Lech Walesa historical biography : Solidarity
An outline historical biography
The Solidarity trades union
ï¿½ Lech Walesa (pronounced Vah-wen-sah) was born as the son of a carpenter in a clay hut located in the village of  Popow, between Warsaw and Gdansk, Poland, on September 29, 1943.   The Second World War was in operation with Nazi Germany being an occupying power. Lech Walesa's father, Boleslaw,  was conscripted to dig ditches and died in 1946 from  the exposure and beatings he suffered. His mother, Feliksa, seemed to have  the most effect on Walesa. The parish priest remembers her as "the wisest  woman in the parish."
Walesa was only an average student at his parish school and after graduating  from the state vocational school in Lipno, where he learned the electrician's trade,   worked as a car mechanic at a machine center from 1961  to 1965. He served in the army for two years, rose to the rank of corporal, and  in 1967 was employed in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk as an electrician.
Poland has had a rather turbulent and unfortunate history in its position amongst powerful  neighbours.  Once an extensive country, but one which was apt to suffer serious domestic  turbulences, by 1800 Poland had been partitioned out of existence with its former provinces being allocated  to the Russian and Austrian empires and to Prussia. At several stages in Poland's history the Roman Catholic  Church there has served as a focus through which efforts were made to preserve a Polish, and Catholic, nationality.   Although Poland had been reconstituted as an independent  state between 1921 and 1939 the aftermath of the Second World War saw a Poland with revised frontiers and under  the ideological control of Soviet Russia.
Most Poles regarded the Polish Communist Party in Warsaw as little more than an outpost of Soviet Imperialism. In 1956  there were riots in protest at food shortages, in 1968 Polish intellectuals joined those of Czecheslovakia, another  reluctant satellite in the Soviet orbit of control, in protesting the lack of intellectual freedoms. In 1970 there  were serious turmoils all along the Baltic coast after the government raised food prices. Lech Walesa was prominent in  a leadership role amongst the workers in Gdansk at this time. Gdansk, and the immense Lenin shipyards, featured as the  focus of protest against the government in these turmoils. Lech Walesa championed reform but he also urged restraint in   the methods used to achieve that reform. In one notably instance he persuaded a crowd of some 20,000 not to attack a  nearby prison.
It happened that the leader of the Polish Communist Party, Wladslaw Gomulka, authorised the police and army to use  force causing tens, and perhaps  hundreds, of fatalities - the actual figure has not been established. Lech Walesa was one of the many hundreds  who were now arrested by the authorities and subjected to periods of detention.
Following on from the riots of 1970 Edward Gierek replaced Gomulka and promised to transform the standard  of living of the Polish people through  the deployment of foreign capital. In all, Gierek imported about $10 billion worth of modern capital goods. Then he  wasted all of it in textbook  cases of how not to run an economy. For example the Ursus tractor factory intended to produce tractors of western design  proved to not have the required licencing to allow it to sell its output in the West. The tractors produced  were too expensive to be sold in the East, besides this most Polish farm equipment did not fit the tractor.
In efforts to inhibit domestic protest that might be caused by economic deprivations, Gierek allowed wages to  rise 40% from 1970 to 1975, compared with  an increase of only 17% over the previous decade. To give Poles enough meat, Gierek quadrupled imports  of grain and fodder; the per capita consumption of meat jumped from 132 lbs. per year in 1970 to 154 lbs.  in 1980. The state's pricing system meanwhile, was primarily designed to hold down food costs to consumers, and   was a very effective blueprint for fiscal disaster.  The state was paying farmers 10 zlotys for a liter of milk that sold it stores for 4 zlotys. Live hogs were  bought from farmers at 130 zlotys per kilogram and sold as butchered pork at 70 zlotys per kilogram. Farmers  bought bread and fed it to their livestock because it was cheaper than the wheat it was made from. Price subsidies began absorbing a staggering one-third of the national budget.
