THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 483ruling Party, lost all control. The workers were not just demanding pay rises in line
with the cost of living. They wanted redress for all manner of neglected grievances.
As the pressure mounted, the Party adopted a strategy of dealing with the strikes on
a piecemeal basis. It very nearly worked. Local officials bought off the strikers with
a varying mixture of money, promises and threats. Their orders were to minimize
confrontation, and at all costs to prevent the coalescence of local strikes into a
nationwide operation of defiance. They had almost succeeded. They had not
counted on the inspirational and negotiational abilities of one extraordinary man.
Lech Walesa (b. 1943) had been in jail, it was said, a hundred times. He was
that simple electrician from the Lenin Shipyards at Gdansk; and he had been
repeatedly and ineffectively disciplined for his refusal to toe the Communist
management's line. He was a loyal Catholic: the father of seven children; and a
member of an underground workers' group devoted to the memory of their fel-
low protesters killed by the security forces ten years before. Above all, he
belonged to the class and generation most fervently devoted to the non-yielding
but non-violent philosophy of the new Pope. When the strike started in the
Lenin Shipyard, the dismissed Waif sa was not even present. But he soon made
his famous jump over the back wall, and took over as chairman of the strike
committee. The scene was unprecedented. Almost 2.0,000 strikers were barri-
caded inside their place of work/Thousands of well-wishers outside the gates
festooned them with flowers and icons. A priest was let in to hear the men's con-
fessions and to celebrate workplace mass - a novelty for the Soviet Bloc. And
educated advisers arrived. And the world media waited, sensing the brink of a
revolution. Walesa's team reached agreement on all the purely local issues, but
in the critical days refused to call off the strike until all other strikes had been
satisfactorily resolved. Hence the name 'Solidarity', and the accompanying
demand for an independent, self-governing trades union to which any Polish
worker could adhere. The local strike committee in Gdansk was expanded and
renamed as the wider Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS).
The summer crisis had developed with dizzy acceleration. At first, the rash of
scattered strikes looked as if they were heading in the same direction as their
predecessors in 1970 and 1976. But in due course it became clear that this time
round the workers were not prepared to be fobbed off. When Walesa's strikers
in Gdansk rejected a favourable settlement of their own claims on the grounds
that they would be betraying their fellow strikers elsewhere, the moment of
truth had arrived. The realization suddenly dawned that the ruling Party's
monopoly was under siege from concerted action across the country. The hearts
of all dedicated Communists sank when they saw the slogan; WORKERS OF
ALL ENTERPRISES—UNITE!
No Communist Party had ever conceded the principle that workers could run
their own affairs. Experiments in so-called 'Workers Self-Government' which
were undertaken in Yugoslavia and briefly in Poland after 1956 never shook off
Party control. Whilst claiming to uphold the 'dictatorship of the Proletariat', the
Soviet Bloc operated on the basis of the Party elite giving orders to the workers