The First Rise of Solidarity, 1980-81
Review of Timothy Garton Ash, Solidarity, the Polish Revolution, (Third edition), Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002
Review posted at Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
It's hard to imagine, but a generation ago the division of Europe between a democratic West and a communist East was obviously permanent. True, from time to time a brave group in one Soviet dominated country or the other would rattle the bars of their cage – Germans in 1953, Hungarians in 1956, Czechoslovaks in 1968, Poles in 1970 – but these acts of defiance and cries for freedom were always doomed. By far the longest-lived of them started in the Polish town of Gdansk in August 1980, and gained momentum until it was repressed in December 1981. Even then, the Solidarity phenomenon was not fully extinguished, and when the Soviet empire began disintegrating from its center after 1985, Solidarity returned to the stage and led the way to a dismantling of the communist regime in Poland in 1988-89 – a success which precipitated the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 and prepared the end of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Having contributed mightily to the impossible achievement of changing the world, Solidarity did not itself survive the change, and, unable to adapt to a democratic world, split and slid into political irrelevance.
In 1980 Timothy Garton Ash was a young British historian researching Nazism. Coincidentally he came to Poland the week Solidarity was born, and had the presence of mind to change his plans and go see the action in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, and record history in the making. For the following 18th months he followed the tumultuous events, using his historical training and perspective to create a report of lasting value. In 1983, when the story seemed over, he published a book about it. In 1999 he added a 25-page postscript.
The strike which launched Solidarity seems to have been an accident, in that no-one saw it coming; even once it was upon them, it lurched from crisis to greatness and back and again repeatedly; none of the actors seems to have a clear idea of where they were going. Like most of human history. There were long-term grievances against the regime (but no expectation they could be redressed); local complaints about the lack of a memorial to previous demonstrators shot down in 1970 at the gates of the shipyard; symbolic resentments about the recent firing of a popular worker, a local Rosa Parks named Anna Walentynowicz; and price hikes which were the immediate catalyst of the strikes. There was the game-changing fact of a Polish Pope. There was the historical wildcard of Lech Wałęsa, an improbable figure who emerged as an inspired leader and gave the strike a resilience which propelled it into a movement. There was the matter of the cooperation with KOR, a group of dissident intellectuals, who added a modicum of sophistication to the striking workers in their negotiations with the wily authorities.
After 18 days of high drama, the strikers wrung major concessions from the authorities. Acquiescence in the right to organize in free, non-Party unions; access to the Party-controlled media; and – seemingly, at least – willingness to share reliable information about the true condition of the economy, so as to enable a society-wide effort of confronting economic crisis. An agreement unprecedented in the Communist world.
The next 18 months were an ultimately futile attempt to square the circle. Solidarity soon grew to a membership of ten million – a movement representative of society (there were some 35 million Poles in all), far greater than the Party, and anyway many of the Party members also joined Solidarity. It far transcended a trade union, since the dire condition of the economy necessitated a comprehensive set of actions; Solidarity signaled that it would be willing to have its membership bear the load in return for true partnership in economic policy. The Party – or, perhaps more accurately, the nomenclature, meaning the bureaucratic class that ruled the country – had not the slightest intention of sharing power. Hanging above the entire discussion was the dark cloud of Soviet intentions. All Poles understood that they dare not tamper with Soviet domination. Yet the very existence of Solidarity was a surprise; as the months passed and Poland moved ever further into uncharted waters of freedom within the Soviet sphere, a growing number of voices began to say things about freedom which previously would have been unthinkable.
The events included forcing the creation of an agrarian branch of Solidarity. In the teeth of regime objection: Polish farmers were self employed and needed no union. Garton Ash describes a visit to the center of this effort, in the small south-eastern town of Rzeszow. For a brief moment, about the time Ronald Reagan was wining the White House, remote Rzeszow was a center of world history.
March 1981 brought the brinkmanship to a climax, as Solidarity prepared for a nation-wide general strike to force the authorities to share power, then backed down for less at the very last moment, perhaps fatally losing momentum.
In July the Party held a congress. Solidarity's existence and popularity caused the rank and file members to behave in a new way, most conspicuously refusing to appoint local delegates to the congress according to lists from the center, and preferring to elect them. Yet ironically, it was the success of Solidarity that doomed the possibility of self reform of the party. The general population, having written the party off as irrelevant, withheld its interest and support, leaving the potential party reformers with no constituency with which to leverage reforms.
