty, idled cranes and abandoned factory halls. While the topography of this place has changed and will continue to change, still remaining is the memory – ‘of those days full of hope / Full of talk and heated disputes / Of those nights poorly slept / Our hearts beating strongly.’4
***
Many studies have attempted to explain the phenomenon of the social rebellion from which the Solidarity movement sprang. However, the first to embark on a major research project dedicated to it and write a book about it was Alain Touraine (Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980‒1981, 1983). Jadwiga Staniszkis (Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, 1983) drew attention to the fact that in the summer of 1980 those who were leading the strike and playing a game of poker with the authorities opened with a list of ‘self-limiting’ demands. Krzysztof Nowak (‘Działania społeczne i problem prawomocności ładu społecznego. Trzy modele kryzysu legitymizacyjnego,’ 1988) analysed the mutual relations between the strikers and the political authorities, which, according to him, left the government stronger after the strikes in 1970, but weakened it in 1980. An analysis of Solidarity and its relation to new social movements in Poland was conducted by David S. Mason (Solidarity as a New Social Movement, 1989). Roman Laba (The Roots of Solidarity. A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization, 1991) observed that the idea of forming free trade unions, although promoted by the democratic opposition, emerged from workers’ experiences of the events of December 1970. Lawrence Goodwyn (Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, 1991) showed Solidarity as the culmination of efforts by workers since 1956 to self-organise and secure rights to which they were legally entitled. Ireneusz Krzemiński (Solidarność. Niespełniony projekt polskiej demokracji, 1997) considered the significance of several factors in the formation of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union ‘Solidarity’ (NSZZ ‘Solidarność’) as a social movement, including those related to professional issues and generational change, as well as Polish traditions concerning contestation (opposition) and religious devotion (the papal pilgrimage in 1979 and the activities of the Catholic Church). Maryjane Osa (Solidarity and Contention. Networks of Polish Opposition, 2003) similarly analysed the cultural roots of Poles’ attitudes towards oppositional activity and the role of national traditions and institutions, including the Catholic Church, in shaping these attitudes. In a recent work in Polish (Anatomia rewolucji. Narodziny ruchu społecznego Solidarność w 1980 roku, 2017), Tomasz Kozłowski reconstructs the development of social networks and the flow of information within the Solidarity movement.
Among the many studies by historians who have researched the history of Solidarity, the most important include the first monographs dedicated to the labour union, Jerzy Holzer’s Solidarność 1980–1981. Geneza i historia (1983) and Andrzej Friszke’s Rewolucja Solidarności 1980‒1981 (2014). Also important in my opinion was Marcin Zaremba’s article analysing the socio-economic crisis in Poland at the end of the Gierek decade (‘Zimno, ciepło, gorąco … Nastroje Polaków od “zimy stulecia” do lata 1980’ in ‘Solidarność’ od wewnątrz 1980–1981, 2013). While working on this book, I made use of dozens of detailed studies and published documents and memoirs on the activities of the democratic opposition and the course of the strike in the Tri-city, a full list of which can be found in the bibliography.
Here I would like to mention just a few of them. A journalistic portrait by Wojciech Giełżyński and Lech Stefański titled Gdańsk. Sierpień 80 (1981) was written in the autumn of 1980 in the immediate aftermath of the strike, based on first-hand accounts of the Gdańsk strike and accounts of the events from the perspective of both the strikers and the authorities. The book Kto tu wpuścił dziennikarzy (1982), edited by Marek Miller, contains recollections compiled in 1980‒1981 by several dozen Polish journalists who were in the Tri-city in August 1980. The collection Sierpień ’80 we wspomnieniach (1991), edited by Marek Latoszek, contains accounts of the events on the Coast written by various participants and observers of the strike in response to an appeal in November 1980 by the Gdańsk Branch of the Polish Sociological Association. Another important source was Janina Jankowska’s interviews with the founders of Solidarity, conducted in the 1980s and published in the book Portrety niedokończone (2003). I also used the published memoirs of, among others, Lech Wałęsa, Anna Walentynowicz, Joanna and Andrzej Gwiazda and Bogdan Borusewicz. Their titles are given in the bibliography. Two collections of documents contained much valuable information: Gdańsk. Rozmowy (produced on the basis of tape-recorded conversations that took place in the OHS hall during the strike) and Zapis wydarzeń. Gdańsk–Sierpień 1980. Dokumenty (1999), compiled and edited by Andrzej Drzycimski and Tadeusz Skutnik.
