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A Peaceful Revolution During the 1980’s, a genuine popular movement arose in Poland that ended up toppling the communist regime in that country. Although there were many anticommunist intellectuals writing and being read in Poland at the time, the spark that ignited the peaceful revolution that ended Soviet rule was lit not by the educated elite but by the working class: workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk launched a strike in 1980 that quickly spread to workers across industries and throughout the country. These workers formed the Interfactory Strike Committee, which drew up a list of 21 demands. Then, in a move reminiscent of the apocryphal story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the Church in Wittenberg, they wrote their demands on wooden boards and hung them from the gates of the Lenin shipyard. Workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk hang their 21 demands from the shipyard gates. The Gdańsk strike was triggered, predictably, by the government raising prices in a price-controlled economy while also denying wage increases. To make matters worse, Lenin shipyard managers had just fired a popular forklift operator, Anna Walentynowicz. Her co-workers believed this was political punishment for her union organizing. “What?” You might ask. “A communist government opposed to labor unions?” Yes—throughout the Soviet Bloc, only government-authorized labor unions affiliated with the ruling communist parties were permitted. One of the key demands of the Interfactory Strike Committee was the ability to form independent trade unions. Of course, the image of workers striking against a communist government was terrible optics for the Polish government. In addition, as a Warsaw Pact country, Poland faced the continuous prospect of military intervention by the USSR. No one knew if or when Moscow would decide to “send in the tanks” like they had done in Hungary…

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Filed under: News - @ January 13, 2025 5:23 pm