Edward Gierek
Edward Gierek was a miner who had spent twenty years in French and Belgian pits, took over Poland from Gomułka after the shootings of December 1970, asked the shipyard workers whether they would help him and was told yes, borrowed twenty billion dollars from the West to buy the consumer goods and the factories that were to pay for themselves, and was removed in September 1980 as Solidarity was born in the same shipyards; the debt was still being paid in 2012. He was born in 1913 in the Silesian coalfield, was taken to France at ten when his widowed mother emigrated, went down the pit at thirteen, joined the French communist party and was deported for organising a strike, and spent the war in the Belgian mines and the resistance. He came home in 1948, rose through the party in Katowice, ran Silesia from 1957 as a fief with better shops and a reputation for getting things built, and was the man the politburo turned to when the coast rose. He went to Szczecin and Gdańsk in January 1971 and talked to the strikers for nine hours, which no one had done, and the recording of a worker answering his question with pomożemy, we will help, became the regime's slogan. The programme was growth on credit. There was the Fiat plant, the Katowice steelworks, the Gdańsk refinery, a highway, wages up forty per cent in five years and the shops full of what the loans bought. The oil shock and the plan's own waste ended it, and when he raised food prices in June 1976 the workers of Radom and Ursus struck and were beaten, which produced the Workers' Defence Committee and the alliance of intellectuals and workers that made Solidarity possible. The pope came in June 1979 and Gierek received him. The strikes of August 1980 began over a sacked crane operator at the Lenin shipyard and ended with the Gdańsk agreement and a free trade union; the party removed him on 6 September, citing a heart attack. The Jaruzelski regime interned him with the people he had governed when martial law came. He died in 2001 in Cieszyn, and the polls of the 2000s put him among the best-regarded leaders Poland had had, for the decade the money lasted.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: politician, party_leader
