Lenin Shipyard, Gate No. 2, Gdańsk

The first independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc

The August Agreements between the Polish government and the Inter-Factory Strike Committee — signed at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard on 31 August 1980 by Lech Wałęsa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczysław Jagielski — established the first legally recognised independent trade union in the Soviet Bloc.

Solidarność — Solidarity, as the union was formally constituted in September 1980 — would within a year claim 9.5 million members.

Roughly one-third of the adult Polish population, and the largest mass movement in the history of state socialism.

It was the first serious crack in the Soviet imperial structure that had existed since 1945. The structural failure that would eventually bring the entire Eastern Bloc down within a decade.

A strike begun over a sacked crane operator

The strike that produced the August Agreements began on 14 August 1980 at the Gdańsk shipyard over the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz, a 51-year-old crane operator and underground union organiser who had been fired five months from retirement.

The shipyard workers went on strike demanding her reinstatement.

The strike then expanded to include 21 demands — most importantly the right to form an independent trade union, the right to strike, and the release of political prisoners.

The Polish government, under First Secretary Edward Gierek, faced a strategic choice. Crush the strike (which would have meant military intervention by Polish forces or possibly by the USSR), or negotiate.

Gierek negotiated.

Wałęsa, the electrician

Lech Wałęsa was 36 years old in August 1980. An electrician at the Lenin Shipyard. The father of seven children. With no formal education beyond technical school.

He had been dismissed from the shipyard in 1976 for political activity and had been unemployed for most of the four years before the strike.

On 14 August 1980, he scaled the shipyard's perimeter wall to join the striking workers and was elected chairman of the strike committee within hours.

He had a knack for symbolic gesture. Wearing the characteristic image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa on his lapel. Refusing to negotiate without recording all sessions in public. Ending each day by leading workers in prayer.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and became President of Poland in December 1990, six years after the Communist government had formally dissolved.

What the Soviets did not do

The most surprising fact about the rise of Solidarity in 1980 is that the Soviet Union did not invade Poland to suppress it.

The USSR had invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 when domestic reform movements threatened Soviet hegemony.

The lack of intervention in Poland is variously attributed to the perceived cost (Polish military and civilian resistance was expected to be much stiffer than Hungary or Czechoslovakia), the burden of the ongoing Soviet war in Afghanistan, internal Soviet political factors, and the personal influence of Pope John Paul II — the Polish Pope elected in October 1978 — who had reportedly told Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev that he would resign the papacy and return to Poland to lead resistance personally if Soviet forces invaded.

Whether the threat was real or rhetorical, no invasion came. The Polish military government under General Wojciech Jaruzelski instead imposed martial law in December 1981, banning Solidarity but never crushing it. The union resurfaced legally in 1989 and won the partially free elections of June 1989.