On September 17, 1980, delegates from the striking factories along the Baltic coast met at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk and voted to merge into one national union, Niezalezny Samorzadny Zwiazek Zawodowy Solidarnosc. Lech Walesa, an electrician at the shipyard and the strike leader, chaired it. The name was Solidarity. Within a year it had about ten million members, in a country of 35 million.
The strike had begun on August 14 at the shipyard, over the sacking of Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator and activist, five months before her pension. It was not the first strike that summer, but it was the one that did not end. The workers occupied rather than walked out, they let a strike committee do the talking, and they wrote down 21 demands, of which the first was the right to form free trade unions independent of the party. That was the demand the government could not grant and could not refuse without shooting.
The Gdansk agreement was signed on August 31, and it was the first document in the Soviet bloc to concede an independent union. The government got the strike ended and a promise to respect the leading role of the party. Solidarity got the right to strike, to organise and to publish. Its weekly had a print run of half a million.
What it was not was a political party, and that is what made it work. It had shipyard workers, doctors, farmers and intellectuals in one organisation, about a third of the workforce and a substantial share of the party's own members. It also had a papal election behind it: John Paul II, the Polish pope, had been elected in 1978 and had gone home in June 1979, and nine million people came out to see him.
The state ended it. On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, interned thousands, and outlawed Solidarity. It ran underground for the rest of the decade, funded partly by Western unions and the CIA. It was legalised again in April 1989, won every contested seat in the June election, and formed the first non-communist government in the Soviet bloc. Walesa was elected in 1990.