[Mb-civic] Solidarity Remembered - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Solidarity Remembered

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; Page A23

Walk down Long Market Street, past the shops selling amber beads and 
cavalry swords, through the medieval gates of the city of Gdansk, 
Poland. Cross the highway, head toward the shipyard and look up. When I 
did so a few days ago, I saw an enormous billboard featuring a list of 
cities: "Gdansk. Budapest. Prague. Berlin. Bucharest. Sofia. Kiev." The 
list makes it clear that the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strikes, which broke 
the state's monopoly of power in the Soviet bloc and created the 
independent Solidarity trade union, set the pattern for the democratic 
revolutions that rolled across Eastern Europe in 1989 and that continue 
to roll across the nations of the former Soviet Union today.

Walk a little farther and you'll come to the shipyard itself. To mark 
the 25th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, a small exhibit has 
been installed. Somewhat oddly, the entrance leads through the hull of a 
ship, festooned with a not entirely comprehensible "multimedia" exhibit. 
More evocative are the black-and-white photographs. Some feature the 
strike leader Lech Walesa, signing the Solidarity agreement with 
Poland's communist leaders. Most show crowd scenes: thousands of 
shipyard workers praying, talking or sprawled out on the ground, passing 
the time during the two-week strike.

But what is most interesting about the billboard and the exhibit, along 
with the multiple conferences, concerts and celebrity speeches taking 
place in Gdansk this week, is the fact that they are happening at all. 
Until recently, it wasn't easy to find public displays of pride in 
Poland's democratic revolution. Five years ago, on the 20th anniversary 
of the founding of Solidarity, giant screens set up to relay celebratory 
speeches to the citizens of Gdansk attracted no more than 50 or 60. Far 
from seeing themselves as part of a peaceful revolution that stretched 
from Gdansk in 1980 to Kiev in 2004, most Poles associated the collapse 
of communism with corrupt politics and personal hardship.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001550.html
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