When was polish solidarity

Their faith in change was predicated on the fact that they were doing something. After the imposition of martial law and the banning of Solidarity, faith could be hard to maintain. But in its religious manifestation, faith played an important role: the Catholic Church, under the leadership of the Polish Pope John Paul II, supported the fight against Communism, and encouraged the United States government to secretly subsidize Solidarity in its underground years.

The Polish American community also played an important role in pushing the United States to support Polish dissidents, as Walesa acknowledged through an interpreter in a interview with Chicago Tonight.

Watch it below. Martial law ended in , and Solidarity and other dissidents continued to work underground to overthrow the Communist regime, always through nonviolent means.

The economy continued to falter, especially under international condemnation for the repression of Solidarity, and prices were raised again in and In , the government took the unprecedented step of asking in a vote what types of financial reforms citizens preferred, but the options were all rejected.

It was the first free election in any Soviet country. The Communists were eventually forced to accept the overwhelming vote, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first post-Communist Prime Minister in August, View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Search WTTW:. On December 13, , the dream of freedom had by the Poles a year before was dashed.

The government imposed martial law, a state that continued until , and dramatically restricted civil liberties. Some 10, dissidents were detained, and dozens were killed. Solidarnosc had to go underground and was not allowed to register again until Read more: Former Polish President Walesa did help secret police, experts say.

The situation in Poland at the time provoked very mixed reactions from Western countries. The then German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt of the center-left Social Democrats SPD , saw martial law in the neighboring country as a stabilizing factor. But the USA and Britain both condemned its imposition. The anti-communist opposition in Poland received a boost from Norway in , when Walesa, in prison at the time, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The democracy movement associated with the independent trade union Solidarnosc has now become a founding myth of present-day Poland. When Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says that "today's Poland has grown from Solidarnosc," he is speaking for all Poles, regardless of their political orientation. That is because Solidarnosc brought together people from many different parts of the political spectrum, from right to left.

Read more: Former Polish presidents say government 'demolishing' democracy. And it is precisely because of this that it is often a bone of contention among present-day Polish politicians. In the almost five years since the national-conservative Law and Justice party has been in power, those people from Solidarnosc who are politically in line with the government are held up as heroes at official ceremonies and cultural events.

Walesa, who was Poland's president from to , is not one of them; he has often sharply criticized the anti-liberal policies of the PiS government. Walesa is a thorn in the flesh of the PiS. In government-friendly media, he has been mostly depicted as an agent of the communist Security Service, a secret police and intelligence agency along the lines of the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB.

In , documents were found pointing to his collaboration with the former secret police. Walesa is said to have been pushed into this collaboration in when he was arrested with some other workers during anti-government protests in Gdansk. But by the end of the s, before he joined the opposition movement, his contacts to the communist secret service had ended.

The debate on whether Walesa was a hero or a traitor, and whether his later achievements canceled out his guilt, still divides Poland. This year's commemorations of the foundation of Solidarnosc will be overshadowed by the dispute as they are every year. Prosecutors will seek to establish whether anti-communist hero Lech Walesa's handwriting matches the signatures of a purported communist-era agent.

Over the next several years, as the Polish economy stagnated, strikes occurred at various enterprises throughout the country. The increasing dependence of the Polish economy on western debt financing and the election in of the Polish cardinal, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II emboldened worker-activists and put the Polish Communist authorities on the defensive.

The immediate precipitant for the strikes that broke out in the summer of and led to the formation of Solidarity in August was a government decree raising meat prices. Over the next sixteen months, Solidarity and the Polish government engaged in a series of confrontations and negotiations, but without any clear resolution.