The Pope travelled around the country holding a number of open-air masses attended by hundreds of thousands, and in one case over a million people. The militia looked on sheepishly as those who had come together realised the strength implicit in their number and spoke to each other with a new-found confidence and sense of solidarity. The Pope’s homilies dwelt on the need to respect and demand respect for the innate dignity of man, and while the message was couched in religious terms, its relevance to the situation in Poland was lost neither on the listening crowds nor on the authorities. In Kraków, he told a vast crowd ‘never to lose hope, give way to discouragement, or give up’.
While those who had pondered his teachings began to think of themselves as a community and to consider how to take responsibility for its future, Gierek was foundering in an economic morass. In July 1980 he again made the mistake of attempting to balance the books by drastic rises in the price of food. A rash of strikes broke out in response, but this time their tenor and their strategy were entirely new.
At dawn on 14 August 1980 a previously dismissed electrical fitter climbed into the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk to lead a strike over the illegal dismissal of a fellow worker, Anna Walentynowicz. His name was Lech Wałęsa. A participant in the 1970 strikes, he had learned that workers out in the open were no match for tanks, and in years of discussion with KOR and underground workers’ cells he had forged a strategy and defined goals. Instead of marching out onto the streets, he occupied the shipyard and demanded that representatives of the government come to listen to the strikers.
At a meeting of the Politburo on 28 August, Gierek admitted that he did not know what to do and offered his resignation. Representatives were despatched to Gdańsk and to Szczecin, where a similar sit-in was being staged, in the hope of dividing the workers. But the leaders of KOR, KIK and ROPCiO, and dozens of prominent dissidents, such as Michnik, Kuroń, the historian Bronisław Geremek and the journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki, had homed in on Gdańsk, to advise the inter-factory strike committee which had been formed to coordinate the strikes breaking out in various parts of the country.
The government was left with no option, and on 31 August signed an agreement with the workers. This was no mere settlement of wage claims or disputes over working conditions. It was a whole package involving the establishment of free trade unions, freedom of information, access to the media and civil rights. Historically, it was a seminal event. It was the first authentic workers’ revolution in European history, and it showed up the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ for what it was, puncturing the fiction that had entranced so many and destroyed so many others since 1917.
On 17 September delegates representing some three million members met in Gdańsk to establish the form the new trade unions should take, and, on the advice of the lawyer Jan Olszewski and the historian Karol Modzelewski, who argued that smaller local unions would be easier for the authorities to infiltrate and manipulate, opted for a single nationwide union, to be called NSZZ Solidarność (Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity). Wałęsa was elected chairman of the national coordinating committee. The aspirations of most of the union’s members and activists were limited to working conditions and a return to a purer and more authentic form of socialism. But that is not how they were viewed in Warsaw or Moscow.
Gierek had suffered a heart attack five days after the signature of the Gdańsk accords, and his place was taken by Stanisław Kania, who promised to combat ‘anti-socialist forces’ and to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union. Two days earlier, the Russian Politburo had instructed its Polish colleagues to prepare a ‘counter-attack’ and created a special group, which included the former Commissar for Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko and the KGB chief Yurii Andropov, to monitor the situation in Poland. They urged Kania and his Minister of Defence General Wojciech Jaruzelski to deal with the situation, and on 22 October the latter gave instructions for the preparation of a plan for the imposition of martial law. The Kremlin gave him to understand that he could count on Russian, East German and Czech army units. The United States was distracted by the Iran hostage crisis, and weakened by the fact that Jimmy Carter’s presidency was in its last months. Carter was nevertheless alarmed enough by the situation to send Brezhnev a strongly worded telegram on 3 December.