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the towns of Slupsk and Eblag, and the workers at the Warski

Shipyards in Szczecin were preparing to strike. Reports were

coming in of supportive strikes in other cities.

On Wednesday workers began occupation strikes in factories.

On Thursday morning, workers walking to the Paris Commune yard

were fired on, at least thirteen were killed. Later that day

workers from the Szczecin shipyard surged out into the city, and

street fighting, costing at least sixteen lives, continued

through Friday. By Saturday it appeared a nation-wide strike

would inssue. Twenty-one demands were drawn up by the workers,

one of which asked for ‘independent trade unions under the

authority of the working class’. Although this was not

achieved in 1970, it is apparent that this was clearly a marking

of a new era in the thought process of the Polish workers. The

course of action that Prime Minister Gomulka took cost him his

job, he was the one who ordered the use of fire arms against

workers. Brezhnev himself advised a political rather than a

military solution. Gomulka’s fate was sealed, and the reign of

Gierek ensued.

The movement was far from over, but the most important parts

had already happened. The lack of the Polish intelligentsia was

apparent in a face to face meeting with Gierek, and other party

officials, that the workers at the shipyards in Sczecin and

Gdansk had on the twenty-fourth of January, 1971. Gierek coerced

the workers to stop the strike by appealing himself as a Polish

patriot, and a man that wanted to keep Poland from collapse.

These workers’ neither had the thought nor the conceptualization

that a collapse could very well be what Poland needed. The

intellectuals could have done exactly what was done in 1980, the

opportunity was just as ripe, but it passed, and another

opportunity would not arise for another five years.

The government could do nothing but appeal to the workers to

help them out, otherwise more demands would have to have been met

by them. In mid-February, with uneasiness in the country, Gierek

restored the old prices. This was the first time a decision by a

communist government was overturned by the working class, the

class that theoretically was in power.

Although a larger victory could have been had, the workers

had no concept of overthrowing socialism, they merely wanted a

better socialism. In 1976 another price increase went into

affect, this time raising meat prices by sixty-nine percent, and

sugar prices by one hundred percent. With memories of the

successful 1970 campaign, on June twenty-fifth work stopped all

over the country. Almost immediately Gierek repealed the

increases. It was clear the working class had a lot of power,

power that it had not yet maximized. Power that the

intelligentsia was only beginning to see as a source for future

social change.

Solidarity

So far most of the work in revolutionizing Poland was done

by the workers. So where was the Polish intelligentsia that

seemed to disappear from the landscape after the 1950’s? It was

always there, but while it was respected by the workers, the

Polish intelligentsia had not worked very hard to unite itself

with them. A social split existed that made the intelligentsia

feel somewhat superior to the workers, feeling a change could

only be made by intellectuals at the top.

That view and feeling slowly changed, the biggest of these

changes in social thought appeared when the printings of illegal,

uncensored leaflets and books by a group of intellectuals calling

themselves the Committee for the Defense of Workers’ Rights (KOR)

and the Movement for the Defense of Civil and Citizens’ Rights

(ROPCiO) emerged. In September of 1979, a press briefing by the

Ministry of the Interior listed twenty-six ‘anti-socialist’

groups. These groups were not publicly denounced, but they were

open to beatings and imprisonment by the secret police. One of

the major events to occur in 1977 was an informal alliance

between the Catholic Church and the opposition. The Church

would be instrumental in uniting the cause of workers in the

Baltic to those in other regions of the country.

On the other side of the coin, Poland’s economy was

disastrous. In fact the national income fell by two percent in

1979. Industrial output was showing negative growth of five

percent. From having one of the highest growth rates in the

world, only five years later Poland had an economy in such

shambles that it was dependent on Western banks to keep

functioning. The time was perfect to strike.

On the fourteenth of August 1980 the members of a little

group called the Free Trade Union conspired to start a strike at

the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which employed 17,000 workers. The

pretext was so a crane driver named Anna Walentynowicz, would get

her job back after being fired. The reason behind this was that

she was one of the most powerful orator’s in the whole strike

movement. They had tried to start a strike a month before under

the pretext of a meat price increase, but they had failed. This

time they brought posters and leaflets, which they promptly put

up. They declared ‘We Demand the Reinstatement of Anna

Walentynowicz and a

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