I had not known Lech Walesa before. I do not think I had ever heard his name. There were other people in KOR who had heard, but I did not. [Bogdan] Borusewicz knew him. Most likely Jan Litynski had heard of him. I don’t know if [Jacek] Kuron had or not. [Lech Walesa was the cofounder of the Solidarity Independent Trade Union and president of Poland from 1990 – 1995. Bogdan Borusewicz was a leading figure in the Polish opposition and a key architect of the Solidarity movement and a prominent post-communist politician. View his Freedom Collection interview here. Jan Litynski was a writer and opposition activist who late became a prominent politician. Jacek Kuron was a Polish historian who became a leading figure of the opposition and a prominent politician after the fall of communism. The Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) was an anti-communist underground civil society organization in the 1970s, formed to provide assistance to laborers and others persecuted by the government. Many of Solidarity’s leaders were also active in KOR.]
When the [1980] strike broke out in Gdansk among the people involved with the Educational Course Association, which I was busy organizing, between Stefan Amsterdamski, Tadeusz Kowalik, Bronisław Geremek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki – an idea was born to sign an appeal to [both] the authorities and to the striking workers. [Stefan Amsterdamski was philosopher and Solidarity activist. Tadeusz Kowalik was an economist and Solidarity activist. Bronisław Geremek was a Polish historian and politician who served as Foreign Minister after the fall of communism. Tadeusz Mazowiecki was a leader of Solidarity who became the first post-communist prime minister in 1989.]
An appeal for a conversation, for a dialogue. But in reality this was not about the strikers and was not about the authorities – in reality this was about broadening the gray zone between the strikers and the authorities. To tie the authorities’ hands in their initial moment of fury, when these people are out on strike, to extend their period of uncertainty about how to react. Later events, that story has already been written, these people became the advisers. Geremek and Mazowiecki went over there and became their advisers; we assisted them; we sent the various expert opinions to Gdansk. But sometime at the end, toward the middle of September, when Solidarity – you know, the strikes were over, et cetera; it became clear that the central headquarters of Solidarity will be in Gdansk and not in Warsaw.
And it was also clear, especially to the Solidarity experts, our experts like Geremek and Mazowiecki, who knew the Strike Committee, who knew Walesa and knew Gdansk, so it became obvious to them that in Gdansk you would have to locate a cell, a group of people which would serve up intellectual assistance, expert opinions, to the committee, to the Founding Committee in Gdańsk, the former Strike Committee, now the Founding Committee that was effectively in charge of all of Solidarity throughout the country.
So this was offered initially to Waldemar Kuczynski, that he should go over there and set up such a team; he refused, then this position was offered to Ryszard Bugaj. [Kuczynski and Bugaj were leading Solidarity activists.] He refused as well, and then it was offered to me and I did not refuse. After three days in Gdansk, I was invited to the sessions of the Committee Board – there were 20 other people there, with maybe two or three women and the rest were all guys. This board was in session every single day, in a room filled with cigarette smoke, surrounded by several dozen people milling about, with ungodly noise and disorder, for seven or eight hours a day. Meanwhile on the other side of a cardboard-thin door there was a revolution going on. They were completely oblivious to the fact that they were simply wasting their time.
So once or twice I made that remark, from off in the sidelines, that in this noise and static nothing could be accomplished. That there has to be an agenda, there has to be a chairperson, that we have to be aiming for some conclusions, and that a session cannot last for seven or eight hours every day. So then Walesa asked me to start chairing the sessions. After a few days or so I was named Secretary of the Board of the Founding Committee of Solidarity. I had this really good thing going for me that everyone trusted me in that room for some unknown reason. And right off the bat, a conflict ensued between the church and the KOR, so to speak and in quotations. For those who were on the side of KOR – I was their friend because I was a KOR man. For the Church I was a friend primarily because I had studied at the KUL [Catholic University of Lublin], and secondly because the local guru – a Catholic bishop man – as dull a man as you could imagine – had confused my last name of Celinski with that of [Bohdan] Cywinski and I did not straighten him out.
After 3 or 4 weeks, my position was so strong that it did not matter any longer whether I was a KOR man or a Church man – it no longer mattered.
Andrzej Celinski was born on February 26, 1950, in Warsaw, Poland. Celinski graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in social sciences. After graduation, he became actively involved in several opposition movements including the Workers’ Defense Committee and Solidarity.
Celinski began organizing protests against Poland’s communist regime at an early age. As a teenager in 1966, he rallied thousands of people gathered for a High Holy Mass at Saint John’s Cathedral for a peaceful, anti-government march to the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw. Celinski joined the 1968 and 1970 protests that were suppressed by the government.
Following the 1980 Lenin Shipyard strike in Gdansk, Celinski was tapped as an expert advisor to the Founding Committee of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the communist bloc. Soon after, the members of the committee recognized his ability for organization and appointed him the secretary of the board of the Founding Committee. In this position, Celinski was tasked with structuring and organizing the body’s meetings. When authorities declared martial law and officially banned Solidarity in December 1981, Celinski was arrested for his activism and spent a year in prison.
After the fall of communism in Poland, Celinski was elected as a senator from Solidarity and served from 1989 to 1993. Celinski was then elected to parliament where he served for over a decade, including a stint as minister of culture from 2001 to 2002 in Prime Minister Leszek Miller’sgovernment.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrzejCeliski1
Poland is a central European country bordered by the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland has a population of 38 million people; nearly 90 percent are Roman Catholic.
Poles struggled against foreign dominance from the 14th century and the modern Polish state is less than one hundred years old. Polish borders expanded and contracted through a series of partitions in the 18th century. After a brief period of independence and parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1939, World War II brought occupation by Nazi Germany and the near annihilation of the Jewish population. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland’s Jewish population went from over 3 million in 1933 to 45,000 in 1950.
After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite state and a communist system was imposed. Farms were collectivized, basic freedoms curtailed, and a culture of fear developed under a Stalinist regime. The 1960s brought greater prosperity and some liberalization. Labor protests in the early 1970s tested the communist government’s resolve and prompted modest reforms.
In 1978, Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century. The pope’s triumphant return to Poland in 1979 saw massive outpourings of public support, shaking the foundations of the government and inspiring the opposition to press for peaceful change.
In 1980, shipbuilders in the seaport city of Gdansk united to confront the government. Their calls for greater political liberties and improved working conditions developed into the Solidarity movement. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, became the movement’s voice. Protests and unrest spread throughout the country and the communists replaced their leadership. General Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister and declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was outlawed and Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned.
While martial law was lifted in 1983, Poland continued to stagnate. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 brought new pressures for reform in Poland. A failing economy and continued repression incited workers to a new wave of strikes in 1988. A desperate regime agreed to legalize Solidarity and conduct semi-free elections. In the 1989 parliamentary elections, Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and 160 of the 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in over four decades. In 1990, Lech Walesa was elected president with 74 percent of the vote. While Solidarity splintered as Poland democratized, a coalition government of anti-communist parties won fully free parliamentary elections in 1991.
Poland transitioned to a market economy and applied for integration into western institutions. Economic dislocation returned the former communists, now social democrats, to power in 1993. Free elections and peaceful transitions in the following decades solidified Poland’s multi-party democratic system. Reforms eventually led to a more robust economy and Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013, Poland earned the status “Free,” (as it has since 1990) receiving the best possible rankings in the categories Political Rights and Civil Liberties.
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