Lech Walesa, the fly, feisty, mustachioed electrician from Gdansk, shaped the 20th century as the leader of the Solidarity movement that led the Poles out of communism. It is one of history’s great ironies that the nearest thing we have ever seen to a genuine workers’ revolution was directed against a so-called workers’ state. Poland was again the icebreaker for the rest of Central Europe in the “velvet revolutions” of 1989. Walesa’s contribution to the end of communism in Europe, and hence the end of the cold war, stands beside those of his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II, and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Walesa’s life, like those of Gorbachev and the Pope, was shaped by communism. Born to a family of peasant farmers in 1943, he came as a young man to work in the vast shipyards that the communist state was developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of workers’ protests in the 1970s and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age 37, to join the occupation strike. With his electrifying personality, quick wit and gift of the gab, he was soon leading it. He moved his fellow workers away from mere wage claims and toward a central, daringly political demand: free trade unions. When the Polish communists made this concession, which was without precedent in the history of the communist world since 1917, the new union was christened Solidarnosc . Soon it had 10 million members, and Walesa was its undisputed leader. For 16 months they struggled to find a way to coexist with the communist state, under the constant threat of Soviet invasion. Walesa–known to almost everyone simply as Lech–was foxy, unpredictable, often infuriating, but he had a natural genius for politics, a matchless ability for sensing popular moods, and great powers of swaying a crowd. Again and again, he used these powers for moderation. He jokingly described himself as a “fireman,” dousing the flames of popular discontent. In the end, martial law was declared. Walesa was interned for 11 months and then released. Yet Solidarity would not die, and Walesa remained its symbol. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. With support from the Pope and the U.S., he and his colleagues in the underground leadership of Solidarity kept the flame alight, until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin brought new hope. In 1988 there was another occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which Walesa again joined–though this time as the grand old man among younger workers. A few months later, the Polish communists entered into negotiations with Solidarity, at the first Round Table of 1989. Walesa and his colleagues secured semifree elections in which Solidarity proceeded to triumph. In August, just nine years after he had climbed over the shipyard wall, Poland got its first non-communist Prime Minister in more than 40 years. Where Poland led, the rest of Central Europe soon followed–and the Soviet Union was not far behind.
