Communism’s End Was Born in a Shipyard

GDANSK, Poland —  In the Gdansk shipyard, where a humble Polish electrician named Lech Walesa started a revolution 25 years ago, stands a mock food store offering a few pats of lard, some minced meat and vinegar. An old phone booth has an “Out of Order” sign, and a recorded woman’s voice warns users that the line is tapped.

The exhibit, in a shipyard that has become a shrine to communism’s victims, is meant to remind Poles how miserly and dysfunctional life used to be.

That era is fading into history. Nowadays Poles can own cell phones. They can say what they please, travel abroad, and elect whomever they like -- be it Walesa or his old communist foes, now back in power but refashioned into model democrats. Poland sends troops to help the Americans in Iraq. It belongs to NATO. Membership in the prosperous European Union has anchored the nation of 39 million firmly in the West.

Such is the vast arc of change Poland has experienced since the birth of the Solidarity movement 25 years ago Sunday, when Walesa led a shipyard strike that would last 18 days, plant the seeds for the death of the communist regime nine years later, and foreshadow the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Those were great days that changed the world,” says Walesa.

He’s 61 now, his face ruddy and his bushy trademark mustache trimmed and gray.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner who went on to be Poland’s president has been out of office for 10 years but is once again the center of international attention as Solidarity’s anniversary approaches.

He’s still a plain-spoken, casually dressed man, occasionally showing traces of the old irascibility that helped turn voters against him. “Next question, please!” He snaps after answering the previous one.

“In this place, in 1980, in a final way, we defeated communism in Poland, Europe and the world,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press in his spacious office a few blocks from the shipyard.

“I organized everyone, all professions, and attracted the cameras of the whole world. I told the world: ‘We don’t want them [the communists]. They don’t represent us. We don’t want communism!’ ”

The strike he led culminated in a historic accord with the government out of which arose Eastern Europe’s first independent workers’ movement.

It wasn’t the end of the affair, though. The following year Walesa went to jail as communist authorities imposed martial law. But the momentum proved unstoppable. In 1989, the communists were humiliated in Poland’s first semi-free election. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and across Eastern Europe, communist regimes collapsed one after another.

The 1980 accord was signed on Aug. 31, and this year on Aug. 29-31, international figures will attend 25th anniversary ceremonies in Gdansk and Warsaw, among them Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who led neighboring Czechoslovakia’s revolt out of communism and, like Walesa, became president.

As Poles celebrate, they do so in a country that feels it has reached home port after a long and stormy voyage.

Being overwhelmingly Catholic among Slavic Orthodox nations, and using the Latin alphabet rather than Cyrillic, Poles feel they have always belonged with the West and bristle at being called Eastern European.

They harbor old grievances -- against the Germans who brutally occupied Poland in World War II, against the Soviets whose proxies ruled them for 45 years, and against the wartime Allies who made the Kremlin’s takeover possible.

The rift with Russia has worsened lately, after Poland mediated an end to last year’s election crisis in Ukraine, clearly taking the side of the pro-Western, anti-Moscow camp of Victor Yushchenko.

Yushchenko, now president of Ukraine, will be among the guests at the Solidarity anniversary. No Russian officials have been invited.

The Ukraine dispute is widely thought to be the underlying motive for recent Russian slights against Poland, including President Vladimir Putin’s failure, during May ceremonies in Moscow marking the end of World War II, to mention Polish sacrifices against the Nazis.

The rancor was also evident in the Kremlin’s angry reaction when three sons of Russian diplomats were beaten up in Warsaw last month and robbed of their cell phones. Poland expressed regret but rebuffed Moscow’s demand for an official apology, saying the attack wasn’t political and Moscow was overreacting.

Still, Poland remains heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas. Moscow, Poles quip, could turn off all the lights in Poland if it so wished.

But while the nation can’t entirely escape the Russian shadow, it has worked hard to expunge the legacy. The former Lenin Shipyard of Gdansk is now the Gdansk Shipyard, having long ago dropped the name of the Soviet founding father. Gone are monuments to Soviet heroes. Streets are no longer named after Lenin and Karl Marx, but after Jan Pawel II -- John Paul II -- the pope whose 1979 pilgrimage to his native Poland was an early harbinger of the rise of Solidarity.

The legacy lingers, however, in the potholed roads, rattletrap streetcars and drab communist-era apartment blocks.

Not that capitalism has benefited everyone -- certainly not the 18% who are jobless. The economy is growing fast, but the wealth that is seen in shopping malls, luxury cars, sushi bars and classy wineries has not trickled much beyond the cities. Echoing a sardonic lament heard all over the former communist bloc, Poles say they used to have plenty of money and no luxuries to spend it on; now luxuries are abundant, but they can’t afford them.

The Gdansk shipyard, has also weathered rough times. Walesa’s government subsidized it until he was voted out and it eventually was declared bankrupt. The government owns 61% , the workers 31% , and the work force is down from 16,000 to 3,000.

It used to build ships primarily for the Soviet Union. Today, it has Germans, Americans and an Israeli among its customers.

The unemployment rate in the city of 460,000 is 12%, well below the national average, thanks to Gdansk’s oil refineries, international banks, and tourists flying into Gdansk Lech Walesa Airport to explore the Amsterdam-like center of the Baltic Sea city.

Solidarity itself today is a trade union like any other, rallying workers to demand higher pay and protest the layoffs ushered in by capitalism, including at Gdansk Shipyard. Walesa says he has grown estranged and plans to formally renounce his membership after the celebrations are over.

“They are so different,” he lamented. “I don’t fit into this Solidarity.”

The legacy of Solidarity’s close alignment with the Roman Catholic church has meant strict laws against abortion except in extreme cases -- a reversal from the communist era, when abortions were legal and frequent.

The result is between 80,000 and 200,000 illegal abortions per year, sometimes without anesthesia, said Wanda Nowicka, president of the Federation for Women and Family Planning.

“It’s a big paradox in history that when Poland gained freedom and democracy, women lost their reproductive rights,” she said.

A sign of Poland’s political maturity is the fate of Walesa himself, thrown out of office by voters who blamed him for economic hard times and judged him authoritarian.

“In the revolution, I win, but in democracy less so because people want me to bend,” Walesa said. “A typical revolutionary.”

But even if they have consigned Walesa to the political margins, Poles still honor him and haven’t forgotten what he stood for. They flock to the Gdansk shipyards, where they light candles and leave bouquets. The big steel gate is festooned with flowers and a crucifix.

To Beata Moczarska, 55, a microbiologist visiting from Warsaw, Gdansk matters to Poland as well as the rest of the former communist bloc “because everything started here. We felt we could be a free nation. We are very proud.”