In September 1981 Solidarity held its own national congress. It was a raucous and messy affair which went on a week longer than originally planned, but was an exhibition of democratic deliberation such as the Soviet bloc had never seen. This included, as must be the case in a democracy, the emergence of diverse factions with varying ideological bents and practical goals, and disagreements about how to progress towards them. Yet astonishingly for a brand new mass movement with but faint memories of earlier democratic traditions, the congress hammered out a program that was dignified, coherent and addressed both matters of practical policy and ringing declarative goals of freedom and human rights.
By the end of the congress, in early October 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski's preparations for martial law and an end to Solidarity were entering their operative stage. While Garton Ash didn't have the documentation (in 1983) to know when the decision was made, he tells that the preparations must have been started early in 1981; by the autumn, the planning and decisions had been made, and it was just a matter of putting all the pieces in place.
The crackdown came on December 13th, 1981. So far as Garton Ash could see in 1983, the repression succeeded and Solidarity was finished. Not totally finished, however. Things that have happened can't be erased, and millions of Poles – indeed, Polish society as a whole – had experienced a different way of life. Solidarity had blown a hole the size of Poland in the Party's multiple pretenses of acting in the interest of the nation, and of reliably describing reality. For more than a year millions of Poles had been able to express their opinions freely, and they had realized that most people agreed with them that the authorities were incorrigible liars.
Before wrapping up his report, Garton Ash dedicates a fascinating chapter to the responses of the West to Solidarity's 18 month saga. The Left in the West, he tells, didn't like a movement which was confronting a worker's party regime, and had trouble recognizing who the true workers were. The Germans with their Ostpolitik, which hoped to shine on the prickly Eastern regimes until they softened their positions, couldn't figure out what to do with a local challenge that couldn't fail to make the regime even less confident and more prickly. The Americans (he calls them Reaganauts), though recognizing the potential of Solidarity to weaken a communist regime, couldn't bring themselves to support a workers' movement. For all these reasons the West failed to support Solidarity by offering Poland a Marshal-Plan package of economic aid tied to co-opting Solidarity in running Poland. Such a plan just might have worked, he claims.
(Seen from a post-1991 vantage, this critique of Reagan's policy isn't convincing. Rather than partially weakening one communist regime in Eastern Europe, didn't Reagan's policies contribute to the collapse of the entire communist edifice?)
Preparing his book for re-publication, Garton Ash added a postscript which focused on two issues: what role did the Soviet Union play in repressing Solidarity, and what happened in the decade after 1981.
His conclusions about the Soviet role is surprising. He thinks the martial law imposed by Jaruzelski in 1981 was mostly home-grown, not – as most of us thought at the time – an attempt to stave off an even more ferocious Soviet repression. In 1989 Gorbachev and the Soviet authorities felt they could abandon the satellite countries of Eastern Europe so as to save their regime at home, assuming the turmoil would halt at the Soviet border. Garton Ash now offers tantalizing pieces of evidence which indicate such a frame of mind even 1981, years before Gorbachev. This needs to be examined in depth, in a different book.
How did Solidarity fare after 1981? Better than it seemed in 1983. Forced underground and knocked out of the official and legal realm, it none-the-less maintained significant public support. After 1985, as Gorbachev's Soviet Union loosened its domination of Eastern Europe, Solidarity began emerging. In 1988 it was negotiating once more with the government, in January 1989 it was officially legalized once more, in June it effectively won the first free elections ever to take place in the Soviet bloc, and on August 24th 1989 Solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister. The communists no longer ruled Poland.
Solidarity, however, did not survive its success. What had begun as a free trade union in August 1980 became the vehicle of Polish society confronting the communist regime. As early as the congress of September-October 1981, it was clear the movement contained significantly divergent forces, united in their immediate antagonism towards the communists, and probably also in their fundamental Polish patriotism, but with precious little common ground between those two basics. Once the communists were gone, and it was possible for different views of patriotism each to express itself in its own political party, Solidarity splintered. Wałęsa was elected president in December 1990, but in the first fully free parliamentary elections, in October 1992, Solidarity – or what remained of it – won a mere 5.1% of the vote.
It had completed its historical task.
Jerusalem,
November 2009