Life’s Work
Wałęsa then returned to the state agricultural department. Frustrated and deriving little satisfaction from his work, in 1967 he made a sudden decision to leave the countryside for a new life in the city and boarded a train heading to Poland’s Baltic coast. Although he originally intended to settle in the port city of Gdynia, he disembarked at Gdansk, another city on the coast, where he ran into a friend who worked at the Lenin Shipyard, a huge industrial complex that employed more than 15,000 people. Wałęsa never made it to Gdynia; he instead took a job at the shipyard as a naval electrician.
In early 1968, several months after Wałęsa’s arrival in Gdansk, student protests rocked Poland, with the demonstrators demanding greater freedom of expression. Polish workers also had grievances for which they blamed the government, though they were of an economic, rather than political, nature. Specifically, the workers were distressed by appalling working conditions, chronic food shortages, and low pay. The authorities, wanting to ensure that the groups did not unite in their opposition to Communist rule, exploited the divisions that already existed between them, telling the workers, for example, that the students were spoiled. For his part, Wałęsa seems to have seen through the government’s manipulations. Although he had been familiar with such treachery on a small scale at his earlier jobs, “at the shipyard the stakes were much higher,” he has contended, “and the contemptible behavior of the authorities automatically took on a political dimension.”
In December 1970 the Polish government, acknowledging the economic crisis in which the country was mired, announced its plan to raise the prices of basic commodities. Poles, who were entering one of the most festive times of the year, were outraged as much at the government’s decision as at the poor timing. Within two days, workers in several cities, including about a thousand at the Lenin Shipyard, went on strike to protest the price increases. On December 15 Wałęsa joined the strike, and Gdansk erupted in violence, with workers battling the police and militia all over the city. Despite his best efforts, Wałęsa, who was chosen as a delegate to a strike committee that was then being formed, was unable to control the workers. “I hadn’t the slightest notion of how to manage a strike,” he admitted in his book A Way of Hope (1987). “I was out of my depth.” Nevertheless, he later came to feel that the strike “provided an incomparable experience, enabling us to understand what makes them behave the way they do in a crisis. And it convinced us that we would have to find other solutions.”
The 1970 riots precipitated the fall from power of the Communist Party’s secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka. He was succeeded by Edward Gierek, who, taking his cue from the fate of his predecessor, adopted an economic program that entailed borrowing heavily from the Soviet Union and Western countries. The idea was that the loans would be repaid with hard currency earned from a prospective increase in Polish exports. The plan backfired. Within a few years, the country had indeed incurred new debts, and it was exporting such high-quality products as Polish ham (which native Poles were thus unable to buy), but its earnings did not cover its debts and interest payments. Wałęsa voiced the discontent of his fellow workers during the elections for representatives to the state-run trade union in 1976. Speaking out publicly for the first time, he delivered a passionate speech in which he criticized the shipyard’s management and declared that the workers needed a trade union to protect their rights. Soon after, Wałęsa was dismissed.
Wałęsa next took a job with ZREMB, a repair company in Gdansk, at which he overhauled old vehicles. During this period he also became associated with the Committee for the Defense of Workers Rights and the Free Trade Unions. Through his involvement with these groups, Wałęsa both gained experience as an activist and began to earn a reputation within the growing, though still loose, coalition of workers, students, and intellectuals who opposed Communist rule. At ZREMB, Wałęsa’s activism did not help his reputation, and in 1979 (or in late 1978, according to one source) he was fired. A few months later he got a job at an engineering firm, one writer reported. During the same period, he was arrested several times and briefly detained by authorities.
In December 1979, nine years after the infamous strike in Gdansk, Wałęsa and other dissidents made plans to commemorate the workers slain in the rioting. At the celebration he declared to his fellow workers, “Only an organized and independent society can make itself heard. I beg you to organize yourselves in independent groups for your own self-defense. Help each other.” Not only did the speech make Wałęsa a local hero but the ceremony itself marked the beginning of what he has called “a period of creativity and growth for our movement.” Indeed, dissident students, intellectuals, and workers, who had formerly been disunited, began to work together in their opposition to a common foe. Wałęsa and his cohorts also steeled themselves to harsh treatment by the authorities. “We were no longer concerned about the searches, the arrests, and the spells in prison,” he wrote in A Way of Hope. “We took them in our stride as occupational hazards, disturbing, yes, but by now commonplace.” Soon after the commemoration, Wałęsa was fired from his new job along with several other workers, one of whom was later found murdered.
