I am from Gdansk [Poland]. I am a man connected to the old democratic political opposition of the 1970s. The first time I was arrested was in 1968. I was a secondary school student at the time. 1968, this was a year of huge student demonstrations. We demanded freedom of speech, the chance to read the things we wanted to read. That censorship be abolished. This student movement was crushed rather quickly. These were very extensive demonstrations.
The student demonstration in Gdansk on March 15 [1968] had 20,000 people. Gdansk became a focus of the nascent Solidarity movement [labor union formed by Gdansk ship builders] and the huge worker strikes for two reasons. For one thing, 10 years earlier, Gdansk was the scene of a worker rebellion in December of 1970. So this was 1970. The number of people who perished then was 42. These people were shot.
This was a lesson for all at the People’s University. They were shot in Gdansk – the TriCity [metropolitan area], also in Gdynia and in Szczecin [Polish cities], and some hundreds of kilometers away. So this was the primary thing – the awareness was much higher than in other places about the nature of communist rule, that was the one thing. And the other was that in Gdansk it was possible for us to create opposition groups, a group with a mixed intelligentsia-worker profile. I created one such group, which was something I spent several years working on.
Later that group started a strike, and later this strike led to the creation of Solidarity. Now, the nature of this group [the Lenin Shipyard strike leaders] is shown by the fact that this group, my group, gave rise to two presidents of Poland [Lech Walesa and Lech Kaczynski], one prime minister [Tadeusz Mazowiecki], and one speaker of the senate [Bogdan Borusewicz].
Bogdan Borusewicz is the Speaker (Marshal) of the Polish Senate. He was born in 1949 and studied history at the Catholic University of Lublin.
Under communism, Borusewicz was an ardent democracy activist. His career as a dissident started in high school, when he was arrested in 1968 for engaging with the opposition movement. In the 1970s, Borusewicz became involved with the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and the Free Trade Unions of the Coast, workers’ advocacy organizations that preceded the Solidarity independent trade union.
Borusewicz rose to prominence as the principal organizer of Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard strike in August 1980, which led to the formation of Solidarity. When martial law was declared in 1981, Borusewicz went into hiding for four years. During this time, he married fellow freedom activist Alina Pienkowska in secret. When Alina gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Kinga, Borusewicz attended her baptism in disguise for fear of being arrested by authorities. He was later arrested in 1986 and imprisoned for two years. After receiving amnesty, Borusewicz renewed his activism, serving as deputy leader of Solidarity in 1990 and 1991. He was elected to the lower house of parliament in 1990, where he served until 2001.
In 2005, he was elected to the Senate, where he was chosen by his colleagues to serve as Speaker (Marshal). In 2010, he served briefly as the interim Polish President after President Lech Kaczynski died.
Poland is a central European country bordered by the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland has a population of 38 million people; nearly 90 percent are Roman Catholic.
Poles struggled against foreign dominance from the 14th century and the modern Polish state is less than one hundred years old. Polish borders expanded and contracted through a series of partitions in the 18th century. After a brief period of independence and parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1939, World War II brought occupation by Nazi Germany and the near annihilation of the Jewish population. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland’s Jewish population went from over 3 million in 1933 to 45,000 in 1950.
After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite state and a communist system was imposed. Farms were collectivized, basic freedoms curtailed, and a culture of fear developed under a Stalinist regime. The 1960s brought greater prosperity and some liberalization. Labor protests in the early 1970s tested the communist government’s resolve and prompted modest reforms.
In 1978, Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century. The pope’s triumphant return to Poland in 1979 saw massive outpourings of public support, shaking the foundations of the government and inspiring the opposition to press for peaceful change.
In 1980, shipbuilders in the seaport city of Gdansk united to confront the government. Their calls for greater political liberties and improved working conditions developed into the Solidarity movement. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, became the movement’s voice. Protests and unrest spread throughout the country and the communists replaced their leadership. General Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister and declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was outlawed and Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned.
While martial law was lifted in 1983, Poland continued to stagnate. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 brought new pressures for reform in Poland. A failing economy and continued repression incited workers to a new wave of strikes in 1988. A desperate regime agreed to legalize Solidarity and conduct semi-free elections. In the 1989 parliamentary elections, Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and 160 of the 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in over four decades. In 1990, Lech Walesa was elected president with 74 percent of the vote. While Solidarity splintered as Poland democratized, a coalition government of anti-communist parties won fully free parliamentary elections in 1991.
Poland transitioned to a market economy and applied for integration into western institutions. Economic dislocation returned the former communists, now social democrats, to power in 1993. Free elections and peaceful transitions in the following decades solidified Poland’s multi-party democratic system. Reforms eventually led to a more robust economy and Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013, Poland earned the status “Free,” (as it has since 1990) receiving the best possible rankings in the categories Political Rights and Civil Liberties.
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