Solidarity and Martial Law in Poland

One Massacre, One Retreat, and a Promise Rotting from the Inside

The Polish People's Republic ran the same script through the 1970s. The government raises food prices. Workers take to the streets. Soldiers and militia open fire. The Party replaces its First Secretary and rescinds the rises. Everything seems to settle, only for the same cycle to return a few years later, with larger debts, older factories, and a more furious population.

In December 1970, Władysław Gomułka's regime announced steep increases in meat and dairy prices and strikes erupted across the Baltic coast cities. Workers at the Gdańsk Shipyard set fire to the Party committee building; in Gdynia, troops shot at trains carrying workers to their morning shifts. At least 44 people were killed. Gomułka fell and Edward Gierek, a technocrat from the Upper Silesian coalfields, became First Secretary. He travelled personally to Gdańsk and Szczecin to apologise to workers and rescind the price rises.

Gierek's answer was Western credit. He borrowed heavily from US and West German banks to build new factories, license Western technology, and stock the shops with consumer goods that bought public patience. National income grew at an average of 9% a year from 1971 to 1975, over 200,000 flats were built annually, and Poland became one of the first Eastern Bloc countries where ordinary families could own a car: the licence-built Fiat 126. But the whole edifice rested on debt. After the 1973 oil shock contracted Western markets, Polish exports stalled while the hard-currency debt kept compounding, from $1.2 billion in 1971 to $20.5 billion by 1979. Short-term debt and Comecon obligations pushed the total toward $27 billion, and debt-service payments alone now matched total export earnings. In 1979, national income fell for the first time in postwar Polish history, contracting 2.3%. Basic foods such as meat, sugar, and butter were chronically absent from the shelves.

On 24 June 1976, Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz announced another round: butter up 33%, meat up 70%, sugar up 100%. The next day strikes broke out across the country, most explosively in Radom and the Warsaw suburb of Ursus. In Radom, 20,000 people stormed the Party headquarters, threw furniture and televisions out of the windows, tore down the red flag and raised the Polish white-and-red. The government brought in tanks and helicopters to crush the protests; thousands were fired and jailed. What was different this time was what happened afterwards.

In September 1976, fourteen intellectuals founded the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). The founding appeal, signed by Jerzy Andrzejewski, Jacek Kuroń, Jan Józef Lipski, and others, pledged legal, medical, and financial aid to the families of jailed workers. KOR published an underground bulletin, set up the independent press NOWA, which printed banned works by authors like George Orwell, and in 1978 established the 'Flying University', teaching history and philosophy beyond the reach of the censors. This bridge between striking workers and dissident intellectuals had no precedent in the Eastern Bloc. After the government declared an amnesty in 1977, KOR reorganised as the Committee for Social Self-Defence (KSS-KOR) and broadened into a wider civil-rights movement.

The regime had another opponent it could not break: the Catholic Church. Poland was the one country in the Soviet bloc that had failed not only to collectivise its peasants but also to destroy its Church. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, who endured house arrest from 1953 to 1956, had preserved the Church as the only mass organisation independent of the Party. Gierek chose coexistence; throughout the 1970s, Poland remained the sole communist state where new churches were built and seminaries operated openly.

On 16 October 1978, the Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, was elected Pope John Paul II. The Polish Politburo was stunned. Gierek is said to have turned to his ministers and asked, 'O God, what are we going to do now?' The new pope made his first pilgrimage to Poland from 2 to 10 June 1979, visiting Warsaw, Gniezno, Częstochowa, Auschwitz, and his home town of Wadowice. Eleven million people, out of a nation of 36 million, came to see him. At Victory Square in Warsaw, he prayed: 'May your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.' Hundreds of thousands stood in silence. He did not call for rebellion. But for the first time, Poles saw with their own eyes that they were not isolated, and that their numbers were far greater than the regime pretended. In the words of historian Paweł Skibiński, the pilgrimage was 'the pebble that started the avalanche.'

A Winter That Froze the Country, a Pope Who Woke It

At the end of December 1978, a high-pressure system from Scandinavia descended on Poland. Temperatures plunged to –25°C. Snowdrifts reached 84 centimetres in Suwałki, 70 in Warsaw. Dubbed the 'winter of the century', this was more than a weather event. Rails splintered and switches froze; coal, the lifeblood of power stations, could not be dug out of the mines or transported. Warsaw's trams stopped. Of the capital's thousand taxis, just twelve remained in service. Burst pipes left entire cities without heating or hot water.

