Originally published in Novaya Gazeta on 7 October 2021, marking forty years since Solidarity’s first congress.
“Solidarity has become a symbol of hope for our country and for the whole world. Poland’s workers have proved that the struggle for human dignity is not futile,” Lech Wałęsa said as he opened the first congress of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union.
“The main celebrations marking the fortieth anniversary of the first congress took place at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk,” says Jan Rulewski, head of the Bydgoszcz regional union organisation in 1980–1981 and a member of Poland’s parliament and Senate between 1991 and 2019. “There were reminiscences, film screenings, meetings… I personally led tours of the exhibition. Guests came from the Czech Republic, France and Britain. At the entrance, we were greeted by huge posters showing activists persecuted in Belarus and artworks by members of the diaspora under the slogan ‘Long live Belarus!’”
Solidarity’s first congress was held at the Olivia arena in Gdańsk in two sessions: 5–10 September and 26 September–7 October 1981. Its 898 delegates from 37 provinces represented almost ten million people. Even by conservative estimates, a quarter of Poland’s population belonged to Solidarity; some put the figure at a third. That includes everyone, even infants. Among industrial workers alone, at least four in five belonged to the independent union.
More than a year had passed since the momentous events of August 1980. Joyful enthusiasm was giving way to anxiety. In July, the ruling communist Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) held its ninth extraordinary congress. It resolved to “defend socialism as we would defend independence”. Everyone knew that “socialism” meant the unchallenged power of the nomenklatura, just as “sovereignty”, “stability” and “spirituality” do in Russia today. “We have elected more comrades in uniform than ever before,” observed Stanisław Kania, first secretary of the PZPR Central Committee.
Poland’s prime minister was also its defence minister: General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Central Committee secretaries Mirosław Milewski, himself a general in the state security apparatus, and Stefan Olszowski, who oversaw ideology, had been demanding martial law since November 1980. The party secretary in Katowice, Andrzej Żabiński, appealed to Brezhnev, Honecker and Husák for “internationalist assistance”. Even Polish generals were embarrassed by his appeals, putting them down to his alcohol dependence.
The Bydgoszcz crisis had erupted earlier that year. On 19 March, the police and ZOMO riot police attacked Solidarity representatives. Jan Rulewski and his colleagues were brutally beaten at a session of the provincial council. Solidarity responded with a warning strike on 27 March.
It was the largest strike in European history, with thirteen million participants.
PZPR committees were reorganising in preparation for martial law. The Interior Ministry’s Security Service, the SB, intensified surveillance and staged provocations. Even during Solidarity’s September congress, SB chief General Władysław Ciastoń and deputy interior minister General Adam Krzysztoporski received a constant stream of intelligence reports about “operational approaches to L. Wałęsa as part of measures to sow division”.
Party and state propaganda whipped up vicious hysteria. Dozens of groups acting as auxiliaries to the authorities, largely drawn from intellectuals within or close to the party, openly called for reprisals. Through them, the ruling party apparatus was speaking. “Watch out, they will strike soon,” warned both Home Army veterans, who had bitter experience, and activists in the independent police union, who had inside information.
But Solidarity did not want to believe it. The hopeful spirit of August was still too strong.
There were disagreements and informal factions within the independent union, too. Most members looked to Lech Wałęsa. The “great electrician” took a moderate line: gradually expand the space for freedom within the law. Dissidents serving as Solidarity advisers supported him, particularly activists from the legendary Workers’ Defence Committee and its successor, the Social Self-Defence Committee “KOR”: Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik, Zbigniew Romaszewski, Jan Olszewski, Henryk Wujec, Edward Lipiński and Karol Modzelewski.
This approach faced strong opposition. Jan Rulewski, an engineer from Bydgoszcz; Marian Jurczyk, a warehouse worker and firefighter at the Szczecin shipyard; Andrzej Gwiazda, an electronics specialist from Gdańsk; Seweryn Jaworski, a steelworker from Warsaw; and Andrzej Rozpłochowski, a fitter from Katowice, advocated open confrontation with the regime. “Solidarity must smash the totalitarian system like a giant hammer!” Rulewski urged. All were leaders of regional union organisations with direct influence among workers.
The congress’s first session dealt mainly with organisational matters. Delegates adopted the union’s statutes. But on 8 September they also adopted an important political statement: the Message to the Working People of Eastern Europe. The idea came from the doctor Henryk Siciński. It followed the reading of a message from Soviet dissidents by Kornel Morawiecki, an engineer from Wrocław who would soon lead the radical underground organisation Fighting Solidarity. His son, Mateusz Morawiecki, was Poland’s prime minister when this article was written in 2021. The dissidents’ message ended: “Your struggle for the rights of ordinary people in Poland is our struggle too. Everything you do to bring down lies and hypocrisy and meet workers’ fundamental needs also weakens our regime. Poland will not be free until Russia is free. (…) Solidarity is showing us the way today.” We return below to how the message was written and reached the congress.