In the book I have tried to use the findings of other researchers and integrate them into a broad source base, generally limited territorially to the Tri-city, though sometimes incorporating the whole of what was then the Gdańsk Voivodship. In my attempt to put together a detailed picture of the Great Strike of 1980, I have borne in mind existing theoretical works on social movements and historical works.
In constructing a social image of the Tri-city, where a (yet another) widescale rebellion against communist power was in progress, theories of mass movements provided a useful tool. First of all, I bore in mind the conditions for their formation, as described by Neil Smelser (Theory of Collective Behavior, 1965). The first of these is a context favourable to the formation of social movements (for example, a tradition of protest passed down through the generations), as well as uncertainty about the future of society, the opacity of its functioning, and a disruption of a society’s system of norms and values – for example, progress followed by economic crisis (in Émile Durkheim’s terminology: social anomie). A condition for the emergence of ‘structural strain’ (for example, divergences between economic interests and the chances of satisfying one’s basic material needs, and divisions between the underprivileged and privileged classes, the elites and the masses, social strata, occupational groups, generations, etc.). According to Smelser, a divergence of interests or values must be perceived, defined, interpreted and emotionally experienced. As a backdrop to many social movements, we find three characteristic experiences: of inequality, of injustice and of deprivation. Why am I worse off than others? – here a helpful means of clarification is the curve used by James C. Davies (Toward a Theory of Revolution, 1962) to show how aspirations and opportunities rise over time, until at some point there is a sudden divergence in the lines. Aspirations continue to rise but capabilities do not, or aspirations rise faster than capabilities. This is when relative deprivation occurs – the achievement curve diverges from the aspiration curve. Going back to Smelser, another condition is the occurrence of an initiating event (like the protest of Rosa Parks, an African-American human rights activist and resident of Montgomery, Alabama, who in 1955 refused, as an act of civil disobedience, to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and was arrested for violating racial segregation laws).
Another important point of reference for my deliberations was the theoretical factors that foster the emergence of a protest leader. The need for a leader to emerge underscores the strength and significance of a social movement, strengthening it, stabilising it, and raising its status. The conditions under which a group of people surrenders to the authority of a leader have been described by many sociologists and social psychologists. I draw in particular on the works of Robert K. Merton, best known for his Sociological Theory and Social Structure (1949) and Bogdan Wojciszke’s Psychologia społeczna (2011). Certain aspects of my story of the August strike were inspired by remarks made by Elżbieta Kaczyńska in her article on mass social movements at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the mutual influence of the masses and political organisations (Organizacja i ruch masowy – doświadczenia historyczne, 2000). In her book she wrote: ‘Strikes became more frequent, more people took part in them, and the first solidarity strike was organised. When a major spontaneous strike broke out in Warsaw in 1899, “To our surprise, it turned out that agitating for socialism, that is, [socialism] in the tradition of the PPS [Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or Polish Socialist Party in English – A.M.], had become commonplace in Warsaw, and that we are now standing on the threshold of a serious workers’ movement, demanded by the politics of the day – real demands made in the name of independence slogans being proclaimed” […]. This statement is extremely important: the parties had achieved propaganda successes; they had spread radical slogans and a specific way of thinking, but were not prepared to take action now.’ I saw in this a means for tracing social mechanisms from within a historical perspective encompassing a full century. Another inspiration was the works of sociologists who analysed the state of consciousness of Poles before and just after the Great Strike, as well as the phenomenon of the ‘civic’ movement initiated in August 1980. Of the pre-August works available, Tadeusz Szawiel’s ‘Struktura społeczna i postawy a grupy ethosowe,’ first published in December 1978, was important for me; it discussed the formative shape of the opposition groups fighting against the communist system in Poland. Also important were Father Józef Tischner’s text ‘Ludzie z kryjówek’, written in 1978, to which the author himself referred in his famous sermon delivered at Wawel in October 1980, after the creation of NSZZ ‘Solidarność’, and Stefan Nowak’s essay ‘System wartości społeczeństwa polskiego’, written in 1979. Two works by Marek Latoszek, based on surveys conducted by Gdańsk sociologists long before the August strikes, were also very helpful: ‘Socjalizacja w rodzinie robotniczej na przykładzie badań nad rodzinami robotników Stoczni Gdańskiej im. Lenina’ (1978) and ‘Więzi i przejawy integracji w grupach i zbiorowościach społeczeństwa gdańskiego pod koniec lat siedemdziesiątych’ (1987).
