On 1 July 1980 the Polish government, without advance notice, announced that it had raised prices of food and other consumer goods. Meat prices were increased by as much as 60 to 90 percent. The next day, strikes for compensatory wage increases erupted throughout Poland. To Western observers these events appeared to put the Polish workers and ruling powers on the same kind of collision course they had gone through twice in the last decade.
In December 1970 a government-directed increase of more than 35 percent in staple food prices had been immediately followed by widespread worker protests. The regime's response at that time had been a crackdown by police and soldiers that resulted in the shooting of workers in front of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. The head of the Polish Communist Party (Polish United Workers Party-Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza or PZPR) who ordered the crackdown, Wladyslaw Gomulka, was replaced less than a week later by Edward Gierek. These events have been subsequently viewed as perhaps the most important precursor to the development of Solidarity.
In June 1976 unexpected food price hikes were again met with strikes that quickly spread across the country. Public demonstrations by workers included the burning of the Polish party headquarters in Radom, south of Warsaw. The breadth of opposition ultimately compelled the regime to back down from price hikes, but police and security forces imposed harsh retaliatory measures on the striking workers, particularly in Radom and at the Ursus tractor factory near Warsaw.
The violence experienced in these earlier episodes had a significant impact on the calculations and maneuvers of participants on all sides of the struggle. Labor groups began to seek greater coordination and centralization to strengthen their hand in confronting the party. A group of dissident intellectuals formed the Committee for Defense of Workers (KOR-Komitet Obrony Robotnikow) for the specific purpose of supporting the labor groups. It established an advisory channel on political strategy and tactics between the workers and intelligentsia that would prove to be influential in the development and shaping of Solidarity, and would ultimately include people who were members of Solidarity. Other groups that sprang up included the Movement in Defense of Human and Citizen Rights (ROPCiO-Ruch Obrony Praw Czlowieka i Obywatela), whose purpose was monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Final Act, and the Young Poland Movement (RMP-Ruch Mlodej Polski).
For senior Polish political and military officials the experiences of 1970 and 1976 presented a vivid demonstration of the volatility and potential costs of using force to bring popular uprisings under control. The perception of Polish attitudes toward the use of force would also become an important variable in the calculations of Western governments and the Soviet leadership.
The July 1980 announcement of price increases occurred when tensions between opposition groups and the government had already been festering. Two months earlier some members of the ROPCiO and RMP had been arrested. Their organizations responded with a campaign of leaflets demanding, among other things, recognition of the rights of Polish citizens, and a major economic reconfiguration aimed at ending price increases and inflation. Other groups such as the KOR threw their support to these demands. (One participant in these campaigns was an electrician named Lech Walesa, who had been fired from the Lenin Shipyard at Gdansk in 1976 for making a confrontational speech at a meeting there of the government sanctioned union. He would shortly begin a trek to an enduring place in the history of Poland.)
As the strikes were breaking out in July, the political evolution that had taken place in the labor movement quickly became evident when the KOR declared it would use its resources to keep the public informed on the progress of the strikes. This produced an alternate news service that would prove to be of considerable help to the strikers in countering regime efforts to splinter their unity by cutting separate deals with workers at different enterprises. It also helped keep the Western press informed of ongoing events.
In contrast to the swift imposition of force in 1970, this time the Polish authorities sought some degree of appeasement. They initially had some success, with strikers at individual enterprises agreeing to return to work after being offered wage hikes of 10 to 15 percent. But in what would be a continuing pattern, as soon as a strike at one factory was settled another began somewhere else. This contagion appears to have been at least partly the result of the KOR communication effort, with increasing numbers of workers resorting to strikes after learning that strikers elsewhere had obtained some concessions.
By mid-July the strikes had expanded to Lublin, the site in western Poland of a major junction of rail links between the Soviet Union and East Germany. The initial strike there was at a truck factory, where workers submitted some thirty-five demands to the government. Many of their demands involved issues beyond prices and wages, such as press freedom and curbs on privileges of security organizations. As soon as the Lublin truck workers strike was settled by offers of wage increases, the local railway workers launched a strike that shut down the rail lines. The prominence of this development was reflected in the fact that a deputy prime minister, Mieczyslaw Jagielski, was dispatched to negotiate a solution with the strikers.
On 20 July the U.S. Intelligence Community prepared an Alert Memorandum warning that the labor disputes in Poland could ultimately lead to military suppression. It said agreements that had appeared to settle some disputes were coming unglued, and the increased tensions throughout the country could degenerate into a violent confrontation between the workers and the regime. The Alert Memorandum said that while Soviet leaders would be reluctant to become directly involved in a military crackdown, Moscow would intervene as a last resort if the Polish leadership proved incapable of restoring order in a situation that appeared to be deteriorating into violent confrontation. The Memorandum also pointed out that no unusual activity had as yet been observed in Soviet military units based in or near Poland.
At about the same time that this intelligence assessment was being disseminated, a compromise settlement was being reached in the negotiations between Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski and the rail strikers at Lublin. The strikers agreed on 20 July to return to work. The Lublin strikes had lasted nine days, during four of which the entire town had been paralyzed.
Less than a month later, on 14 August, a strike began at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk-the site of the December 1970 tragedy. Until that day, the workers at this enterprise had not joined the widespread strikes in reaction to the July announcement of price hikes. The fuse that set them off was the firing of Anna Walentynowicz, a popular employee of long standing at the shipyard, on blatantly bogus charges in connection with her efforts to promote a memorial to the protesters killed in the strikes of 1970. The next two weeks would produce a fundamental evolution in the nature of the labor movement and popular opposition in Poland.
