People of the Revolution and the USSR

Poland Dissident 1927–2013 ○ Natural causes

Catholic intellectual of Solidarity who became the Eastern Bloc's first non-communist prime minister

We split away the history of our recent past with a thick line. We will be responsible only for what we have done to help extract Poland from her current predicament, from now on.

A Polish Catholic lay intellectual, he founded and edited the independent monthly Więź in 1958 and served in parliament from 1961 to 1971 as part of the Znak Catholic deputies' circle, practicing conscientious opposition within the system. He led Solidarity's board of experts during the Gdańsk strike of 1980, became the first editor of Tygodnik Solidarność, was interned for a year under martial law, and emerged as a key architect of the 1989 Round Table negotiations. On 24 August 1989 he was appointed prime minister, the first non-communist head of government in the Eastern Bloc in over forty years, and launched radical market reforms through the Balcerowicz Plan while declaring a 'thick line' separating the new government from the past. After losing the 1990 presidential election to Lech Wałęsa, he founded the Democratic Union and led it through the post-communist transition.

Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) Dissident 1934–2004 ○ Natural causes

A dissident socialist who linked workers’ self-management to civic solidarity

When the strikes began in 1980, he declared that the stranglehold on workers’ organisation and free information had finally been broken.

Jacek Kuroń was a Polish historian and organiser who tried to separate socialist ideals from the rule of party bureaucracy. His Open Letter to the Party, written with Karol Modzelewski, argued that the bureaucracy dominated workers and proposed workers’ councils and democratic pluralism. A co-founder of the Workers’ Defence Committee in 1976, he connected intellectuals with workers and became a leading adviser to Solidarity in 1980, advocating a programme of self-management. Interned on the first night of martial law in December 1981, he continued to support the underground union and later served as labour and social policy minister during Poland’s post-1989 transition.

Solidarity (Solidarność) Dissident 1949–

The Solidarity strategist who planned the 1980 Gdańsk strike, shaped the 21 Demands, and co-founded the MKS

In the Lenin Shipyard, in the course of implementing Lenin's theory, we folded up Marxism-Leninism.

He was the principal organiser of the August 1980 strike at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard: he drew up the strike plan, grouped and ranked the Twenty-One Demands, and co-founded the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee (MKS), making him the architect of the event that gave birth to Solidarity. When martial law was declared in December 1981, he evaded internment and spent more than four years underground rebuilding Solidarity's clandestine networks, once attending his daughter's baptism disguised as a woman. Arrested in 1986 and released under amnesty, he later served as a member of parliament, Deputy Interior Minister, and Marshal of the Senate; in July 2010 he made Polish history as the shortest-serving acting president, holding the office for only a few hours.

Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) Dissident 1952–2002 ○ Natural causes

The shipyard nurse who, when the regime declared the strike over, held workers back and turned it into a solidarity strike

"You betrayed them. Now the authorities will crush us like bedbugs." To Wałęsa, the moment he declared the strike over.

A nurse at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard, she joined the founding of the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) in 1978 and wrote for its underground paper The Coastal Worker on workplace safety and occupational disease, becoming one of the most determined opposition activists on the Baltic coast. On 16 August 1980, after management granted pay rises and Wałęsa declared the strike over, Pienkowska and Anna Walentynowicz physically blocked the shipyard gates and appealed to workers not to abandon the other factories that had joined them in solidarity, turning a local settlement into a movement-wide solidarity strike. Her intervention made the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee (MKS) possible; she drafted demand number 16 on healthcare reform among the Twenty-One Demands and became a signatory of the Gdańsk Agreement on 31 August.