Shortly after the strike, a report entitled ‘Polacy ‘80” was written by a team led by Mirosława Marody, from which I drew, in particular, information on the relations between particular professional groups in Polish industrial plants. Ireneusz Krzemiński’s ‘System społeczny epoki gierkowskiej’ (1984) and Piotr Marciniak’s ‘Horyzont programowy strajków 1980 r.’ (1989) were both very helpful, as well. Numerous other sociological works are listed in the bibliography.
***
The main resource base for the book was archival materials. In reconstructing the activities of the ruling elite and the relations between the local and central centres of power, both throughout the 1970s and during the strike, I made use of party documents stored at the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw (materials from the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party [KC PZPR]) and at the State Archive in Gdańsk (from the Voivodship Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party [KW PZPR], as well as the archives of party organisations within individual enterprises and institutions). In reconstructing the social portrait of the Tri-city during the Gierek decade, party materials from both Warsaw and Gdańsk were useful, as were documents from the Municipal and Voivodship National Council and the Gdańsk Shipyard (including data on employment and wage dynamics) stored in the State Archive in Gdańsk. I also made use of the personal archives of Lech Bądkowski and Zbigniew Gach – two important participants in Gdańsk’s social life and the August strike – held at the Polish Academy of Sciences Library in Gdańsk. The Institute of Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences holds documentation remaining from a research project on lifestyles carried out in the 1970s under the direction of Professor Andrzej Siciński, including those of Tri-city residents. Reports from the Public Opinion Research Centre [OBOP], now available on its website, and the results of research carried out among workers and engineers by a sociological laboratory operating at the Gdańsk Shipyard (held in the KC PZPR archive in Gdańsk) were very useful in describing social moods. These were reported on, albeit incompletely and in a veiled manner, by the official press in the Tri-city, especially by the Gdańsk weekly Czas. Unfortunately, despite my best attempts, I was unable to access the Diocesan Archives in Gdańsk, so in sections concerning the role of the Church in the events described, I was forced to rely on published documents, memoirs and materials from the Department for Religious Affairs at the Voivodship National Council in Gdańsk.
A significant portion of the documents used in the book comes from the Archives of the Institute of National Remembrance branches in Warsaw and Gdańsk. Analyses produced by Department III (which dealt with the opposition) and Department IIIA (which monitored industrial enterprises), the reports of Security Service [SB] functionaries from the Gdańsk voivodship, the reports of secret collaborators, and intercepted letters were rich sources for studying social moods, the activities of the opposition, and people’s attitudes to the strike.
Transcripts of broadcasts from the Polish section of Radio Free Europe, presently stored in the National Digital Archive in Warsaw, and recordings from the KARTA Centre’s Oral History Archive and the History Meeting House, as well as documents from the Archives of the National Commission of the Solidarity Trade Union and the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk, proved useful in researching various aspects of the Tri-city strikes. In the Polish Naval Archive in Gdynia, I found fragmentary materials documenting the activity of the Naval Border Squadron during the strike. To supplement my knowledge of the American reaction to the Gdańsk strike, I found fruitful my search in the National Security Archive in Washington DC, which holds a collection of dispatches to the State Department from the embassies in Warsaw, Prague and Berlin, including those from August 1980, and comparing them with documents held in the archives of the Polish Foreign Ministry. In the book, I also made use of unpublished diaries submitted for a competition organised by the Paris-based Kultura in 1983.