The freeze struck an economy already in structural freefall. The 'dynamic development' strategy Gierek had launched with Western credit in the early 1970s had been faltering since the 1973 oil shock. Net external debt climbed from $1.2 billion in 1971 to $20.5 billion by 1979; add short-term loans of $2 billion and undisclosed Comecon obligations and the real figure approached $27 billion. The debt-service ratio, interest and principal as a share of export earnings, shot from 12.4% in 1971 to 81.8% in 1980, more than double the 40% ceiling the IMF considered manageable. In 1979, for the first time in post-war Polish history, national income contracted, falling by 2.3%. After the bloody suppression of the June 1976 price protests at Radom and Ursus, Brezhnev had ordered Gierek not to attempt further price manipulation, so the regime improvised: better-quality meat was redirected to 'commercial shops' (sklepy komercyjne), where it sold at near-market prices. The share of these commercial sales in total retail rose from 8% in 1978 to 18% in 1979.

Right then, a single event shattered Polish society's sense of what was possible. On 16 October 1978, the conclave elected the Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, as pope, the first non-Italian in 456 years, the first ever from a Soviet-bloc country. The regime was stunned. In 1966 it had twice refused Paul VI entry for the millennium celebrations; this time it had no pretext to keep out a pope who was Polish.

John Paul II's first pilgrimage, from 2 to 10 June 1979, was not a religious event in any narrow sense. Over 300,000 people jammed Victory Square (now Piłsudski Square) in Warsaw for his first Mass; across nine days an estimated 11 million Poles saw him. At the square the Pope read the entire history of Poland through the key of Christ, declaring that 'without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland.' When he ended with 'Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land,' and hundreds of thousands roared back 'We want God!', the ideological monopoly that the party had spent 35 years constructing collapsed in public for the first time. What Joseph Nye would later call 'soft power' was at work: the Pope, as a Pole beyond the regime's reach, gave millions permission to stop being afraid. Party officials had hoped to show that the visit changed nothing about their capacity to govern. After those nine days, Poles were no longer afraid.

Barely recovered from the winter's shock, the economy worsened rapidly through 1980. The summer 1979 drought and another severe winter in 1979–80 devastated agriculture. Industrial productivity turned negative in both 1979 and 1980. On 30 June 1980, the government announced a 'reorganisation of meat distribution' that shifted better-quality meat entirely to commercial shops, in effect a 40–60% price rise. The next day, 1 July, strikes erupted at the Ursus tractor plant in Warsaw, the communications equipment factory in Mielec, the Autosan bus works in Sanok, the Polmo plant in Tczew, and others. On 8 July, at the WSK aviation plant in Świdnik outside Lublin, workers in Section W-340 discovered that the price of a pork chop in the canteen had jumped overnight from 10.20 to 18.10 złotys, an 80% increase. They switched off their machines. By mid-July some 150 enterprises in the Lublin region employing 50,000 workers were on strike; railway workers paralysed the lines connecting the Soviet Union with Red Army garrisons in East Germany. The government dispatched Deputy Prime Minister Mieczysław Jagielski, who granted average wage rises of 10% to calm the movement, but the fire had already spread to Warsaw, Poznań, Łódź, and Ostrów Wielkopolski. These strikes did not yet demand independent unions, and the regime's strategy of buying workers off enterprise by enterprise still seemed to work. But unlike in 1970 and 1976, the strikers did not pour into the streets: they stayed inside the factories, occupied them, elected committees, and learned to negotiate collectively. It was on this experience of the 'Lublin July' that, three weeks later, the Gdańsk Shipyard would build its 21 demands.

Three Women at the Gates, and the Strike That Changed Overnight

On the morning of 14 August 1980, the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard stopped. Five months short of retirement, crane operator Anna Walentynowicz had been sacked on 7 August, and Bogdan Borusewicz of the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ), together with young workers Bogdan Felski, Jerzy Borowczak and Ludwik Prądzyński, had planned the strike. From dawn they distributed leaflets at the gates; after six o'clock, department by department, the workers downed tools. Their demands were simple: Walentynowicz's reinstatement, a 1,000-złoty pay rise, and a monument to the dead of December 1970. Independent trade unions were nowhere mentioned. The WZZ core judged that getting the strike off the ground was the first priority. In a yard still raw from the shootings ten years earlier, going too far could bring bloodshed.

The strike spread fast. On 15 August, tram driver Henryka Krzywonos stopped her tram at a central intersection, paralysing city-centre traffic and spreading the news to other workplaces. By the 16th, factories and port workers across the Tri-City area had joined. That afternoon, the shipyard management conceded the pay and reinstatement demands. The strike committee declared the strike over, and Wałęsa told the workers to go home. Thousands began moving toward the gates.

