Dubai: The shipyards of Gdansk were a tough place, where tough men worked under tough conditions, welding and bolting and building the bulk carriers to carry Polish steel and Polish coal around the world from the dangerous mines of Silesia where tougher men worked the toughest mine faces.
There was little room for the finer points of personnel management and human resources — the humans were resources that needed to be exploited in the Communist regime where wealth was held in trust by the state for the betterment of all its people. All were equal in Poland — just some were more equal than the tough men who built the bulk carriers and the support vessels for the USSR’s navy.
But Poland has a long history of revolt — as long as its history of suppression by its neighbours to the east and the west. If there was one philosophy that neither Nazis nor Soviets could conquer, it was an unshakable belief in Roman Catholicism.
The Bishop of Krakow had just been elected Bishop of Rome, the first Polish pope, the first from the Communist bloc, and the first non-Italian pontiff in centuries.
Enter Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic — he and Danuta, whom he married in 1969, had been blessed with eight children. He worked as a car mechanic for a while, completed his compulsory stint in the Polish army, and found steady work as an electrician in the Gdansk yards. The trouble was, Lech had a way of making trouble coming his way. Not that he looked for it — but his ardent beliefs in Catholicism gave him a burning internal morality that all men had to be treated equally and fairly — and you do onto others as they do onto you.
In 1980, when the tough men of Gdansk revolted against the tough conditions, Lech’s belief in an independent trade union — all trade unions had to be registered with the state and comply with the demands of the central economic planning ministries — gave the Gdansk workers an edge.
After a month of stoppage, Lech’s union won the right to represent the workers and negotiated better pay and conditions for the men in the yards.
But Walesa was gaining a reputation in international labour organisations, attending such meetings in Italy, Japan, Sweden, France and Switzerland.
He was received by his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.
Poland’s brief period of loose freedom ended in December 1981, when General Wojcieck Jaruzelski, fearing direct armed intervention from the Soviet leadership in Moscow, imposed martial law, suspended the Solidarity trade union, arrested many of its leaders, and interned Walesa. There wasn’t much room for compromise and collective bargaining in the security ministries that occupied the dour buildings in Warsaw adjacent to the central economic planning ones. And Moscow wasn’t forgiving for those who gave way to such nonsense as workers rights and that democracy thing.
In November 1982 Walesa was released and reinstated at the Gdansk shipyards. Although kept under surveillance, he managed to maintain lively contact with Solidarity leaders in the underground.
While martial law was formally lifted in July 1983, many of its punitive restrictions such as curbs on assembly, continued in its civil code of laws.
But the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. In Hungary, a bid for greater freedom under the Soviets was forcibly repressed in 1956. Barely a decade later, Soviet tanks suppressed the Prague Spring, with a generation of Czechoslovakian activists sentence to the darkest cells of the regime.
But Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t willing to commit troops to stifle Polish unrest. The last Soviet intervention in Afghanistan hadn’t fared too well. Why risk tearing the Soviet Union apart by moving its men out of the bases in Poland onto the satellite state’s streets?
Besides, the whole world was watching developments in Poland closely. The new phenomenon of electronic news-gathering meant that any suppression could be beamed into homes around the world instantaneously. And with Ronald Reagan talking tough in the White House and Margaret Thatcher equally rigid in Downing Street, there was always the danger that Nato forces wouldn’t allow that to happen. After all, Poland’s invasion had already started one World War barely four decades earlier.
In October 1983 the announcement of Walesa’s Nobel prize raised the spirits of the underground movement, but the award was attacked by the government press.
The Jaruzelski regime became even more unpopular as economic conditions worsened, and it was finally forced to negotiate with Walesa and his Solidarity colleagues. The result was the holding of parliamentary elections which, although limited, led to the establishment of a non-Communist government.
Walesa basked in his new-found fame, leader of a trade union that had grown to be much more — a catalyst for change within the Soviet bloc — a political force where membership was a ticket for political and social activity.
When Poland did hold a presidential election in early 1990, Walesa swept to power on a wave of euphoria. But leading a popular revolt is one thing — leading a nation is another. Yes, he was feted for his achievement, but Poland struggled with rampant inflation, the collapse of traditional subsidised industries and even the Gdansk shipyard where he had cut his teeth, struggled to compete in the new world order.
And the Catholicism in which Walesa so fundamentally believes?
The march of time and independence had brought liberalism to the fore, even in a conservative society such as Poland. In the past months, the grand old man of Polish independence has been made to appear isolated and out of touch, holding firmly to his beliefs and ridiculed for his controversial opinions on gay rights.
Walesa cuts an isolated figure now, a senior statesman removed from a power base that sparked change across the Soviet bloc — tough times for the toughest man to come out of the tough shipyards of Gdansk.