Wałęsa’s emergence as the de facto spokesperson of the Polish working class and leader of the opposition occurred in 1980. Tensions reached a new high that summer, following the government’s announcement of an austerity program calling for drastic price increases for meat and other goods. The wave of protests that ensued compelled the government to increase wages to compensate for the price rises, but this failed to placate workers, who were demanding not only economic reforms but political ones as well, the principal one being the right to organize free and independent trade unions. A turning point came on August 14, when Wałęsa, harassed by the police, showed up at the Lenin Shipyard, where 16,000 striking workers (according to one estimate) were occupying the grounds. In a dramatic move, Wałęsa scaled the shipyard walls—the entrance was closely guarded—upstaged the director, and delivered a riveting speech from atop a bulldozer. Over the next two days, negotiations yielded a limited agreement that Wałęsa, who had become the leader of the strike, himself was ready to accept. But when more radical workers insisted on continuing the walkout until the right to strike had been won, Wałęsa supported them. At this juncture, the strike became transformed into a social revolution.
On August 22, 1980 the strike committee presented a historic manifesto of 21 demands, among them an eight-hour workday, free-speech guarantees, and, most important, the right to strike. “The workers are not fighting merely for a pittance for themselves,” the document stated, “but for justice for the entire nation.” Over the next week Wałęsa led negotiations with Poland’s deputy prime minister, Mieczyslaw Jagielski, and in doing so he became the “hero of the hour,” as Mary Craig wrote in Lech Wałęsa and His Poland (1987). “It was a collective leadership, not a one-man show; but it was his finger that felt the pulse of the strikers.”
During the talks, the government made several major concessions: in addition to granting workers the right to form independent unions and to strike, it pledged to give strikers and their supporters immunity from reprisal, to increase wages, and to improve social services and distribution of consumer goods. These and other points were spelled out in the Gdansk Agreement, which Wałęsa and Jagielski signed on August 31, 1980. The document marked the first time that workers in any country of the Soviet bloc had been granted such freedoms. Before long, the original Gdansk strike committee had evolved into the National Committee of Solidarity, with Wałęsa as its chairman. By 1981 the union included some 10,000,000 of the nation’s 17,300,000 workers.
In the months that followed the conclusion of the Gdansk agreement, Wałęsa, seeming to sense how far he could push the authorities without triggering a backlash, pressed them to make good on their promises as spelled out in the accord. For instance, there were rumors that the Soviet Union might invade Poland to crush the opposition, and Wałęsa, in an attempt to stave off Soviet intervention, worked to contain strikes that broke out in the fall of 1980. But in spite of his prestige, he was unable to control the more radical members of the movement, and relations between Solidarity and the government worsened throughout 1981. By the end of the year, after he was reelected chairman of Solidarity, Wałęsa has written, it had become “obvious that we were in a state of civil war.”
On December 13, 1981 the Polish government, led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law. It suspended the activities of all unions, arrested thousands of Solidarity members, including Wałęsa, announced that publications would be censored, and declared public gatherings (except religious services) illegal. Following his arrest Wałęsa was held in detention, first alone at a villa near Warsaw and later in reasonably comfortable circumstances in a more isolated town where, using a smuggled transistor radio, he kept abreast of developments in the nation. In the end, martial law failed to accomplish one of its main aims—that of neutralizing Solidarity—for the union successfully reorganized itself as an underground organization. In the fall of 1982 the government officially outlawed Solidarity, which had formerly merely been “under suspension,” and released Wałęsa from prison.
During Solidarity’s years as an illegal organization, Wałęsa found himself under the watchful eye of the government, though he nevertheless managed to meet with the leaders of the union and could not be kept from the political spotlight. Indeed, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace, in 1983, he had become an international symbol of the hope for political freedom.
In 1986 the government declared a limited amnesty under which it released many political prisoners. It also proposed political reforms as well as an austerity budget that required it to raise prices. The program, which was opposed by Solidarity, was put to a referendum in 1987; because a large segment of the Polish electorate boycotted the vote, the government could not claim that it had the support of the people, forcing it to proceed more cautiously. Still, the price increases that were ultimately put in place were devastating to Poles, who had seen their real wages decline over the previous several years. The spring of 1988 was thus marked by more labor unrest, the worst since that which preceded the imposition of martial law. To forestall still more chaos, the government felt it had little choice but to appeal to Solidarity’s leadership to help it restore order to the country. Representatives from the two camps then entered into negotiations on how to govern Poland and reform its economy.
The Polish government’s acknowledgment that it lacked the ability to rule the country effectively was followed by something even more extraordinary: in 1989 it both relegalized Solidarity and invited the union to join the Communist Party in forming a coalition government. During the campaign for the nationwide parliamentary elections, set for June 1989, Wałęsa promoted the candidacies of the Solidarity contenders (as a result of these events Solidarity had been transformed into a political party), though he himself decided not to run for a seat, feeling that he should remain above the fray. As expected, Solidarity candidates trounced their opponents: the new party won 99 of the 100 seats (all of which were contested) in the newly established Senate and all of the 161 contested seats in the 460-seat Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament. (During their negotiations Solidarity acceded to the Communists’ demand that 299, or 65 percent, of the seats in the Sejm be reserved for members of the party.) The election results signaled the death knell of Communism in Poland, and Wojciech Jaruzelski (who was then serving as first secretary of the Communist Party and president of Poland) was compelled to ask a Wałęsa aide, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, to form a government.