Another important source used extensively in the present work are the accounts of participants and supporters of the strike, as well as those of people in power, recorded by the European Solidarity Centre between 2006 and 2010, as well as several dozen accounts from people who worked in various enterprises in Gdańsk, pre-August opposition activists, and participants in the August strike, which I personally collected between 2013 and 2015. When used by a historian, this last type of historical source requires a good dose of caution. Such sources are valuable because they provide researchers of recent history with a unique opportunity to confront existing documents with the memory of living participants in the events. He or she thus has the opportunity to pose questions which have not previously been posed. Such sources must, however, be subjected to critical analysis consistent with the demands of academic research, the basic principles of which include scepticism and the need to verify all information obtained by comparing it with other materials. In the case of oral history, the historian must also contend with the memory of his or her interviewees, which has been shaped by later experiences, the books they have read, and their emotional ties to the subject. However, inquisitiveness is always rewarded by a broadening of the research perspective and, above all, by allowing one to get to know better the protagonists of the events described.
***
This book consists of two parts. The starting point for both was the question: Why Gdańsk – why the Tri-city? I tried to capture the specificity of the place where the story took place, and to show what processes and events caused a rebellion to erupt on such a wide scale. Therefore, the first part of the book represents an attempt to create a social portrait of the port city in the 1970s and to search for the sources of the crisis. I was inspired to take such an approach by a careful reading of the hundreds of demands that striking enterprises made between 14 and 16 August 1980, which are stored in the National Archive in Gdańsk. It was these documents that provided the best portrait of the Gdańsk opposition.
The second part of the work is an analysis of the strike itself, with the first chapter attempting to identify features of the earlier protest in the Lubelskie region, which later helps in understanding the success of the protests on the Coast. In the chapters that follow. I describe the course of the strikes in the Tri-city and the negotiations with the authorities, as well as analyse this socio-political phenomenon from various perspectives: those of the strikers themselves and their leaders, those of the inhabitants of the city and the region, and those of the opposition, the authorities, and the Church. I also look at the international perspective, as well as those of the media, politicians and ordinary people.
In the first part, I present a social portrait of the Tri-city, searching for an answer to the question of what made this region so different from the rest of Poland. To do so, I first attempt to reconstruct the mood after the war and social expectations towards the authorities, as evidenced by, among other things, the protests and strikes in 1971. Slogans about economic development and improvements in the quality of life in the Tri-city found their expression in both propaganda and in real life. In the first half of the 1970s there was an increase in both investment in the shipbuilding industry and employment, and modernisation of the shipyards. In the mid-1970s, an economic crisis spread to the city, and throughout the country, leading the social mood to sour, as shown by OBOP’s (then secret) sociological surveys. I address the issue of whether the crisis on the Coast had its own specific features and characteristics, what the dynamics of social change in the Tri-city looked like, and what the scope and directions of migration and changes in the demographic structure were. How did intensive industrial development and the migration of young people affect living conditions and the social mood? To what extent were they determined by the specificity of the port city and the types of available employment, which were a source of greater social inequality and diversified access to attractive consumer goods than elsewhere? To what extent did this affect the aspirations of other inhabitants, was this a source of relative deprivation, and who was actually affected by this?
