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SOLIDARNOSC:
The Solidarity Decade
During the ten years which separated the summer of 1980 from the autumn of
1990, Poland experienced a political roller-coaster ride, such as few countries have
ever endured. At the start of the decade, she was still in the grip of the Communist
dictatorship and the Soviet Bloc. At the end, she was a free nation. There were
three distinct phases. In 1980-1, the independent Solidarity Movement - the only
independent organization of its kind in the history of the Soviet Bloc - mounted an
unprecedented challenge to the ruling Party's monopoly. In 1981-3, the military
element within the Communist system launched a violent counter-attack, intro-
ducing martial law, suppressing all overt Solidarity activities and desperately try-
ing to impress its Soviet masters. From 1983-90, the military leaders failed in all
their attempts to restore a viable Communist order, eventually choosing to rein-
state Solidarity and to aim for stability through partnership. The outcome was the
opposite of that intended. The Communist system collapsed.
Although some sort of major crisis in Poland had been long predicted, no one
foresaw the exact course which events would take. Few people guessed that the
political initiative would not be seized by the Church, by disgruntled reformers
in the Party, or by dissident intellectuals, but by the Polish working class and by
a completely new crop of proletarian activists. Few commentators would have
banked on an orderly confrontation between a mass opposition and the state
security apparatus. Indeed, until an obscure body calling for independent trades
unions surfaced in the early summer of 1980, no one in the wider world had ever
heard of it. When interviewed in June, the prime mover of this 'discussion
group', an unemployed electrician from Gdansk, had no idea when it might pro-
duce concrete results. All he knew, just a few weeks before the eruption, was
that the cause was worth striving for.
The resultant Solidarity Movement emerged in July - August 1980 from the con-
junction of the old dissident groups with a new and much more widespread deter-
mination to resist. Polish society, which had remained fractured throughout the
1970s, now assumed an overwhelming sense of common purpose. Workers and
intellectuals joined hands; and an important section of grass-root Communists
would openly join their demands. The starting-point, as four years earlier, was an
arbitrary rise in food prices. A rash of strikes broke out in factories all over the
country, first in Lublin and then in almost every town and city. And strikes were
illegal. The official Trades Unions, which were designed to enforce the policy of the