People

Solidarity (Solidarność) Dissident 1944–

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.

Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) Dissident 1946–

The dissident strategist who negotiated a peaceful transition with communist power

A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.

Raised in a communist family in Warsaw, he became a dissident after his imprisonment in the 1968 political crisis. As a strategist for the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and Solidarity, he participated in the 1989 Round Table talks, then as the founding editor of Gazeta Wyborcza led the election campaign and proposed the 'Your President, Our Prime Minister' formula that enabled a peaceful division of power with the communists. He later withdrew from politics to remain an influential journalist and liberal democratic voice.

Polish People's Party (PSL) Dissident 1946–2015 ○ Natural causes

A peasant leader who carried Rural Solidarity into pluralist politics

On 19 March 1981 in Bydgoszcz, he was beaten and taken to hospital during the crackdown on the farmers’ demand to legalize Rural Solidarity.

Roman Bartoszcze was a Polish farmer and opposition leader who carried the struggle to legalize an independent farmers' union into the agrarian politics of the post-communist era. He led the 1981 Bydgoszcz occupation that secured Rural Solidarity's registration and was interned under martial law, then became the first leader of the revived Polish People's Party and ran for president in 1990, before losing the party leadership in 1991 and founding a smaller conservative peasant party.

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.

Dissident 1953–

The tram driver who carried the strike beyond the shipyard

On 15 August 1980, she stopped her tram near the Baltic Opera, helping set Gdańsk’s public-transport strike in motion.

Henryka Krzywonos was a Gdańsk tram driver and trade-union activist who connected action inside the shipyard with workers across the city. On 15 August 1980 she stopped her tram, helping launch the public-transport strike and spread the news that encouraged solidarity action in other workplaces. She represented transport workers in the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, signed the August Agreement, and later aided internees and distributed underground publications during martial law. Her later work running a family children’s home and serving in parliament linked shop-floor action with care and institutional politics.