The day started with a misfire. We wanted to visit the Solidarity Museum near the shipyard, but thought we would begin at St. Nicholas Church which is the only church in Gdansk that the Soviets did not burn when they captured the city in 1945. Google Maps is usually pretty good so when I put St. Nicholas church into the program and told it we wanted to use transit all looked good. It told us to get off at the Opera House exit, and then proceed on foot for 500 meters. When we got there we found an old abandoned church in an overgrown park. There must be two St. Nicholas Churches. So we put in the museum, doubled back to the tram line and went back the way we came to the center of the city.
We have been very impressed with the museums in Poland and the Solidarity Museum did not let us down. It is a rust colored building made of steel panels that are supposed to represent the raw steel used to make ships. It sits on the edge of the still active Gdansk ship yards, surrounded by huge cranes.
The museum does a great job of showing the history of worker led dissent throughout the history of the Warsaw Pact. It gives background on the causes of different rebellions in not only Poland but Czechia, Hungary, and East Germany.
The museum excels at giving you the story of the workers movement in Poland beginning with a strike at the Gdansk Shipyard in 1970 over price increases on basic necessities. This strike was violently put down by the police and the army with over 40 workers killed.
While the strike resulted in the workers returning to work, it did not lesson the discontent in the ship yard. Also, it was not just the workers at Gdansk who were unhappy, but most factory workers in Poland. One of the biggest sources of discontent was that the factories were just poorly run and terribly mismanaged. While the shipyard in Gdansk was completing almost one ship every 5 days it was doing it despite the management not because of it.
The strike in 1980 began as many work stoppages do over the firing of a popular worker. Anna Walentynowicz was a crane worker who had worked at the plant for nearly 30 years and popular with her fellow workers. She was also a pain to the management of the shipyard who took revenge by firing her a couple of months before her retirement depriving her of her pension.
The shipyard workers took over the shipyard and made demands to be allowed to form a workers union independent of the communist party. This strike soon spread through out Poland and quickly most industrial sites and mines were also occupied by their workers.
These workers were not intellectuals or theorists, they were blue collar workers who were primarily interested in practical things like improving working conditions, and the economic status of their families. Their initial demands were not to be part of the government, just to be allowed to form a union independent of the government. Lech Walesa an electrician from the Gdansk shipyard became the leader of this group and led the negotiations between the newly formed Solidarity and the ironically named Polish Workers Party (the official name of the Communist Party of Poland). In early 1981 the government recognized Solidarity and allowed it to begin to represent the workers in industry throughout Poland.
In 1982 the Communists decided that Solidarity was too much of a threat and cracked down, arresting many of the leaders and forcing the rest including Lech Walesa into hiding. But, by 1986 the economy in Poland was in shambles and to try to recover the government again recognized Solidarity. This time Solidarity realized that they could not function just as a workers union, but needed to become involved in politics. They negotiated with the Communists to be allowed to run in the next election. The communists allowed a narrow majority of the lower house to be elected freely, and the entire senate. They felt that they could control the outcome. But despite stacking the deck and limiting Solidarity’s access to television and radio they lost all but 1 of the freely elected seats, losing control of parliament to Solidarity. The timing was good as the Soviet Union was also undergoing great economic strain and could not do what they would normally do; which was send in the tanks. As a result of this Poland withdrew from the Warsaw Pact and most of the economic alliances with the Soviet Union. Over the next few years other countries followed Poland’s lead until the eventual fall of the iron curtain.
The story is wonderfully told. It inspired me to accidentally write a short college report on the Solidarity movement in Poland. In addition to seeing new sites and enjoying cool food and drinks, I sometimes learn new things.
