Solidarity

Solidarity (Solidarność, formally NSZZ Solidarność - Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy Solidarność, meaning Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity) was a Polish trade union and mass political movement founded at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard on August 14-31, 1980, following a shipyard strike led by electrician Lech Wałęsa. At its peak in 1981 it claimed approximately 10 million members - roughly a quarter of Poland's total population - making it the largest organized opposition movement in the history of the Soviet bloc.¹

Origins

The movement emerged from a long history of Polish workers' resistance to communist economic management, drawing particularly on the 1970 shipyard strikes in which dozens of workers had been killed by security forces, and the 1976 strikes at Radom and Ursus that had produced the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR), an intellectual-worker alliance that laid organizational groundwork for what became Solidarity.

The August 1980 strike wave began at the Gdańsk shipyard when workers refused to accept the dismissal of crane operator Anna Walentynowicz, a veteran activist, and escalated into a 17-day occupation strike. Wałęsa, who had been dismissed from the shipyard in 1976 for union organizing, climbed the fence and joined the strike, becoming its public face. The Gdańsk Agreement of August 31, 1980, signed between the striking workers and the Polish government, conceded the right to form independent trade unions, the right to strike, freedom of expression, and the release of political prisoners - an unprecedented set of concessions from a communist government.¹

CIA and Vatican Funding

The covert support provided to Solidarity by external powers - primarily the CIA and the Vatican under Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła, born in Wadowice, Poland) - was documented by journalist Carl Bernstein in a 1992 investigation for Time magazine. Bernstein reported that the CIA, under Director William Casey, and the Vatican had jointly organized a program of financial and logistical support for Solidarity from 1981 onward, with total CIA funding estimated at $50 million through the decade.

The funding channels included direct transfers through the AFL-CIO's international labor programs, the National Endowment for Democracy, and covert CIA disbursements. The IOR served as one conduit for money moving into Poland through church and charitable channels that could not be monitored by Polish security services. The BCCI network, which maintained relationships with intelligence services of multiple countries and conducted transactions that avoided conventional banking oversight, was identified by investigators as one mechanism through which money reached underground Solidarity infrastructure after the December 1981 crackdown.²

The Polish Pope's role went beyond financial support. John Paul II's June 1979 visit to Poland - his first return to his homeland after his 1978 election - drew approximately 10 million Poles to public masses over nine days and demonstrated the church's capacity to organize massive public gatherings that the state was unable to prevent or disperse. The visit directly preceded the 1980 strike wave.

Martial Law and Suppression

On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, suspended Solidarity, interned Wałęsa and thousands of activists in internment camps, imposed communications blackouts, and deployed military units to control public space. The crackdown was the Polish communist government's response to pressure from Moscow, which had threatened military intervention as it had intervened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The Reagan administration's response to the martial law declaration - which included economic sanctions against Poland and accelerated covert support for the underground movement - was coordinated with the Vatican. The underground Solidarity network, sustained by continuing external support, maintained organizational capacity through the 1980s under conditions of severe repression.¹

1989 Elections and Transition

After Jaruzelski's government entered into the Round Table negotiations with Solidarity in February-April 1989, partially free elections were scheduled for June 4, 1989. Solidarity candidates won 99 of 100 Senate seats and all 161 of the Sejm seats they were permitted to contest. The result destroyed the communist government's claim to political legitimacy and initiated the rapid transition that produced Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Poland's first non-communist prime minister in September 1989.

Wałęsa was elected President of Poland in 1990. The Polish transition became the model for the subsequent democratic revolutions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania that together ended communist rule in Eastern Europe by the close of 1989.¹