At that moment, three women ran to the gates: Walentynowicz, nurse Alina Pienkowska, and Ewa Ossowska. "If we pull out, the other plants are on their own. They will be crushed." They turned workers back and called for solidarity with the other workplaces already on strike. Wałęsa was persuaded; he announced a solidarity strike. Only a few hundred stayed, but that night, delegates from 21 enterprises met and formed the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee (MKS). With Borusewicz serving as chief advisor, the MKS Presidium was filled with people who had worked together for years in the WZZ: Andrzej Gwiazda, Bogdan Lis, Andrzej Kołodziej. Populating the leadership with trusted comrades was a deliberate lesson from the 1970s, when strikes collapsed because they lacked an organised centre.

During the night of 16–17 August, the MKS drafted what would become one of the most consequential social documents of the twentieth century: the 21 Demands. The first demand was a bombshell: "Acceptance of free trade unions independent of the Party and of enterprises," invoking ILO Convention No. 87, which Poland had ratified. That clause aimed at the foundation of a Leninist state. Warsaw dissident intellectuals thought it reckless. Jacek Kuroń later confessed: "I really believed it was impossible. In fact, I knew it was impossible." Adam Michnik planned to travel to Gdańsk "to explain to them that it was senseless to insist on such a demand." But the Gdańsk workers had outflanked the Warsaw intelligentsia: it was workers, not intellectuals, who had first raised the call for independent unions during the Baltic rebellion of December 1970.

The list was structured strategically, with political demands (1–5) placed at the front and economic and social ones (6–21) behind. The demands were handwritten on wooden boards and hung on Gate No. 2 of the shipyard, the very gate where workers had been shot dead in December 1970. Adorned with an image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa and a portrait of Pope John Paul II, this gate quickly became a global media icon.

Meanwhile in Szczecin, Marian Jurczyk's MKS signed its agreement with the government on 30 August, a day before Gdańsk. But the Szczecin Agreement secured economic concessions without specifying independent trade unions. The Gdańsk MKS, learning of the shortfall, resolved to hold out. On 31 August, the government commission led by Deputy Premier Mieczysław Jagielski and Wałęsa's MKS signed the Gdańsk Agreement. The document guaranteed independent, self-governing trade unions under ILO Convention 87, the right to strike, release of political prisoners, relaxation of censorship, and free Saturdays. Wałęsa signed with an oversized ballpoint pen bearing the image of Pope John Paul II. In exchange, the regime extracted a promise that the new union would not act as a political party and would respect the socialist constitution, but in substance, the Polish People's Republic had, for the first time, recognised a mass organisation outside Party control.

On 17 September, workers' representatives from across the country gathered and formally launched the national union Solidarity (Solidarność). The Gdańsk Agreement was one of the rarest political moments of the twentieth century: in sixteen days, a local strike had been transformed, from bread to the end of a monopoly on power, and a gate in a Baltic shipyard had become the crack through which a whole order would eventually fall.

When Borrowed Prosperity Became Whose Crisis?

Gierek's removal was not simply a change of party personnel. After taking power in the wake of the bloodshed against Baltic workers in 1970, Edward Gierek tried to rebuild the regime's legitimacy by raising wages and borrowing from the West to purchase consumer goods and industrial equipment. It worked at first. But after the 1973 oil shock, export earnings did not rise as expected, while debt service squeezed production and food imports. The price increases of summer 1980 were the bill for that failure, passed to workers. As strikes spread, Gierek was removed on September 5, and the party sought a successor who could calm popular anger without surrendering central planning or party rule.

The solution advanced by Stanisław Kania was double-edged from the start. Destroying Solidarity immediately by force risked a bloodbath like 1970 and possible Soviet intervention. Yet if an independent union moved beyond the workplace to challenge control of the press, local administration, and police, the party's chain of command would become hollow. The government therefore allowed registration and negotiations, made limited adjustments on wages and food, and at the same time demanded that Solidarity restrain strikes and recognize the constitutional order of a socialist state. For Solidarity activists, this was not retreat but a “self-limiting revolution”: workers could govern society without bringing down the state. Negotiation, however, could not produce bread amid shortages and inflation. Workers and their families paid first through queues, rationing, and lost production, while the government's reform promises collided with resistance from the party bureaucracy and the material limits of the economy.

