In August 1980, an unemployed electrician climbed over the fence of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk to join a strike he had helped inspire. Within weeks, he was the face of Solidarity — the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Within a decade, communism in Europe was gone.
Lech Wałęsa is a shipyard worker with a walrus moustache who won the Nobel Peace Prize, negotiated communism out of power at a round table, and became Poland's first popularly elected president. Whatever one thinks of his later politics, few lives make a better story.
The Shipyard
Wałęsa was born in 1943 in the village of Popowo, into a farming family, and came to Gdańsk in 1967 to work as an electrician at the giant Lenin Shipyard. The massacre of protesting workers on the Baltic coast in December 1970 marked him for life.
Fired in 1976 for union agitation, he spent years drifting between odd jobs, under constant secret-police surveillance — and kept organising anyway.
Sixteen Days in August
The August 1980 strike began over food prices and the firing of crane operator Anna Walentynowicz. Wałęsa, no longer employed there, famously climbed the shipyard wall to join in — and was soon leading the strike committee and its list of 21 demands.
On 31 August 1980 he signed the Gdańsk Agreement with the government using a giant souvenir pen bearing the image of John Paul II. Solidarity was born, and within a year it had some ten million members — roughly one in four Poles. The regime answered with martial law in December 1981, and Wałęsa spent eleven months interned.
The Round Table and the Presidency
In 1983 he won the Nobel Peace Prize but did not travel to collect it, fearing the regime would not let him back into the country; his wife Danuta accepted it in his name. He kept leading the underground movement through the bleak 1980s.
In 1989, the Round Table talks he championed produced partly free elections — and a Solidarity landslide that stunned the bloc. A year later he was elected president of Poland. In 1989 he addressed a joint session of the US Congress, opening with three words that needed no translation: 'We, the People.'
We hold our heads high, despite the price we have paid, because freedom is priceless.
Curious Facts
- He signed the 1980 Gdańsk Agreement with an oversized souvenir pen bearing the image of John Paul II.
- At its peak, Solidarity had about ten million members — roughly one in four Poles.
- He did not travel to collect his 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, fearing he would not be allowed back; his wife Danuta accepted it.
- In 1989 he opened his address to the US Congress with the words 'We, the People'.
- Gdańsk's international airport is named after him.
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