The outburst of Solidarność: the most interesting event in Polish social history

In this section I will concentrate on reconstructing the actual events that took place in 1980 and 1981� I find it important because the mythological and even metaphysical narratives about Solidarność are very much present in discourses on it� This includes also debates in social sciences� The following reconstruc-tion is based mostly on the work of Antoni Dudek (2010)�³⁴ On the 1^st of July 1980 the communist government raised the prices of meat products in factory canteens� This triggered protests in factories located in various cities� The atmos-phere in Poland this summer was hot� On August 14, workers of the shipyard in Gdańsk decided to go on strike to protest against dismissing one of their col-leagues� Their postulates were not only of an economical character, but they also included building the statue of shipyarders murdered in protests that took place in December 1970� On the next day, other enterprises and public transportation

34 I am conscious that it is impossible to describe only the facts and that every historical narration contains an interpretation of events, also formed by the genre used (White 1973)� Yet, it is necessary to start from some description focusing on the events� As I will demonstrate later in this chapter, many considerations on Solidarność and years 1980 and 1981 in Poland are either full of metaphysical pathos, or omit events recognizing the timeline as something obvious for the readers who have somehow witnessed them�

in Gdańsk agglomeration also went on strike� On the third day of the strike, the management of the shipyard decided to set a bargain with striking workers� The leaders of the strike decided to terminate the protest, but under the pressure of workers from other enterprises, already present in the shipyard, finally the protest was not ceased� According to Antoni Dudek (2010: 15), this was the first turning point in the formation of the mass movement� On the following night, a committee coordinating the protest action among various enterprises was cre-ated, leading to the announcement of the list of 21 postulates (many of them were of political and not economical character, including the postulate to create trade unions independent from communist party supervision)� This meant that the protest became a coordinated action of workers from various establishments�

In the following days, workers in other cities went on strike using the same prac-tice of coordinating strikes in various enterprises and announcing similar postu-lates� On the August 20^th, 64 intellectuals (mostly from Warsaw) issued an open letter to the government, in which they insisted on negotiating with workers�

Following the announcement of the letter, the group of so-called “experts” came from Warsaw to support the workers in their negotiations� On August 31, deputy prime minister Jagielski and the leader of the strikers, Lech Wałęsa, signed an agreement accepting 21 postulates of the protesters� The Gdańsk agreement be-came a starting point for the negotiations in other protesting cities, but also for the creation of self-organized workers’ structures, similar to those in Gdańsk, in cities in which there had previously been no strikes�

On September 17, the representatives of workers’ commissions from 20 cit-ies gathered in Gdańsk and made the decision to create a trade union (Gdańsk agreement of August 31 guaranteed the workers the right to establish a trade un-ion) uniting the emerging organizations from the whole country, organized on the basis of regional branches�³⁵ Then, also in September, similar self-organized trade-unions were created also by farmers and university students� The growth of Solidarność’s structures was impressive – in the middle of October 1980 there were already between two and three million members in 2,600 enterprises and 60 workers’ commissions on the city level (Dudek 2010: 21; cfr� Włodek 1992: 122)�

The following period was the time of Solidarność’s growth and consolidation as an actor capable of initiating coordinated actions, such as threatening the gov-ernment to set a strike stopping enterprises all over the country on the same day�

35 As Antoni Dudek (2010: 19–20) notes, this division was the idea of the protesters, who realized that their actions are more effective if they are coordinated on the level of cities and regions, and not on the level of industry sectors�

The leaders of Solidarność were negotiating with the communist government about implementation of their agreements�

According to Dudek (2010: 27), the peak of Solidarność’s growth was the so-called “Bydgoszcz crisis” in March 1981, following the beating of the local trade union leaders calling for a formal registration of the farmers’ union� The use of violence against Solidarność activists alerted the members of movement in the whole country, and the leaders became ready to organize a nationwide strike�

Finally, the crisis situation was resolved without going on strike�

September and October 1981 were the period of the First National Congress of Solidarność, which was held in Gdańsk� For the sake of organizing the elections of delegates to the congress, the number of trade union members was counted:

9,476,584 were eligible to vote and 94% voted for delegates (Kaliski 2011: 18)�

Thanks to this count, Solidarność leaders were able to say that they represented an organization of 10 million members – the number which got well granted in the memory of the movement� During the congress, the leadership of the trade union was consolidated and Lech Wałęsa was elected as its president� Another outcome of the congress was the release of the document entitled “Samorządna Rzeczpospolita” [A Self-governing Republic], which was the program of the movement� During the congress “Posłanie do ludzi pracy Europy Wschodniej”

[Message to Workers of Eastern Europe] was also announced, which angered the leaders of communist parties in other states of the Soviet Bloc� It needs to be remarked that during the congress, Red Army organized the largest war games since World War II (Dudek 2010: 29)� More or less direct threats of this kind from the Soviet Union were present during the whole period of Solidarność’s carnival�

On December 13, 1981, general Jaruzelski, who at the time was holding three key functions in the state – the first secretary of United Party of Polish Work-ers, the Prime Minister, and the Commander-in-chief of the Army – introduced martial law throughout the country� Approximately five thousand Solidarność leaders became “prisoners of war�” Major enterprises went on strike in order to protest against the introduction of martial law and arrests of the movement’s leaders� The strikes were brutally pacified and another thousands of protesters were arrested� Some of the leaders of Solidarność were not caught by the secret police and started underground activities� Yet, the martial law was an end of the open, mass-scale actions of the social movement� In this chapter I am focusing on sociological interpretations of period between summer 1980 and December 13, 1981, so the rest of the events of the late 1980s, which lead to Round Table Talks and the elections of June 4^th of 1989 are not described here�

5.3 A movement fulfilling the vacuum? Solidarność as a problem for