On February 9, 1981, Defense Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister. This was a choice to manage the deadlock through the military's concept of order. He appealed for “90 days of peace,” presenting a suspension of strikes and a return to production as the realistic way to avoid civil war and give the state time to distribute food and fuel. But once the army's commander held the premiership, negotiation became less a settlement between equal social forces than a postponement that could at any moment become emergency rule. Documents later published by the National Security Archive show, contrary to the Western tendency at the time to read the crisis chiefly as the prelude to a Soviet invasion, that Poland's party and military leadership were preparing a domestic military solution to restore social control. This does not make the economic collapse or Soviet pressure imaginary. It shows that, under those pressures, the leadership chose state power capable of imposing the crisis's costs on workers again rather than a political settlement that might have restored production by accepting their demands.

From Bydgoszcz to the Brink of a General Strike, How to Make Power Answer for Violence

The Bydgoszcz crisis was not simply a case of police beating demonstrators. Farmers wanted recognition for an independent union of individual farmers, rather than another agricultural organisation controlled through the official system. From 16 March they occupied the local headquarters of the United People's Party, while Jan Rulewski, head of Bydgoszcz Solidarity, joined the city's workers' organisation to the demand. To the party leadership this was no longer another wage dispute. It was an independent organisation reaching into the countryside. Kazimierz Barcikowski said that, if talks failed, the authorities would be asked to end the occupation; First Secretary Stanisław Kania called Bydgoszcz “a new attempt to bring the authorities to their knees.” Rulewski and the farmer activist Roman Bartoszcze, by contrast, treated the occupation as the last public means of making the authorities honour their promises. When the provincial council refused even to discuss their demands, the delegation refused to leave on 19 March.

That evening the Citizens' Militia and ZOMO cleared the chamber. Rulewski, Bartoszcze, and Mariusz Łabentowicz were beaten and taken to hospital. The government presented the action as an attempt to restore order, but its practical cost was violence imposed on those who had come to negotiate. State television did not immediately report what had happened, so Solidarity's local structures and underground print spread the news across the country. On 24 March Solidarity decided on a general strike, and its warning strike on the 27th involved about 2.5 million people. This was pressure the union leadership could direct, but it was also a force that could slip into open confrontation with the state. Lech Wałęsa wanted to use the strike threat to secure recognition of the violence and negotiations over the farmers' union. Some activists believed that, if the government conceded only under force, an even larger strike was the only protection against another assault.

Negotiations between Mieczysław Rakowski and Wałęsa, begun on 25 March, temporarily joined these two calculations. In the Warsaw Accord of 30 March, the government agreed that Solidarity representatives could explain the Bydgoszcz events on television, that an investigation would proceed under union observation, and that talks on the farmers' demands would continue. In return, Solidarity cancelled the general strike planned for 31 March. This was not an immediate victory that established the police's guilt. The government did not promise to punish those responsible, and it did not legalise Rural Solidarity on the spot. For Wałęsa, it was a retreat that gained public scrutiny without paralysing the state; for activists around Rulewski, it was an ambiguous formula obtained after blood had been spilled. The Soviet leadership and the Polish party hardliners read it as another instance of the state yielding to the union. The accord therefore did not end the crisis. It only set temporary rules for the next struggle over who could use violence, and who would decide the limits of concession.

When a Trade Union Tried to Redesign the State

Solidarity's national congress was not merely a meeting to elect new officers. Held in Gdańsk in two sessions, 5–10 September and 26 September–7 October 1981, it brought together 896 delegates representing roughly ten million members. The scale exposed the authorities' dilemma. An organization broader than the membership of the Polish United Workers' Party was now speaking openly about the principles by which the state should be run. Lech Wałęsa won 55 percent in the first ballot and became chairman, but the disagreements represented by challengers such as Andrzej Gwiazda and Jan Rulewski were not simply personal rivalries. Wałęsa sought a single leadership capable of managing confrontation with the government through negotiation, while other currents wanted stronger guarantees of control by regional delegates and members. His victory was less a declaration that Solidarity would replace the state than a compromise that could keep very different groups of workers inside one organization.

The programme adopted by the congress, the Self-Governing Republic, gave that compromise a concrete institutional shape. It did not call for abolishing the state. Acknowledging that Poland remained a socialist country and a member of the Warsaw Pact, it proposed democratizing the state through workers' councils, local government, and social control. Workers' councils were to help appoint and recall the directors of enterprises entrusted with public property, while party officials were not to monopolize appointments and economic decisions. The argument was persuasive from inside the movement. If the agreements won through strikes were to be enforced, and the collapse of food supplies and heating was to be contained, people who understood production had to have a say instead of merely receiving orders from bureaucrats. The programme also stressed gradualism. Aware of Europe's balance of power, it did not propose immediately overturning the army, foreign policy, or alliances. It sought first to enlarge the sphere in which society could control the state.