An important issue in terms of understanding the genesis of the social rebellion that took place in August 1980 is obtaining a clear picture of what workers’ lives looked like at work, at home, and among friends in the 1970s. Such a picture has been pieced together in this book using a variety of available sources to answer such questions as: what was the distribution of wages among workers of different ages and with different levels of seniority? What consequences did this have in terms of people’s aspirations and their assessment of their perspectives? How did working conditions and the level of wealth change over time, and how did these factors affect people’s attitudes and lead to grievances against and criticism of the authorities? The August protests affected every professional group, so in this book as a representative example I reconstruct an image of the engineer, who in the Gierek era symbolised modernity, change and progress. I make an analytical comparison between an engineer’s aspirations and the reality he faced, in an effort to determine, based on sociological studies of the engineers at the Gdańsk shipyard, whether their career prospects were good or whether they had reason to feel frustrated and disappointed. Another group, the academic intelligentsia, was heavily involved in supporting the strike. I attempt to depict their attitudes and actions based on the example of the engagement of students and employees of Tri-city universities in the activities of official organisations and the democratic opposition. I analyse the factors which contributed to a feeling of relative deprivation among workers of state-owned enterprises, especially shipyards, on the basis of sociological research carried out in the 1970s and documents showing people’s attitudes and moods during that decade. This is accompanied by an overview of the economic landscape (an economic and financial crisis and a crisis of management), the demographic landscape, a growing lack of social trust, and perceptions of a decline in social norms (as expressed in letters to the Voivodship Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party and in sociological surveys).
Supplementing this portrait of society at large are efforts to describe the role of the Catholic Church within Tri-city society, to show the Church’s response to the post-December repressions, and to examine the impact of the papal pilgrimage in June 1979 on the agglomeration’s residents.
Analysing the causes of the social rebellion in the Tri-city required a detailed characterisation of the ‘opponent’, i.e. the local authorities. To this end, I sought to determine whether the First secretary of the PZPR Voivodship Committee in Gdańsk, Tadeusz Fiszbach, and his co-workers, who were part of Gierek’s technocratic team, attempted to implement their own diagnosis in relation to the impending crisis. Did they have data, and if so, how much, that could have proved helpful in gauging people’s true sentiments?
In the second chapter of the first part of the book, I sketch out a portrait of the Gdańsk opposition, showing its roots going back to March ‘68 and December ‘70, and the ideological foundations of its two main pillars – the Free Trade Unions and the Young Poland Movement – after which I attempt to determine the scale of the opposition’s impact. To do so I look at the leaders of both factions, and their disputes with the authorities. I also examined their contacts with other domestic opposition circles (on the basis of existing literature and my own research), as well as the extent to which the opposition in Gdańsk was self-generated, rather than being a local manifestation of national initiatives.
Along with my attempt to show the specificity of the Gdańsk opposition, which despite its diversity, was bound by an esprit de corps and self-identification through participation in joint action, I consider what factors strengthened this community, which had arisen from a variety of different milieux. I also show how the memory of December 1970 was cultivated among workers over the course of the decade, and ultimately rejuvenated by the opposition in the late 1970s. Could we say this memory was the result of – to use a now fashionable term – the ‘historical politics’ employed by the opposition?
In reconstructing the actions of the opposition and how they were perceived by various social groups in the Tri-city, I look at the motivations of the people who chose to support it and the point at which the opposition’s activities gained wider social support.
An important point of reference in the book is the assessments made of opposition groups’ activities by the political authorities and the Security Service (SB). While the latter was in theory supposed to perform merely a service function, through its reports, it had a very real impact on how the opposition was perceived by the authorities and in official propaganda. I therefore attempt to show to what extent the opposition was assessed as a real threat and the scale of the repressive actions taken against its activists by the secret police.
In the second part of the book, which deals with the events of the summer of 1980, I present the process of social rebellion initiated by a small group of relatively unknown people, which ultimately grew into a mass protest. I try to explain how the expectations and slogans of those involved moved from being economic and grievance-based to political and civically-engaged. I also consider the extent to which the formulation of these slogans and demands were carefully considered, and to what extent they reflected ad hoc decisions made in the heat of the moment. Another issue addressed is how this spontaneous protest, which quickly spread to enterprises throughout the Tri-city, was subordinated to a uniform leadership, and transformed into a social movement led by a distinctive leader, whose position was strengthened by those who supported him and the authority they themselves possessed. How did the leader of this movement achieve his position and what was his success based on? The strength of the Inter-enterprise Strike Committee was in part a function of the weakness of the party and the state authorities, so it was important to identify the sources of the authorities’ weakness, and the strategy and tactics they employed during the negotiations, up to (and even after) the moment when the agreement was signed.