Bogusław Śliwa, a lawyer from Kalisz, and Jan Lityński, a mathematician from Warsaw, drafted the Message. Andrzej Gwiazda put it to a vote. The short text deserves to be quoted in full, since it remains relevant to some countries in Eastern Europe:
Translated here from Natalia Gorbanevskaya’s Russian version.
“The delegates gathered in Gdańsk for the First Congress of Delegates of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union ‘Solidarity’ send greetings and express their support to the workers of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Hungary and all the peoples of the Soviet Union. As the first independent trade union in our post-war history, we feel deeply that our destinies are linked. We assure you that, contrary to the lies spread in your countries, we are a genuine ten-million-strong representation of working people, born of workers’ strikes. Our aim is to improve the lives of all working people. We support those among you who have chosen the difficult path of struggle for a free trade union movement. We believe that your representatives and ours will soon be able to meet and exchange experiences.”
The fury of the authorities in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union was indescribable. Leonid Brezhnev offered a telling assessment: “A dangerous and provocative document. There are few words in it, but they all strike at the same point.” The general secretary ordered meetings at the largest Soviet factories to “angrily condemn” it. As a result, Solidarity became widely known among Soviet workers. And after those meetings, the men went off to talk in the smoking areas.
Nikolai Ivanov explains how the message from Moscow reached the congress. At the time he was a researcher at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR; by 2021 he was a professor at universities in Opole and Wrocław. “The idea of sending a letter to the Solidarity congress arose among Moscow dissidents whom the Chronicle of Current Events describes as ‘a group of Moscow socialists’. Andrei Fadin proposed the appeal. Fadin and I wrote it. We put the letter into code, and before leaving for Poland I learnt it by heart. The document was signed ‘Founding Committee of Free Trade Unions in the USSR’.”
Just three weeks later, during the congress’s second session, the first reply arrived: “We wish the First Congress of Free Polish Trade Unions every success. Thank you for your Message to the working people of all socialist countries. Your message has made us happy and strengthened our friendship. We support you. Thank you once again. Iulius Filip, worker, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. P.S. Our press reports nothing about your congress.”
His name should not have been disclosed, but it was read from the podium: another lesson from the past for the present. Poland’s SB immediately passed the information to Romania’s Securitate. On 13 December, in a sinister coincidence the first day of martial law in Poland, maintenance worker and underground union activist Iulius Filip was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. He endured beatings and imprisonment without giving in. Later came emigration, a return home and, in 2014, a Polish state honour.
Warning signs appeared between the congress’s two sessions. On 16 September, the PZPR Central Committee’s Politburo issued a statement “Against political adventurism and attempts to destroy the socialist state”. Two days later, the Polish press published a letter from the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Soviet government to their Polish counterparts. Kania and Jaruzelski were summoned to Brezhnev’s Crimean dacha and given a final warning. On 25 September, Poland’s Sejm adopted laws on self-management and state enterprises. Once again, earlier agreements were ignored. The authorities were clearly provoking the union.
The congress’s second session was more overtly political. Ideological differences came to the fore. On 28 September, the 92-year-old economist Edward Lipiński, a Solidarity adviser and a founder of KOR, addressed the delegates. He was widely respected and had an extraordinary history: a member of the historic Polish Socialist Party, a participant in the 1905 Revolution and the Polish–Soviet War of 1920, an anti-Nazi resistance activist and an anti-communist socialist dissident. Lipiński announced KOR’s dissolution: “KOR’s work is finished; other, more powerful forces are continuing it. But the tasks of fighting for an independent Poland and for human and civil rights remain unchanged.” The intellectuals’ human rights organisation handed the baton to a workers’ union with millions of members.
Elections for Solidarity’s chair and National Commission took place on 2 October. Four candidates stood for chair: Lech Wałęsa, Andrzej Gwiazda, Jan Rulewski and Marian Jurczyk. All had substantial records of activism. Wałęsa and Gwiazda had helped found the underground Free Trade Unions of the Coast. Rulewski had served a prison sentence. Jurczyk had helped lead the strikers’ “Szczecin Republic” of 1970–1971. Gwiazda’s politics were broadly democratic, with social-liberal leanings and an uncompromising commitment to moral principles. Rulewski was a convinced right-wing liberal. Jurczyk represented right-wing national-Catholic circles.