In April 1990 Wałęsa was reelected chairman of Solidarity. By then he had already begun to hint at his interest in serving as president of Poland, and a few months later he expressed his intentions explicitly. His prominence notwithstanding, Wałęsa’s candidacy was not enthusiastically welcomed by many of the country’s new leaders. Voytek Zubek, writing in Problems of Communism (January-April 1991), suggested that the intellectuals’ cool response to Wałęsa’s intentions derived from inborn class prejudices that had been suppressed during the Communist era, when the need for a united opposition was paramount, and their longing for a Polish leader cast in the mold of the Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel: “The Western mass media’s portrayal of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet revolution’ inundated the world with depictions of a stylish, sophisticated politics: the president-writer, who was the scion of an old aristocratic family, clad in jeans and a sweater, filling palatial governmental offices with the Bohemian figures of dissidents-turned-officials. Poland’s intelligentsia felt outdone and embarrassed with their presidential office occupied by Jaruzelski, an unappealing figure who carried highly damaging historical baggage, and with the prospect of Wałęsa, who could hardly have been a more un-Havelian figure, knocking at the door of the office.” Such sentiments, Zubek further contended, were what lay behind statements such as those expressed by Senator Andrzej Szczypiorski in an open letter to Wałęsa; among other admonitions, the senator suggested that Wałęsa “hit the books and start learning, because it is never too late for that.” Another criticism of Wałęsa was that he was only interested in acquiring power for its own sake.
Nevertheless, Wałęsa ultimately won the support of Solidarity and became the leader on a slate of 14 candidates. On election day, November 25, 1990, dark-horse candidate Stanislaw Tyminski captured 23 percent of the popular vote, against Wałęsa’s 39 percent, which necessitated a runoff election, held on December 9. In that vote, Wałęsa was swept into the presidency with more than 74 percent of the ballots cast, thus becoming Poland’s first popularly elected president. In The Struggle and the Triumph (1992), his second volume of autobiography, Wałęsa expressed his ambivalence over the way many Poles’ perception of him had changed, writing that his critics “found it impossible to admit that a mere worker had become president. The nation should have chosen a businessman, a professor, an intellectual, somebody who embodied learning and deft manners. Instead, the nation had chosen me.”
Poland’s new leaders inherited a host of economic problems, not least among them high inflation—which reached 600 percent in 1991—growing unemployment, and the task of transforming a moribund state-run economy into one that operates according to free-market principles. Yet another challenge was simply governing—while they had a wealth of experience in opposing Poland’s government, they had none in ruling a nation. In 1991 Wałęsa’s own difficulties were compounded when, following general elections, he was compelled to support one of his critics, Jan Olszewski, as prime minister. Olszewski’s government lasted only a year before it was succeeded by one led by Hanna Suchocka, with whom Wałęsa established a good working relationship. Still, Wałęsa remained under fire from many quarters; among other things, he was accused of high-handedness, of forging ties with military figures he had long despised, and of seeking unchecked power for himself.
When the austerity policies of prime minister Hanna Suchocka earned her government a vote of no confidence in May 1993, Wałęsa called for parliamentary elections, to be held that September. He hoped that a new election law designed to limit the number of parties that could win seats in parliament would produce a more solid coalition that would be able to enact important measures on privatization, but instead the major beneficiaries of the new law were the Democratic Left Alliance and the Polish Peasant Party, both of whose memberships comprised former Communists. The subsequent coalition government, led by Waldemar Pawlak, was still more critical of Wałęsa. By mid-1994 the president was being blamed for a host of ills plaguing Poland, including its high unemployment and inflation rates. Wałęsa counterpunched, accusing the parliamentary coalition of corruption and threatening to dissolve it, which he did in February 1995. As a result, his approval ratings, which had hovered around 5 percent the previous summer, improved somewhat. (Pawlak’s government was succeeded by one led by Jozef Oleksy, of the Democratic Left Alliance.)
In 1995, with his first presidential term nearing its end, Wałęsa announced his intention to run for reelection. In a development that surprised many observers, Aleksander Kwasniewski, the young and telegenic leader of the Democratic Left Alliance, who had held several posts in the former Communist regime, emerged as Wałęsa’s principal rival. At times, Wałęsa was less than diplomatic in his treatment of Kwasniewski, so disgusted was he with the rising popularity of the former Communists; for instance, he referred to Kwasniewski’s association with “a gang of thugs” and refused to shake his hand during debates. Although Wałęsa made a strong comeback in the polls and won 33 percent of the vote, just 2 percentage points less than his opponent, in the November 5 elections, he lost the runoff, on November 19, to Kwasniewski. While the ballots cast during the runoff were still being tallied, Wałęsa told reporters that he planned to remain active in Polish politics. He suggested that he would not do so in an official capacity but that he would resume his role as an opponent of the government, telling one journalist that he intended to put so much pressure on the new government that Kwasniewski would be compelled to call early elections.