In Cracow, meanwhile, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla emerged  as a strong advocate of human rights and promoted an independent intellectual life. In 1974 Communist Party  ideologue Andrej Werbian called the Cardinal "the only real ideological threat in Poland." The astuteness of  Werbian's judgment became dramatically apparent four years later when Wojtyla became John Paul II. The naming  of the first Polish Pope caused an explosion of national pride in Poland. As had occurred so often in the past,  a religious act had become a patriotic cause for the Poles.
Fearing a national outcry, Gierek was reluctant to ease the strain on the budget by raising prices. He was right.  When he finally increased prices in 1976, there were major riots in Radom and at the Ursus tractor factory.  The brutal repression of these riots led to the formation of the committee for Social self-Defense (KOR), a  precursor of Solidarity. The organization was the first significant link between the dissident intellectuals  like Jacek Kuron and the workers who later founded the Soldarity trades union. Inspired by KOR activists, small  independent--and illegal--labor unions cautiously began to form in various parts of the country.  Lech Walesa joined such a unit and was arrested and briefly jailed scores of times.
In 1976, as a result of his activities as a shop steward, Walesa was fired and had  to earn his living by taking temporary jobs. In 1978 with other activists he began to organise free non-communist trade unions and  took part in many actions on the sea coast. He was kept under surveillance by the state  security service and frequently detained.
The spark that ignited the Solidarity revolution was a government decree that raised meat prices  in July 1980. As they had done many times before, Polish workers reacted with angry protests. But this time something  was different. This time the workers occupied the factories. Still, the movement had no focus. In Gdansk's Lenin  shipyard, protest seemed to be on the verge of dying out when a stocky man with a shock of reddish-brown hair  and a handle-bar mustache clambered over the iron-bar fence and joined the strikers inside. They all knew Lech  Walesa. He was an unemployed electrician, fired eight months earlier for trying to organize an independent trade union.
With a double chin, a bit of a paunch, and of middle height, Lech Walesa,  then 36, did not have an imposing physical presence.  His working-class Polish was rough and often ungrammatical: his voice, perhaps  from years of heavy smoking, was hoarse and rasping. His speeches were frequently   riddled with mixed metaphors and skewed analogies. His real strength as a speaker was an ability to reduce  complex issues to simple words and images that everyone could understand. Said one Solidarity official:  "He knows his audience. He can sense what they want, and almost always he is right."
In August 1980 he led the Gdansk shipyard strike which gave rise to a wave of strikes  over much of the country with Walesa seen as the leader.  The primary demands were for  workers' rights. The authorities were forced to capitulate and to negotiate with Walesa  the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980, which gave the workers the right to strike and  to organise their own independent union.
If any one event had helped to create the psychological climate in which Solidarity trades union emerged, it was  the visit of Pope John Paul II to  his homeland in June 1979. From the moment that the Pope knelt in Warsaw's airport to kiss the ground, he was  cheered wildly by millions of Poles. John Paul never criticized the Communist regime directly, nor did he have  to: his meaning was plain enough. "The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man," he  told an enormous outdoor congregation in Warsaw. With that hardly veiled allusion to Communism, a deafening  roar of approval filled the great city square. Says a Polish bishop of that day: "The Polish people broke  the barrier of fear. They were hurling a challenge at their Marxist rulers."
During the August 1980 defiance of the communist authorities, the Lenin shipyard functioned as the emotional center of  an extraordinary national movement. Festooned with flowers, white and red Polish flags and portraits of Pope John  Paul II, the plant's iron gates came to symbolize that heady mixture of hope, faith and patriotism that sustained  the workers through their vigil. In September 1981 Walesa was elected Solidarity  Chairman at the First National Solidarity Congress in Gdansk. As  the world watched and wondered if Soviet tanks would put an end to it all. Walesa and his fellow strikers  stood their ground. Like soldiers before battle, they confessed to priests and received Communion in the open  shipyard. To reduce the risk of violence, Walesa called for a ban on alcohol and insisted on strict discipline.  Through it all, his plucky courage and infectious good humor helped keep up the workers' spirits.