Solidarity Evolves as a Political Force
Many of the specific factors that shaped the developments at Gdansk in August 1980 were not clear at the time. Nonetheless, what did seem clear even then was that what was unfolding had the potential for becoming a historical watershed.
On the first day of the strike, Lech Walesa vaulted into a leading role in the events that were beginning to unfold. The preceding December he had made an impromptu appearance at a ceremony held at the Lenin Shipyard to commemorate the 1970 tragedy, delivering a speech that drew rousing applause from the crowd (and resulted in his dismissal from his latest job). On 14 August 1980 his timely intervention and delivery of another rousing speech was instrumental in causing a protest demonstration to quickly become an occupation of the factory.
Within a few days the confrontation took on a new dimension with the creation of an Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS-Miedzyakladadowy Komitet Strajkowy). This was composed of two representatives from each of the diverse striking enterprises in Gdansk and the nearby cities of Gdynia and Sopot. Its meeting site was a large hall at the Lenin Shipyard. On the weekend of 16-17 August, the MKS issued a communiqui describing its purpose as the coordination of the actions and demands of workers at all striking enterprises. The communiqui said that a common list of demands would be drawn up, and that all workers represented by the MKS would remain on strike until all demands on the list were settled.
By Monday morning, 18 August, the MKS had agreed upon and released a list of twenty-one demands. At the top of this list were:
Free trade unions that would be independent of the party and employers,
in accordance with the Convention of the International Labor
Organization.
A guaranteed right to strike, and guarantees of security for strikers
and those who supported them.
Regulation of censorship through guarantees for free speech and protection
of printing and distribution of independent publications.
Restoration of jobs and rights for those who had been dismissed from
their jobs or expelled from universities in the 1970 and 1976 crackdowns,
the release of political prisoners, and legal prohibition of
reprisals for political beliefs.
Access to the mass media for publication of worker views and demands.
Provision of full and accurate information on the economy, and opportunities
for all social groups to participate in discussions of economic
reforms.
These were not simply demands tied to specific work-related concerns of the specific strikers represented by the MKS. They addressed political, social, and economic issues central to the entire citizenry of Poland-what one European scholar has described as a "civil crusade." Issues like wages, strike compensation, work and holiday regulation (including the demand that Saturdays be work-free), and other worker benefits appeared further down on the list of demands. Even some of these demands were framed to affect a much broader segment of Polish society than the workers at the striking facilities. They included, for example, provisions dealing with food pricing and distribution, and demands for reining in the preferential treatment and privileges of party officials and security forces. The provisions addressed the complaints of all Poles who were not the beneficiaries of party nomenklatura privileges. Many of the demands articulated long-standing objectives of the KOR.
U.S. intelligence descriptions of these developments said that while the Polish regime was willing to offer concessions on purely economic issues like wages, prices, and working conditions if this would defuse the crisis, the leadership would not give ground on the demands that were seen as crossing into the political sphere. Free trade unions in particular were "politically unacceptable," according to intelligence analysts.
Some three hundred enterprises in the Gdansk region signed up with the MKS within the first week of its existence. Workers on strike at factories in Gdansk alone numbered about 120,000. Strikes also had spread to every major Polish industrial center. In some of the larger ones, such as Szczecin, near the East German border, Elblag, southeast of Gdansk, and later at Wroclaw in southwestern Poland, the workers copied the Gdansk idea by forming their own MKSs. On 23 August, the Gdansk MKS distributed the first issue of its strike bulletin under the title "Solidarity" (Solidarnosc).
The regime initially refused as "a matter of political principle" to negotiate with the unified MKS, continuing instead to pursue a "divide and conquer" strategy aimed at getting separate agreements with workers at different plants-trying, in effect, to buy them off with nominal wage increases. This scheme soon came to be seen as exacerbating the standoff. It had been these government tactics that contributed to the creation of the MKS. On the same day that the first Solidarity bulletin was issued, Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski, who had again been put in charge of government negotiations with the strikers, began dealing directly with the Gdansk MKS. This de facto official recognition of the authority of the MKS to represent the collective unions represented the achievement of a new dimension for the labor movement.
A day later, the head of the government, Prime Minister Edward Babiuch, was offered up as a scapegoat for the failure of the economic policies. Josef Pinkowski was named as his successor.
There also was a major overhaul in the top organs of the party. Several individuals viewed as impeding constructive dealings with the workers were dropped from the Central Committee and Politburo, even though most of them were also allies of First Secretary Gierek. The individuals who were promoted included at least two of Gierek's strongest critics. One of them-Stefan Olszowski-had challenged him some years earlier and had since then been exiled as ambassador to East Germany. Olszowski was described by U.S. intelligence analysts as a candidate to replace the politically weakened Gierek, and as a "forceful supporter of far-reaching economic reforms," a view that contrasted with that of many outside observers. Intelligence analysts described the personnel changes as having shifted the balance within the regime toward "the moderate and pragmatic end of the political spectrum," but said that this offered no guarantees of resolving the crisis.
On 31 August, Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski and Walesa signed what
became known as the Gdansk agreement. By any standard it was a landmark
event. On its face it essentially committed the government to all
twenty-one of the demands put forward by the MKS. Many of these provisions,
such as the right to establish independent unions, the right to strike
without reprisals, and the right of "freedom of expression," were without
precedent in member states of the Soviet bloc. The government had already
reached a settlement with strikers in Szczecin a day earlier, and three days
after the signing at Gdansk an agreement was reached ending strikes at
Jastrzebie in the Silesian coalfields.
Continues...
Excerpted from U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, 1980-1981 by Douglas J. MacEachin Copyright © 2004 by Douglas J. MacEachin. Excerpted by permission.
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