It is now
exactly 40 years since that glorious August in 1980 when the striking workers
in the Baltic shipyards of Northern Poland organized a strike over the creation
of a free trade union and, under the eyes of an astounded international media, brought
a totalitarian state to its knees without a single drop of blood. While the ruthless riot militia stood
watching, while the army stayed in its barracks, while the Kremlin fulminated
with impotent rage, the Polish Inter-factory Strike Committee covering 700
different plants in the Gdansk region, accompanied by its advisers and lawyers,
negotiated with the Communist government on behalf of the whole of Poland’s
work force. Their famous 21 demands, political, economic and social, headed by
the right to set up a free trade union and the right to strike, handwritten
onto wooden boards almost as iconic as the Ten Commandments, were agreed by a
terrified government and are now a UNESCO protected artefact.
I was
active at the time in Polish media circles, in the UK Information Centre for Polkish Affairs, that were concerned with
propagating the struggle for democracy and human rights in Poland. So, I was
used to acting in the rarefied atmosphere of journalists and academics specializing
in Eastern European affairs. I was also a Labour Councillor at a time when party
members’ main foreign interests were an obsessive anti-Americanism and an
abhorrence of South African apartheid. Suddenly, there followed the successful culmination
of the strike in Poland in August and the subsequent registration in October followed
by 15 months of alternating drama and carnival and 3 bitter years of martial
law. During that momentous time, I was amazed now to find myself the centre
of attention of countless trade union branches, left wing organizations and
academic bodies throughout the country inviting me to come and explain this
extraordinary phenomenon.
As early as
the beginning of August 1980 a group of ideological left wingers had set up an
organization called the Polish Solidarity Campaign in order to campaign among
trade unions to support the striking workers in Poland. Along with others, I
was drawn into supporting this organization and becoming one of their major
speakers. By an extraordinary piece of good fortune in mid-September the newly formed structure of the independent trade union in Poland had constituted itself under the
name Solidarność, as if echoing our earlier modest organization in name. It struck
a chord. That is why in the last week of August alone I had chaired a well-attended
international press conference in the Atheneum which included the philosopher
Leszek Kołakowski, the economist Włodzimierz Brus and Electricians’ Union boss
Frank Chapple; addressed a meeting of Labour Party members at Conway Hall in
London; and travelled to Leeds to address a crowd of 1600 left-wing activists
at the “Beyond the Fragments” conference. Everywhere I travelled this hitherto
obscure East European country called Poland had now become front page news
greeted with wonder and delight in left and right wing media alike.
Sympathy
for Poland and the new Solidarność movement seemed universal. We found that the Polish Solidarity Campaign
had little problem gaining funds from the sale of Solidarność T-shirts,
pullovers and badges at Jumble sales and cultural events. We were equally welcome
at Conservative Party meetings and at CND rallies, in Catholic churches and Methodist
halls. Within a week of the imposition of martial law we had organized a march
of 15,000 people which had been announced by the BBC news following our press
conference in the Houses of Parliament. The demonstration was attended not only
by the massed ranks of the Polish community young and old but also by a massive
range of British organizations ranging from church groups to student unions,
Afghan Mujaheddin to Latvian youth
organizations, as well as branches of trade unions and political organizations
from Conservative to Communist and all stops in between, proudly displaying their
banners as they marched from Hyde Park past the Polish Embassy to Regent’s Park.
We held demonstrations regularly twice a year for the next 5 years, occupying
Jubilee Gardens or Trafalgar Square. Solidarność was a magic word that opened
all doors to political party leaders, to trade union bosses and to university
lecture rooms. It even assisted us in convincing the Labour Party National
Executive not to invite any more Eastern European Communist Party
representatives to their annual conferences. In 1989, when Lech Wałęsa finally
visited a highly polarized UK, he was the only person imaginable who could kiss
Margaret Thatcher on the hand and Glenys Kinnock on the cheek in the same day,
and he was actually the person who introduced that fiercely anti-trade union British
prime minister to Norman Willis, her British T.U.C. counterpart, as they had
never met before.
In fact,
apart from outright Soviet sympathisers like Arthur Scargill, everyone saw in
the Solidarność movement an idealized image of what they were trying to achieve
in this country. Conservatives saw an organization challenging Communism and demanding
a more market orientated economy, liberals saw an organization that was
democratic and progressive in a totalitarian environment, democratic socialists
saw here a challenge to dogmatic Stalinism, Trotskyists supported the struggle
of Solidarność for workers’ councils
running factories and regional government, trade unionists admired the ability of
Solidarność to recruit 10 million members in 3 months and fight so successfully
for workers rights using sympathy strikes to achieve progress for weaker organizations.
Religious leaders welcomed the moral God-fearing challenge to an atheist
Marxist state, peace movements saw Solidarność as their partner for peace in
the Soviet bloc and admired their ability to conduct a bloodless peaceful
revolution. The multi-faceted profile of Solidarność, as both a social movement
and as a trade union, gripped the imagination of such a disparate range of
supporters, each viewing Solidarność through a skewed and subjective ideological
telescope of its own, that it spun a legendary narrative of a universal moral
crusade cut off in its prime. It became in time, subconsciously or not, a model
for many mass popular and peaceful resistance movements throughout the world in
places as diverse as Brazil, Senegal, Ukraine or Belarus.
However in
the UK, popular interest in the resistance of Solidarność to martial law somewhat
faded in the summer of 1982 as the UK went to war over the Falklands and only
found itself restored in the public consciousness in 1989 after Poland created
the first non-Communist government in the Eastern bloc, headed by leaders of
the Solidarność. The legend is tempered now by reality. It is also somewhat tarnished
by the challenge to normal liberal values of the present Polish government,
which includes some elements of the old Solidarność ideas. Yet the main social
and political movement which is seeking to recover the values of solidarity,
tolerance and participatory democracy is hoping to lay claim to the glorious past
by recasting itself as the Nowa (New) Solidarność. Its leaders hope that it too
will capture the imagination of the democratic world once again against the
background of a world-wide illiberal nationalist challenge to democratic values
more sinister and more potent than it had been during the cold war.
Wiktor Moszczyński
23/09/2020 www.polishlondoner.blogspot.co.uk
