A Solidarity leader beaten while linking workers’ and farmers’ demands
“You have to call them and try to persuade them to leave the building. It is very important and very urgent.”
Jan Rulewski was a Polish trade-union leader and democracy activist who headed Solidarity in the Bydgoszcz region. In 1981 he made farmers’ demand for an independent union a union-wide issue, and on 19 March he was beaten by militia during a session of the provincial council. The incident helped Solidarity organize a nationwide warning strike and exposed the tensions that preceded martial law. He was later interned under martial law and served in parliament after Poland’s democratic transition.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1944Born in Bydgoszcz
- 1965–1969Expelled from the Military University of Technology, then imprisoned after an attempted escape
- 1979Graduated in mechanical engineering from the Academy of Technology and Agriculture in Bydgoszcz
- 1980–1981Chair of Solidarity’s Bydgoszcz region
- 1981–1984Interned after martial law, then released under amnesty in 1984
- 1991–2001Member of the Polish Sejm
- 2007–2019Senator of Poland
Related historical events
Student Repression and the 1966 Conviction
Rulewski's record of opposition predates his trade-union career, going back to his years as a military cadet in the 1960s. In the spring of 1965, while a student at the Military University of Technology (WAT) in Warsaw, he refused to verify the electoral rolls ahead of the parliamentary and people's council elections and declared that he would not take part in them. He cited the presence on the candidate lists of figures with Stalin-era security service backgrounds. On 15 May 1965 he was expelled for publicly spreading hostile, anti-socialist, anti-state and anti-patriotic views, then assigned without trial to a punitive armoured unit in Sanok for two years' service. He did not report, went into hiding briefly, and tried to escape to France, but was caught in Czechoslovakia and deported to Poland.
The Warsaw Military District Court sentenced him on 21 April 1966 to five years' imprisonment for desertion, upheld by the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court on 23 May. He was released under an amnesty in July-August 1969. That conviction was annulled on 5 June 2025, when the Warsaw Military District Court found the acts attributed to him to have been connected with activity for Polish independence. This early repression channelled him into the research and development centre of the Predom-Romet bicycle works in Bydgoszcz, where from 1970 he chaired the works council until 1980. Before he became a regional Solidarity leader, in other words, he had already passed through the state's punitive machinery: military-court conviction, expulsion and amnesty release.