Firmness and patience paid off; the government team finally gave in on almost all of the workers' demands.  In addition to the right to strike and form unions, the Warsaw regime granted concessions extraordinary in  a Communist country, including reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks for the  unions and the church. At a nationally televised ceremony, where strikers and government representatives  stood side by side and sang the Polish national anthem. Walesa signed what became known as the Gdansk agreement  with a giant souvenir pen bearing the likeness of John Paul II.
The Catholic Church had supported the Solidarity movement, and in January 1981 Walesa was cordially  received by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. Walesa himself has always regarded his  Catholicism as a source of strength and inspiration.   Falling to his knees, Walesa kissed the papal ring and then briefly  resisted the Pope's efforts to pull him to his feet. The union leader then had a rare private meeting with  the Pope, which lasted for half an hour. Later, in his public remarks, John Paul II warmly supported  Solidarity. "I wish to assure you," he told Walesa, "that during your difficulties I have been with you  in a special way, above all through prayer." He declared that the right to form free associations was  "one of the fundamental human rights." But the Polish Pope also cautioned Walesa to follow a moderate course.
As workers rushed to join up at hastily improvised union locals across the country, Walesa and the other  ex-strike leaders quickly found themselves at the head of a labor federation that soon grew to 10  million members--fully a quarter of the Polish population. One of the key organizational problems for Walesa and  Solidarity was the question of  defining policy and strategy. In the beginning, Walesa insisted that Solidarity should be a pure  and simple labor movement, not a political opposition. On the day he showed up at a Gdansk apartment  building to open Solidarity's first makeshift headquarters, a wooden crucifix under his arm and a  bouquet of flowers in his right hand. Walesa told a crowd of reporters, "I am not interested in  politics, I am a union man. My job now is to organize the union."
Some 900,000 Poles quit the Communist party after August 1980, reducing its strength to a mere 2.5 million,  only 7% of the population. The resignations increased in October when the Central Committee urged party  members, about 1 million of whom belonged to Solidarity, to quit the union. In a strikingly candid statement,  Central Committee Member Marian Arendt recently told a Polish weekly: "Mostly it is workers who are leaving  (the party). Once I was so naive as to think that a few evil men were responsible for the errors of the party.  Now I no longer have such illusions. There is something wrong in our whole apparatus, in our entire structure.  "The party was on the verge of total collapse. What was more, Solidarity's surge had started another surprising  movement in Poland: a grass-roots crusade for reform that sought to democratize the party from within.  Adopting the workers' slogan of ODNOWA (renewal), party reformers tried to make the leadership more  responsive to the rank and file. Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, a pragmatic politician who had replaced  Gierik in September 1980, shrewdly adopted the cause of renewal in the hope of controlling it from the  top and limiting its scope. At the same time, he cooperated with Solidarity to avoid a possibly disastrous  confrontation.
A five-day work week was granted on Jan 31 1981 after  decades of six-day work weeks in Poland. But that only aggravated the economic crisis by further reducing  production--especially in the coal-mining industry, whose output fell by nearly 10% in 1981.  In addition, the country was soon swept by a spate of wildcat strikes over local issues. In  some cases, Solidarity chapters were taking on the Communist Party bureaucracy by demanding the  ouster of corrupt local officials or the conversion of party buildings to public hospitals. For  the first time, rank-and-file militants threatened to spin out of Walesa's control.  "We must concentrate on basic issues. "Walesa pleaded as the protests spread. "There's a fire in the country."
All the while, the Kremlin watched with rising anxiety. Solidarity's very existence was incompatible with the  Communist Party's monopoly of power. But perhaps even more important, the drive for democracy within the  Polish party challenged the Leninist doctrine of centralized party discipline. Poland's festering economic  crisis also put a drain on the whole Soviet bloc, whose member nations' economies were interlocked within  the COMECON trade organization. And in Moscow's worst-case scenario, the "Polish disease" might infect  other East bloc countries and the Ukraine, posing a threat to the future of the Soviet empire.