A prelude to these considerations and a point of reference were strikes that broke out in July 1980, especially those in the Lublin area. According to theories of social rebellions, an explosion occurs when people finally start to say out loud things like ‘enough is enough,’ ‘this cannot go on,’ ‘I can’t stand by passively,’ ‘I can’t stand it any longer’ and ‘something must be done about it.’ In Gdańsk, one such place for expressing opinions was rallies and demonstrations, which in the previous year had assumed a mass character at least twice – in December 1979 and in May 1980. Another would have been the meetings held before the Party Congress in February. In a report from such a meeting at the Paris Commune Shipyard in Gdynia, I found statements made about rampant waste and dishonesty, and questions raised about the formation of free trade unions. However, the first time a mass social protest grew into a paralysing strike was in the Lublin region, not on the Coast. I looked for reasons why a strike broke out there, how it was silenced relatively quickly, and what conclusions the authorities and the democratic opposition drew from these events.
Another source of information on public opinion was the independent mass media and its reporting on the strikes. The protests in Lublin and elsewhere in Poland were covered by Radio Free Europe and written about in the underground opposition press. The event that initially sparked this interest was the sacking of Anna Walentynowicz in mid-August, after which she became a kind of Polish Rosa Parks. Why did people identify with her story, and what was the reason for people’s joining the ensuing protest en masse? What were the aims of those who initiated this protest, and what role was played by the veterans of previous strikes?
The strike was launched in defence of a hitherto almost unknown woman, so it is important to enquire into the reasons and mechanisms behind the spread of the protest, including the importance of the economic demands that were made. In the present book I have analysed both the demands of individual workplaces and the means by which they communicated among themselves. I ask: Who were the strikers? What did it mean for the success of the strike that it was joined by technicians, engineers and administrative workers, that apart from involving large enterprises, it drew support from smaller workplaces employing just a few dozen people, some dominated by men, others strongly feminised? Finally, what was the role of the Gdańsk opposition in sustaining the strike and building a community of strikers?
The strength of the social rebellion was also the product of a misdiagnosis of the situation in its first phase by both the local and central authorities, and the fear of a repetition of the tragic events of 1970, which were traumatic for both sides. The authorities agreed to enter into negotiations almost from the beginning, though they misjudged the strength of the protest and the reasons behind it. This is why the end of the strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard on 16 August 1980 turned out to be a different kind of breakthrough than those in power had assumed ‒ the protest did not end, it grew more intense. It is therefore legitimate to ask at this point about the role of the opposition and the significance of the authorities’ decision to delay negotiations with smaller workplaces.
The formation of the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee and the announcement of the 21 demands increased the strikers’ sense of strength, unity and organisational efficiency. For this reason it is necessary to look at how the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee in Gdańsk functioned, how information was exchanged within it, and the extent to which the leadership of the strike movement was united. Efforts to building a community of strikers sparked self-organisation work throughout the city and voivodship, in which hundreds of work establishments took part, greatly strengthening the position of the MKS. This social movement, with its slogans of renewal, attracted even frustrated lower-level members of the party apparatus, and thereby initiated an erosion of support within the ruling camp, although it also strengthened fears and anxieties about being held accountable by those in the higher echelons. A positive social climate was created around the MKS and the strikers themselves, despite initial hesitations and doubts about the sense of the protest. A sense of community, weakened in the PRL’s atomised, anonymous society, was being revived. I try to show how the strike influenced people’s emotions, and to what extent it became a lesson in civics, leading people to clarify or radicalise their expectations towards the authorities.
An invaluable role in this process was played by people experienced in opposition activity, who took on the burden of passing on information. I therefore show how underground printing work was organised and how the printed materials (bibuła) were distributed, and analyse the content of the strikers’ leaflets and the Strike News Bulletin, as well as the mechanism for passing news on to Radio Free Europe, whose broadcasts were an important unifying force within the emerging community of strikers.
