Who Owns a Movement’s Memory? The Case of Poland’s Solidarity

Abstract

It is August of 1980. The Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, Poland are about to erupt into worker protest, as food prices escalate. In a system built on a philosophy of worker ownership, free trade unions are — ironically — illegal. Veteran crane operator Anna Walentynowicz raises her voice about management abuses — and loses her job. Workers rally and declare a strike. Electrician Lech Wałe¸sa scales a 12-foot wall to join the workers -and assumes the leadership mantle. From 17,000 protesters in Gdansk, to local university student occupations, to nationwide sympathy strikes across the country, to the Solidarity (‘Solidarność’) trade union that draws ten million members plus countless fellow travellers globally, this remains among the largest social movements on record. Intellectual activists Bronisław Geremek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Adam Michnik labelled Solidarity a ‘self-limiting revolution’ — (using nonviolence and eschewing a full-scale popular revolt to wrest state power) (Staniszkis, 1986). This movement would help usher in the people-power sentiment across the Eastern Bloc that would culminate with the domino-style collapse of seven state-communist systems across Central and Eastern Europe symbolized by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall (Kenny, 2002) — a historically unprecedented achievement for a nonviolent revolution.