Gdansk Agreement: Poland's Road to Freedom Begins

After seventeen days of strikes that paralyzed Poland's Baltic coast, the Polish government capitulated on August 31, 1980, signing the Gdansk Agreement with striking workers led by electrician Lech Walesa. The agreement granted Polish workers the right to form independent trade unions and to strike, concessions without precedent in any Communist country. The document, signed with an oversized souvenir pen from the Vatican, cracked the foundation of Soviet control over Eastern Europe. The strikes began on August 14 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk after management fired Anna Walentynowicz, a popular crane operator and activist. Workers occupied the shipyard and elected Walesa, a former employee who had been fired years earlier for union activity, as chairman of the strike committee. Within days, strikes spread to shipyards, factories, and mines across Poland. Workers in over 700 enterprises joined the action, making it the largest labor uprising in the history of the Soviet bloc. The strikers' demands went far beyond wages. They called for independent trade unions free from Communist Party control, the right to strike, freedom of speech and press, the release of political prisoners, and access to media for religious organizations. The government, led by First Secretary Edward Gierek, initially attempted to negotiate factory by factory, hoping to isolate the Gdansk workers. The strategy failed as solidarity between workplaces held firm. Gierek was replaced by Stanislaw Kania in September, but the agreement was already signed. Solidarity, the independent trade union that emerged from the strikes, grew to ten million members within a year, roughly a quarter of Poland's entire population. Led by Walesa, it functioned as much as a social movement as a labor organization, attracting intellectuals, farmers, students, and Catholic clergy. The Soviet Union pressured the Polish government to suppress it, and in December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law and arrested Solidarity's leadership. The union was driven underground but never destroyed. By 1989, the government was forced to negotiate again, and semi-free elections in June 1989 produced a Solidarity-led government. Walesa became president in 1990. The Gdansk Agreement was the first crack in the wall that divided Europe, and it opened nine years before the Berlin Wall fell.