SOLIDARNOŚĆ, Twenty Years of History

Title: SOLIDARNOŚĆ, Twenty Years of History

Photographer(s): Various photographers

Writer(s): Antoni Dudek

Designer(s): Witold Wódka

Publisher(s): Polska Agencja Informacyjna, Warsaw, Poland

Year: 2000

Print run:

Language(s): English

Pages: 254

Size: 29 x 32,5 cm

Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket

Edition:

Print:

Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Poland, 1980 - 2000

ISBN: 978-8322326985

On 17 September 1980, the historic Polish trade union led by an electrician, Lech Wałęsa, was founded. With almost ten million members, it united the majority of the population against the communist regime. From that experience a rift was born in the country that still survives today.

Born in the Gdansk shipyards, Solidarność (‘solidarity’, in Polish) established itself, together with Václav Havel's Czechoslovak Charta ‘77, as the symbol of anti-communist and anti-Soviet resistance in Central and Eastern Europe.

Although it was already banned the year after its foundation by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the leader who imposed martial law in the country (1981-1983) and ruled until the final demise of Polish communism (1989), the movement grew to almost ten million members - about a quarter of the entire Polish population at the time.

Acting in semi-clandestinity for almost a decade, this Catholic-inspired force led by an electrician, Lech Wałęsa (Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1983), managed to unite the majority of the population against the regime. It proved to the nomenklatura and international observers that Poland was indeed a communist state, but not a communist nation.