Lech Walesa
Lech Wałęsa was an electrician at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk who founded the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc and became president of Poland. Born in 1943 in a village under German occupation, he trained as an electrician, and was working in the shipyard in December 1970 when strikes over food prices were put down by the army with dozens killed. He was dismissed in 1976 for collecting money for the families of the dead and blacklisted, and spent four years in casual work and under surveillance. The strike of August 1980 began over the sacking of a crane operator, and Wałęsa climbed the shipyard fence to join it. What he did next was the decisive move. When the management conceded the local demands, he persuaded the strikers to continue in solidarity with other factories, and the interfactory committee that resulted turned a wage dispute into a national movement demanding the right to organise. The Gdańsk agreement in August created Solidarity, which had ten million members within a year — a quarter of the population. Martial law was declared in December 1981 and Wałęsa was interned for eleven months. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and did not go to collect it, fearing he would not be let back in. The round table talks of 1989 produced partly free elections that Solidarity won overwhelmingly, and the bloc unravelled from there. He was president from 1990 to 1995, was a difficult one, and lost. His later years have been taken up by the accusation that he informed for the security service in the early 1970s under the codename Bolek, which he denies and which documents released in 2016 support to a degree that Poles still argue about. It has not much altered what August 1980 achieved.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: trade_union_leader, activist, head_of_state