The candidates presented their programmes. Rulewski emphasised the struggle for the civil and political rights affirmed in the Helsinki Accords. Economically, he proposed turning enterprises into shareholding companies and extending employee ownership. This clashed with Kuroń’s approach, which predominated in the union: workers would participate in managing state enterprises without changing their ownership. Jurczyk called for the strongest possible anti-communist pressure and criticised Wałęsa’s authoritarian leadership style. Gwiazda focused on ways for unions to hold the authorities accountable.
Confident of victory, Wałęsa gave a rather unremarkable speech. He merely warned the “hotheads” against excessive zeal.
Wałęsa won in the first round with 462 votes, an absolute majority of the congress. Jurczyk also attracted substantial support: 201 votes, nearly a quarter of the delegates. Gwiazda received 74 votes and Rulewski 52. Most of Solidarity was thus ready to defend the freedoms it had won while accepting compromises with the PZPR. It had no desire for confrontation.
Indeed, confrontation seemed unnecessary. People naively did not expect violence from the ruling communists and tried hard “not to provoke them”. There was no talk of overthrowing PZPR rule or breaking with the Soviet Union: only of securing trade union and civil rights. People believed that a new era had begun. Besides, “they won’t dare”, “it’s not in their interests”, “the West won’t let them”… The whole familiar repertoire of arguments.
“In my arguments with Wałęsa, I believed we had to act as vigorously as possible to achieve change. The moderates proposed the same thing, but ‘in instalments’. Martial law proved my strategy right, when radicals, moderates and people who had done nothing wrong all ended up behind bars.
“The moribund communist system was incapable of reform. That rotten order could only be dismantled,” Jan Rulewski recalls.
On its final day, the congress adopted Solidarity’s programme, “A Self-Governing Republic of Poland”. An expert group led by the medieval historian Bronisław Geremek, later Poland’s foreign minister and a member of the European Parliament, prepared the draft. Its principal author was Karol Modzelewski, regarded as the union’s ideologue. He, too, was a medieval historian, and had proposed the very name “Solidarity”.
The document rested on the ideal of the greatest possible self-government, built from the bottom up. This was seen as Solidarity’s core idea. Self-government went hand in hand with “ideological, social, political and cultural” pluralism. It was an unusual synthesis of anarcho-syndicalism, democratic socialism, Christian democracy, solidarism and national tradition. The ability to unite people of very different backgrounds in the pursuit of freedom, independence and democracy was one of the movement’s greatest strengths. It remains an example to those fighting dictatorships today.
The programme clearly described the union’s character: “Its origins lie in the independent activity of workers, intellectuals and young people, in the Church’s efforts to preserve values, and in the entire struggle for human dignity in our country. Our union grew out of this struggle and remains faithful to it. Solidarity draws on the values of Christian ethics, on our national traditions, and on the traditions of the labour and democratic movements. As a mass organisation of working people, Solidarity is also a movement for the nation’s moral renewal.”
Solidarity’s programme set out 37 propositions, each developed and justified in detail. It expressed public distrust of the authorities. Economic reform would be based on socially owned, self-managed enterprises, run by their workforces through workers’ councils. The programme also envisaged nationwide economic coordination through a Social Council for the National Economy, conceived as a future popular government.
Pluralism also extended to the political system of the future self-governing republic. The programme contained detailed proposals to reform workplace and local self-government and the legal system, ensure judicial independence, establish a Constitutional Tribunal and end the monopoly on information. Alongside its general principles were immediate measures to overcome the crisis and protect working people’s interests. A separate section addressed social policy based on a society of solidarity.
Within weeks, workers’ councils had spread through Polish factories. The leading theorist of self-management was the left-wing socialist Karol Modzelewski, while the regional union organisation in Szczecin, led by the right-wing Catholic nationalist Marian Jurczyk, was particularly active in putting it into practice. That unity was the essence of Solidarity.
The programme and proposed course of action promised something positive for all Poles, but not for the ruling nomenklatura. If there were a self-governing republic, what use would there be for the PZPR, its party apparatus, state bureaucracy, SB, ZOMO and propaganda machine? On 18 October, the PZPR Central Committee elected Wojciech Jaruzelski first secretary. The general concentrated party, government and military power in his hands. Sealed orders went out to army units, party committees, police commands and security offices. Military patrols appeared on the streets. Solidarity, meanwhile, was preparing the Congress of Polish Culture at Warsaw’s Drama Theatre.
The central lesson of the first congress and of Solidarity’s entire history is that hope must not be lost, even in the most hopeless circumstances. And hope lives through action.
Pavel Kudyukin and Stepan Yarik, writing for Novaya Gazeta.
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