Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebestyen

Author:Victor Sebestyen [SEBESTYEN, VICTOR]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 2009-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

In April 1988 Jaruzelski did what all his Communist predecessors in Poland had done. He raised prices - by 40 per cent on most foods. Within weeks much of the country was at a standstill. The first strike, on 1 May, started in the bus and tram depot in the north-west city of Bydgoszcz, where workers demanded a 60 per cent pay rise. They spread rapidly. At the Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta, the giant sprawl- ing plant near Kraków, 15,000 men downed tools and demanded a 50 per cent wage increase. Security forces stormed the factory and detained around a dozen workers, as well as the Solidarity adviser Jacek Kuro. Strikes closed sixteen coal mines and the shipyard in Szczecin. Stoppages were being planned throughout the country’s transport network and at the Gdak plants.

The unrest revived Solidarity, which came through a period in the doldrums. Membership was less than half the nine million or so that it had been at the height of the union’s first flowering in 1980-81. Martial law and the following years of stagnation dashed people’s hopes and led to widespread apathy. Solidarity’s influence waned. The gnome-like features of Jerzy Urban, the face of Polish communism as press spokesman for Jaruzelski, was often to be heard calling Solidarity ‘a non-existent organisation’ and Lech Wałesa ‘the former head of a former trade union’ or ‘a private citizen’. Archbishop Glemp had told Vice President Bush, who visited Warsaw on a whistle-stop tour towards the end of 1987, that ‘Solidarity is a closed chapter in Polish history’.3

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