A sacked shipyard electrician climbed a fence and helped end communist Poland
In August 1980 Lech Wałęsa, an electrician fired from Gdańsk's Lenin Shipyard four years earlier, climbed over its fence to join a strike. Within weeks he had signed a landmark deal with an oversized pen on world television. Nine years later his movement, Solidarity, swept Poland's first partly free election in decades.
Wałęsa was born on 29 September 1943 in Popowo, in German-occupied Poland. His father, a carpenter held in a forced labour camp, came home after the war only to die two months later; his mother Feliksa is credited with forming his convictions. He qualified as an electrician in 1961, served two years in the army, reaching corporal, and started at the Lenin Shipyard in July 1967. He helped organise the illegal 1970 protests against food price rises, whose outcome, with more than 30 workers killed, hardened his belief in change. Fired in 1976 for union work, he spent years under secret police surveillance, repeatedly jobless and arrested.
A fresh price rise on 14 August 1980 triggered a strike he helped lead, and he soon chaired a committee coordinating Gdańsk with 20 other plants. The Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August granted the right to strike and to form an independent union. Solidarity grew to more than ten million members. When General Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981, Wałęsa was interned for 11 months, and the union was outlawed in 1982. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, but his wife Danuta collected it, since he feared he would not be allowed back into Poland.
Underground, his motto that Solidarity would not be divided or destroyed ran on every issue of the weekly Tygodnik Mazowsze. By 1989 the regime agreed to Round Table talks, where he informally led the opposition. The resulting election in June gave Solidarity every freely contested seat in the Sejm and all but one in the Senate; its winners were nicknamed Lech's team. That August he assembled the first non-Communist government in the Soviet Bloc, with Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime minister.
Elected president in 1990, the first Polish president chosen by popular vote, he oversaw the shift from state socialism to a market democracy before narrowly losing in 1995. Time made him Man of the Year for 1981, and Gdańsk's airport has carried his name since 2004.
Source: Lech Wałęsa