In my portrait of this social movement, the mechanisms that led to the emergence of Lech Wałęsa as the strike’s leader seemed particularly important. Wałęsa’s charisma was already apparent during the first hours of the strike – he was able to control the crowd, and people willingly listened to him, but his assuming a leadership position was a longer process. According to theories of social psychology, a leader’s strength lies in his ability to delegate matters, and in line with this principle, I have tried to analyse the extent to which the various participants in the negotiations contributed to working out the final agreement. No less important to the strike’s success than its leadership was the social milieu and sense of community in and around the shipyard, and I have therefore depicted this at various levels –including material and financial support, cultural activities and the organisation of everyday life ‒ which I have shown using as examples several striking workplaces that belonged to the MKS.
The last chapter of the second part of the book is devoted mainly to the strikers’ negotiations with representatives of the authorities in Gdańsk. I show how three decision-making circles interacted: the local authorities, the government commission, and the central authorities. I also examine the mechanisms by which the decision to enter into negotiations was made on both sides, the course they then followed, and finally, the circumstances under which consent was given to sign the agreement. Also important here was the importance of the people leading the negotiations and making the decisions, the role of the party apparatus, and the divisions that arose within it. I present a description and analysis of the activities of the security services and how they related to the decisions of the central authorities.
The attitude of the authorities was Hamlet-like, with key decisions being prolonged sometimes indefinitely. On the one hand, the ruling elite was happy that the workers had closed themselves off in the shipyard, avoiding the danger of the protest spilling out onto the streets; on the other hand, they were terrified by the efficiency and solidarity of the movement, and thus tried to break it up. They launched an information and propaganda war in which they tried to disgrace the opposition and prepare the ground for the arrest of its activists. A special role in the authorities’ tactics was played by the Catholic Church, few of whose representatives participated in the conflict on the side of the strikers. An important thread in this regard was the government’s efforts to make use of the authority of Primate Wyszyński, and his response to these efforts.
In analysing the authorities’ decision to sign the agreement, it is important to look at how the international context affected the conflict in Poland, in particular, the position of Moscow, but also, though to a lesser extent, that of France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States. In the latter case, the fact that the strike in Gdańsk was on the front pages of newspapers and TV stations all around the democratic world seems to have played a significant role.
The strike was ultimately successful due to all of the above-mentioned factors, but the most important seems to me to be the successful cooperation between those who participated in talks with the authorities on behalf of the MKS. The strikers’ negotiating team included people reflecting a wide spectrum in terms of age, gender, knowledge, experience and education. Despite the differences between them, one common goal remained the most important: negotiating an agreement that would guarantee the establishment of an organisation independent of the authorities, and bringing together people with worldviews and political beliefs. The rest was in the hands of those who had taken part in the social rebellion and woke up in a different world the day after the agreement was signed.
***
This book was made possible through support from the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk and the City of Gdańśk. The ESC financed the research connected with the preparation of the book, while the City of Gdańsk financed the cost of its translation into English. I would like to express my sincere thanks to both.
While working on the book I benefited from the advice of many people and twice had the opportunity to present sections of it at a wider forum – as part of Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski’s modern history seminar at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and at a seminar organised by the ‘Solidarność’ research group at Collegium Civitas, titled ‘New approaches to the analysis of a social movement.’ The suggestions and comments I received there proved most inspiring, and I have tried to incorporate them. Above all, however, I would like to thank Prof. Andrzej Friszke for his comments and advice.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York 1990, p 31.
Jadwiga Staniszkis first used this term in an interview with Magdalena Wojciechowska, ‘Samoograniczająca się rewolucja’, Kultura (Warszawa) 22 March 1981.
Hannah Arendt, op. cit., p. 223.
‘Piosenka dla córki’, Punkt. Almanach Gdańskich Środowisk Twórczych 1980, no. 12, p. 175.