On October 18 1981 the Communist Party's Central Committee accepted the  resignation of the ineffectual Kania and elevated General Jaruzelski to the party leadership, the  real source of power in the country. Jaruzelski was thus the head of the party, the government and  the army. The very fact that the Soviets allowed the Poles to violate the Communist dogma that party  civilians must always control the military was a sign of their dismay over the Polish party's disarray,  and of their faith in the Soviet-schooled general.
Jaruzelski appealed for national unity. He asked Solidarity  and the church to join with the party in a "front of national accord" that would cooperate on economic  recovery. The overture raised hopes that Poles might at last find a way out of the impasse by forging the  vital element that had been missing from their body politic for more than three decades; a true social compact.
Then on December 12, Solidarity radicals gave Jaruzelski the excuse to do what he probably had been planning all  along. From the start, the government and the Kremlin had made it clear that they could not tolerate a challenge  to the existence of Poland as a Communist state, or any loosening of ties with the Soviet Union. That is precisely  what the radicals voted to do at their last meeting in Gdansk. While Walesa looked on in frustrated silence, they  called for a national referendum on the future of the Communist government and a re-examination of Poland's  military alliance with the soviet Union.
That was the perfect pretext for the government to impose martial law. Near the end of the session, when  communications with the outside world had already been cut, Walesa stood up, raised both arms in a gesture  of despair, and angrily told his fellow leaders: "Now you've got what you've been looking for."
The end had begun. Within in hours, most of the union leaders had been arrested. Walesa had been flown to Warsaw,  and army vehicles were clanking across the country. By the time Jaruzelski appeared on television, Solidarity's  tumultuous revolution had been gagged and shackled. No one could know if Warsaw's leaders would honor their  pledge to restore the people's freedoms once "order" returned. But one thing was certain; the flame that was  lighted in August 1980 had brightened all Poland, and Poles do not give up easily. In the words that emblazon  the tomb of the venerated Marshal Pilsudski: "To be defeated and not to surrender, that's victory."
If  the government of General Jaruzelski had not imposed the crackdown, the Soviets  certainly would have. The presence in Warsaw of high-ranking soviet officers,  including Marshal Viktor Kulikov, even suggested a direct soviet role in  planning what amounted to an invasion by proxy. For more than a year, the  Kremlin had made it clear that it would not indefinitely tolerate the  development of a union movement that could challenge a Communist government  as directly as Solidarity had--a movement that was calling, in effect, for  government by consent of the governed.
In November 1982 Walesa was released and reinstated at the Gdansk shipyards. Although  kept under surveillance, he managed to maintain lively contact with Solidarity leaders  in the underground. While martial law was lifted in July 1983, many of the restrictions  were continued in civil code. In October 1983 the announcement of Walesa's Nobel Peace Prize  raised the spirits of the underground movement, but the award was attacked by the  government press.
Over the following years the Jaruzelski regime became even more unpopular as economic conditions worsened. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the  Soviet Union was no longer prepared to use military force to keep communist parties  in satellite states in power. The Polish Communist party was finally forced to again negotiate with Walesa and his    colleagues in a revived Solidarity movement.  The result was the holding of parliamentary elections in September 1989 which led  to the establishment of a Solidarity led government.
Walesa, now head of the revived Solidarity labour union, began a series of meetings  with world leaders. In November 1989 he became the third person in history, after  the Marquis de Lafayette and Winston Churchill, to address a joint session of the  United States Congress.
In April 1990 at Solidarity's second national congress, Walesa was elected chairman  with 77.5% of the votes. In December 1990 in a general ballot he was elected President  of the Republic of Poland. He served until defeated in the election of November 1995.
Walesa has been granted many honorary degrees from universities, including Harvard  University and the University of Paris. Other honors include the Medal of Freedom  (Philadelphia, U.S.A.); the Award of Free World (Norway); and the European Award  of Human Rights.
In 1969 he  married Danuta Golos and they have eight children.
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at Age-of-the-Sage
The preparation of these pages was influenced to some degree by a particular "Philosophy  of History" as suggested by this quote from the famous Essay "History" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:-
There is one mind common to all individual men...
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.