The Appeal to the Working People of Eastern Europe, issued on 8 September, pushed that cautious domestic project beyond Poland's borders. Addressing workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, Solidarity said it was not the small minority described by official propaganda but an organization of ten million workers created through strikes, and expressed hope that representatives would soon meet to exchange trade-union experience. To Solidarity's delegates this was a natural expression of workers' internationalism and mutual support. To Moscow and the Polish party leadership it sounded like an invitation for workers in other countries to build independent organizations in the same way. On 10 September Leonid Brezhnev called the document “dangerous and provocative” at a Politburo meeting, saying its authors wanted to sow disorder in socialist countries. The authorities feared it not because Solidarity had announced an armed uprising, but because the form itself, a legal and non-violent workers' organization, put the party's monopoly to a cross-border test.

In this confrontation, Stanisław Kania's middle course became increasingly untenable. Kania and some party officials believed that avoiding Soviet intervention required limited coexistence with Solidarity while the economy was stabilized. Party hardliners and the Kremlin judged that the congress had made the union an unacceptable political actor. When Kania left office on 18 October and Wojciech Jaruzelski also became first secretary, this was not simply a personnel change. The general, already prime minister and defense minister, now concentrated the party as well as the government and army in his hands. The political channel that had tried to integrate society through negotiation was displaced by military and administrative command. This did not happen merely because Solidarity had become radical. The programme's demand for social control and the party's monopoly could be patched over by compromise, but not reconciled structurally. Jaruzelski's rise signaled a choice to handle that conflict through coercion rather than negotiation.

Who Was the Order to Save the State Aimed At?

Jaruzelski presented martial law as self-defense against civil war and state collapse. In his broadcast on the morning of 13 December 1981, he said that “the homeland has found itself at the edge of an abyss,” arguing that strikes and confrontation had paralyzed production and administration and that society was sliding toward violence. This argument persuaded party officials and military commanders. A direct Soviet invasion risked provoking Polish nationalism and mass worker resistance, so having the Polish army restore order could appear to preserve both sovereignty and the existing system. The Soviet Politburo did in fact confirm on 10 December that it would not send troops into Poland, and Jaruzelski chose domestic military action rather than an open foreign intervention. Yet the method of “saving the state” was not negotiation but the strangulation of society. The WRON was an extraconstitutional military body, and soldiers and ZOMO took control of strategic workplaces. More than 3,000 Solidarity activists were detained without trial during the first night, and roughly 5,000 by the end of the first week. Telephone and telex lines were cut, travel and strikes were banned, and the press was placed under military control. The last dispatch preserved in the Radio Free Europe records expressed the fear that “the worst is yet to come.” This severing of communications was not merely censorship. It prevented workers across the country from knowing the scale of one another’s resistance and from turning that knowledge into a nationwide general strike.

That calculation met blood at a mine. At Katowice’s Wujek Coal Mine, workers learned that Jan Ludwiczak, chairman of the Solidarity works committee, had been arrested on the night of 13 December. From the 14th they occupied the mine, demanding his release, the release of other detainees, and the lifting of martial law. They were not an armed group seeking to overthrow the state, but workplace workers trying to recover an arrested colleague and defend their union. The authorities read the occupation as a lesson that had to be taught to other enterprises. After police had already shot and wounded four miners at the Manifest Lipcowy mine on 15 December, the forces sent to Wujek on the 16th included 2,231 police and soldiers, 22 tanks, and 44 armored vehicles. About 3,000 miners built barricades and resisted with metal bars and tools; after water cannon and tear gas, armored vehicles broke through the fence. Around noon, a ZOMO special platoon armed with submachine guns opened fire. Six miners died at the scene, and three more later died of their wounds. Nine were killed and 23 wounded. The youngest, Andrzej Pełka, was nineteen.

The authorities immediately called the operation a restoration of order, but the gunshot wounds to the victims’ abdomens, chests, and heads, together with the overwhelming force deployed, weakened the explanation of an accidental clash. Strike leader Stanisław Płatek received a four-year sentence in 1982, while it took 27 years for the shooters to be punished. In 2008 platoon commander Romuald Cieślak received six years, yet the political chain of command behind the shooting was never adequately established. Wujek therefore remains the place where the state’s self-description of martial law as temporary surgery for society collides with the documents and consequences showing that state violence was chosen to frighten and break a workers’ organization. The strike ended that day, but the bullets did not destroy Solidarity. They drove it underground.