The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 645Poland witnessed the most successful challenge to
Communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe. The Poles
had resisted in 1956; worker protests in Poznan led to
more than one hundred killings. Food riots were put
down in 1970 and new strikes were suppressed in 1976,
yet Poland still became the home of sustained protests
in the 1980s. Rising food prices in 1980 led workers in
Gdansk to strike. The movement spread among Polish
industries, building a network of unions known as the
Solidarity movement (Solidarnosc). Solidarity was the
first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, and it
grew to ten million members. Under the leadership of
Lech Walesa, a Gdansk shipyard electrician (see illus-
tration 32.3), Solidarity strikers issued a dramatic list of
demands (see document 32.2) and won changes in the
government, increased wages, and most of their de-
mands. Within a few months, however, a military gov-
ernment took power and banned the union.
The USSR warned Poland in 1981 to crack down
on counterrevolution, and Poland was put under martial
law with civil liberties suspended. Troops fired on strik-
ers, killing seven. Walesa and thousands of strikers were
imprisoned. Walesa won international support, how-
ever, including a Nobel Peace Prize (1983). The elec-
tion of a Polish-born pope who supported Solidarity—
John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years—
greatly strengthened the movement. Poland had re-
mained strongly Catholic during the Communist
regime, and Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to Poland had
strengthened the will to resist the government. In part
because NATO governments warned the Soviet Union
that intervention in Poland under the Brezhnev Doc-
trine would end détente, the movement survived in a
delicate compromise with the Communist regime dur-
ing the 1980s.
The Soviet Union of the post-Stalin era had its
own dissident movement. Khrushchev’s destalinization
allowed enough freedom for dissident writers to risk
criticism of the regime. In 1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn
was allowed to publish a novel entitled A Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovitch,which exposed conditions in the So-
viet gulag.Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of continuing censor-
ship led to the banning of his subsequent books, which
appeared in the West and circulated in the USSR in
samizdat(clandestinely printed) form. His Nobel Prize
in Literature (1970) gave Solzhenitsyn the stature to
publish a massive history of Stalin’s terror, The Gulag
Archipelago(1973–75), which led the frustrated Soviet
regime to deport him to the West. Other distinguished
dissidents included the physicist considered the father
of the Russian hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, who
championed international arms control and Soviet civil
rights so persistently that he won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1975.Illustration 32.3
The Solidarity Movement in
Poland.The founder and president of
the workers’ movement known as Soli-
darnosc(Solidarity), which played a ma-
jor role in the fall of the Communist
government in Poland, was a thirty-
seven-year-old electronics technician
and electrical worker at the state ship-
yards in Gdansk named Lech Walesa.
He expressed the grievances of ship-
builders so effectively that he became a
national symbol of Solidarity’s resistance
to the government. Here, Walesa ad-
dresses dockworkers in Gdansk in 1980;
three years later he won the Nobel Peace
Prize.