So then 1976 rolled about, with the food price hikes in June. [Large demonstrations erupted in several Polish cities when the government dramatically raised prices on basic foods. The government responded with a violent crackdown.] And here we come to the beginnings of the history of KOR. [The Workers’ Defense Committee 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.]
One thing we need to add is that one significant external circumstance to this was the Helsinki Accords process. [The Helsinki Accords were an international treaty signed by 35 countries in 1975. They guaranteed basic human rights and promoted cooperation between the Soviet bloc and western nations. Dissidents and activists in the communist countries used their governments’ signatures to the treaty to advocate for freedom and human rights.] Namely, Leonid Brezhnev [General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1964 to 1982.], or in particular the Soviet Union in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s had tried breaking apart the now uniting Europe – the EEC [European Economic Community, predecessor to the European Union] – through local Communist parties: through the Communist parties in Western Europe. In fact, in the 1950s as well.
As an example, various Communist parties of the Eastern Bloc would virtually finance the Communist parties of Western Europe. So now I think we have reached the KOR times now because we are at 1976. I think the important thing is that the Russians had changed their tactics by then. And so when they saw that it was impossible to bust apart the West by use of the communists, the Communist parties there, they tried to draw into a mutual political process the United States, Canada, and especially the countries of Western Europe – as part of the Helsinki Process. I will not recount this in detail; since this is a well-known story – they lost that bid.
They miscalculated, the Third Basket toppled their objectives. [The Helsinki Accords covered a wide variety of issues, divided into “baskets.” The Third Basket dealt with a range of human rights issues, including freedom of expression and the right to emigrate. By signing the Helsinki Accords, the communist governments committed themselves to respecting these rights.] Now, for our part, we chose the tactic of not notifying the authorities about our activities, within our organization, and resting [our platform] directly upon constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
We did not ask the authorities to approve our organizing effort because then they would have refused, but without notifying the authorities that we were self-organizing, and by standing directly on constitutional rights, we created a situation under the umbrella of the Helsinki Process which was quite uncomfortable for the authorities. Because on the one hand these were already existing organizations. And, you know, for Communists, a self-organizing society is an abomination, something outlandish. And on the other hand, they were hard-pressed to really assault us because of their obligations under the Helsinki Process.
So they were reduced to sort of tugging at us, but this was something incomparably less than the situation from previous decades, for instance from the 1950s. So therefore this Helsinki umbrella added significance because effectively, authorities had tied their own hands with their activities in the international arena. Of course this was accompanied by the entire, so to say, complex international political game. A Russia that was aging, and was not keeping up – especially later in the 1980s things was absolutely crumbling, it was breaking up under the stress of the arms race.
This search for – Russia was searching for – I did some research on this later, recently, actually, in documentation, which for instance indicates that the Russians, the Soviets, were searching for some manner of detente with the West starting already back in 1953. They thought they would outwit the West, this was their conception of political power, which held that political authority has much more loyalty to its own self than it does to its people. And therefore they would meet with understanding in the West as one political power to another political power. That in return for a commercial exchange, in return for lowering the fear of nuclear annihilation, in return for the loosening up of certain threats in state to state relations, so to speak, they will obtain acquiescence in their own internal policies. And they miscalculated.
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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