LECH WAŁĘSA TURNS SEVENTY

LECH WAŁĘSA 

b. September 9, 1943 

THE FUTURE PRESIDENT 

OF POLAND (1990-1995) 

AS LEADER OF SOLIDARITY 

Plotting Strategy 

Warsaw, Summer 1981 

Imprisoned under Martial Law, December 1981 

1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner 

Now the subject of a new film by Andrzej Wajda, "Wałęsa: Man of Hope," meant to re-burnish Walesa's name and to introduce him to a new, younger audience (see here and here).  

SOLIDARITY-TO-BE WINS ITS STRIKE, THIRTY-THREE YEARS AGO

SOLIDARNOŚĆ 

IS BEING BORN 

GDANSK, POLAND 

August 30, 1980 

"LET POLAND BE POLAND" 

Solidarity Poster 

Summer 1981 

The story is here 

More Poland, here 

IT ALL STARTED IN THE GDANSK SHIPYARD, THIRTY-THREE YEARS AGO

ONE OF THE 

FIRST FRUITS OF 

THE RISE OF SOLIDARITY 

IN POLAND 

1980 MONUMENT 
TO THE WORKERS 
WHO DIED IN 1970 

Photographed in the summer of 1981 

Construction of this monument was one of the key demands of the Gdansk Lenin Shipyard workers who rose up on August 14, 1980, and gave birth to the movement known as Solidarność (Solidarity).  It was up by December 1980, and said to be built to last, so it could not just be torn down with another turn of the political wheel.  It is still up in 2013.  The shipyard and the shipyard workers have not fared so well -- except, of course, that ultimately they helped "Let Poland Be Poland." 

More of the story here and here. 

AT THE WEDDING FEAST

WEDDING COUPLE

POLAND 1981

INSTANT POLISH COUSINS

IN THE TIME OF SOLIDARITY

More Wedding Celebrations

More Couples

More Poland

SOLIDARITY ESTABLISHED IN POLAND, THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO

SOLIDARNOŚĆ 

b. August 31, 1980 

KATOWICE (POLAND) COAL MINE  

Published in the February 15, 1982, 

issue of BUSINESS WEEK (p. 68) 

On August 31, 1980, Lech Walesa, representing the striking workers in the Gdansk shipyard, signed the August Accords wrenching certain rights from the Polish communist government. 

The development of what became a ten-million-strong movement growing out of the strike, called Solidarność, or Solidarity, was amazing, but also fraught with complications. 

One of them was the relationship between Warsaw and Moscow, discussed in the Sol W. Sanders Business Week article ("The high price Russia will have to pay in Poland") for which the photograph above was the illustration.  His conclusion:  "The Soviet Union can only lose economically in the continuing crisis insider her largest satellite." 

The USSR ultimately lost far more than economically; a brief discussion can be found here. 

Today, thirty-one years after the founding, Poland's president, Bronisław Komorowski, came to Gdansk to honor Solidarity.  Walesa had a more bittersweet take on the movement:  "'It was such a big victory, but the effects don't match it,' he was quoted by TVN24 as saying." 

STILL AT IT: BORIS NEMTSOV

STILL AT IT:

KEEPING THE FAITH?

or

QUIXOTIC?

BORIS YELTSIN (right)

MAKES A POINT TO

BORIS NEMTSOV (left)

at a Summit Photo-Op in Beijing

November 1997

Nemtsov was then a first deputy prime-minister to President Yeltsin.

Today he is a leader of the Russian opposition movement Solidarity, and was just jailed for fifteen days, for "disobedience towards police," according to Reuters, following a monthly rally promoting free assembly.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former oligarch and one-time 'richest man in Russia,' recently had his sentence extended to fourteen years.

"RUSSIA REDUX"

FATHER JERZY POPIEŁUSZKO IS BEATIFIED, June 6, 2010

FATHER JERZY POPIEŁUSZKO

IS BEATIFIED,

June 6, 2010

INTERIOR OF ARKA PANA,

THE THEN NEW

CHURCH AT NOWA HUTA,

KRAKÓW (CRACOW), POLAND

IN 1981, IN THE

TIME OF SOLIDARITY

Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, the "priest of Solidarność"

(Solidarity), was murdered in October 1984.

An accounting and an appreciation is to be found here.

IN HONOR OF POLAND, AND OF COAL MINERS

IN HONOR OF POLAND, 

AND OF COAL MINERS

COAL MINER

KATOWICE, POLAND, 1981

IN THE FIRST SOLIDARITY ERA

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM II

SHIFT CHANGE 

Katowice Coal Mine, Poland, 1981 

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM II

Speaking of the fall (or not) of communism ("All Rise," May 21, 2009), we are in the primetime of the twentieth anniversaries of the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. 

The year 1989 saw the second "Springtime of Nations." In astonishment, and uncertainty, the outside world, and even the political actors within the various members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, watched as events unfolded and limits were pushed. 

Now, twenty years later, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, serves as a stand-in for all the regime changes that year. And the violent climax of the downfall of all the Soviet-bloc regimes in Eastern Europe came on Christmas Day, in Romania, when the just-deposed former leader Nicolae Ceausescu -- and his wife -- were executed by firing squad. 

But the Polish story should not be overlooked.  Timothy Garton-Ash believes "to this day that the Round Table - that is to say, the negotiated revolution - was a particularly Polish discovery, and is in a way Poland’s gift from 1989 to the world." 

The backstory includes the founding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in August 1980, and its rise and rise until it was crushed in December 1981. When I took photographs all over Poland in the summer of 1981 (including the coal miners in Katowice, above), it was obvious how entrenched Solidarity was in the workplaces, and in society more generally.  At its height, there were said to be ten million members, out of a population of thirty-some million. 

  

That summer, and into the fall, there was nervous speculation as to whether the Soviet Union would invade; it was the era of Leonid Brezhnev and the Brezhnev Doctrine ('what we have, we hold'). But in the end, on December 13, 1981, Poland's own leaders imposed martial law.  Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders 

were thrown in jail. 

Solidarity came back to life again after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow and seemed to embrace the possibilities of reform in other communist countries besides his own.  Still, as Garton-Ash testifies, "You have to remember that nobody knew what would happen next and nobody knew what the Soviet Union would accept."