Born: September 29, 1943, Popowo, Poland
Early days. His father, Boleslaw, a carpenter, was conscripted to dig ditches and died in 1946 from the exposure and beatings he suffered from the Nazis. His mother, Feliksa, seemed to have the most effect on Walesa. The parish priest remembers her as "the wisest woman in the parish." Young Walesa was only an average student at his parish school and after graduating from the state vocational school in Lipno, where he learned the electrician's trade, he worked as a car mechanic at a machine center from 1961 to 1965. Then he served in the army for two years, rose to the rank of corporal, and in 1967 was employed in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk as an electrician. In 1969 he married Danuta Gołoś, and the couple now has eight children.
Solidarity. He was a member of the illegal strike committee in Gdańsk Shipyard in 1970. After the bloody end of the strike, resulting in over 80 workers killed by the riot police, Wałęsa was arrested and convicted of "anti-social behavior", spending one year in prison. Following the riots Edward Gierek replaced Gomulka and promised to transform the standard of living of the Polish people through the deployment of foreign capital. In all, Gierek imported about $10 billion worth of modern capital goods. Then he wasted all of it in textbook cases of how not to run an economy. When Gierek finally increased prices in 1976, there were major riots in Radom and at the Ursus tractor factory. The brutal repression of these riots led to the formation of the committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), a precursor of Solidarity. The organization was the first significant link between the dissident intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and the workers who later founded the Solidarity trade union. In 1976 Wałęsa lost his job in Gdańsk Shipyard for collecting signatures for a petition to build a memorial for the killed workers. Due to his being on an informal blacklist, he couldn't find another job and earned his living by taking temporary jobs. In 1978, together with Andrzej Gwiazda and Aleksander Hall, he organized the illegal underground Free Trade Union of Pomerania (Wolne Związki Zawodowe Wybrzeża). He was arrested several times in 1979 for organizing an "anti-state" organization, but not found guilty in court and released at the beginning of 1980. On August 14, 1980, after the beginning of an occupational strike in the Lenin Shipyard of Gdansk, Wałęsa illegally scaled the wall of the Shipyard and became the leader of this strike which was spontaneously followed by similar strikes across Poland. Several days later he stopped workers who wanted to leave Gdańsk Shipyard, and persuaded them to organize the Strike Coordination Committee (Międzyzakładowy Komitet Strajkowy). Wałęsa was chosen as a chairman of this Committee. The authorities were forced to capitulate and to negotiate with Walesa the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980, which gave the workers the right to strike and to organize their own independent union. . The Catholic Church supported the movement, and in January 1981 Walesa was cordially received by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. Walesa himself has always regarded his Catholicism as a source of strength and inspiration. In the years 1980-81 Walesa traveled to Italy, Japan, Sweden, France and Switzerland as guest of the International Labor Organization.
Internment. In September 1981 Walesa was elected Solidarity Chairman at the First National Solidarity Congress in Gdansk. As the world watched and wondered if Soviet tanks would put an end to it all, Walesa and his fellow strikers stood their ground. Firmness and patience paid off; the government team finally gave in on almost all of the workers' demands. In addition to the right to strike and form unions, the Warsaw regime granted concessions extraordinary in a Communist country, including reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks for the unions and the church. As workers rushed to join up at hastily improvised union locals across the country, Walesa and the other ex-strike leaders quickly found themselves at the head of a labor federation that soon grew to 10 million members--fully a quarter of the Polish population. One of the key organizational problems for Walesa and Solidarity was the question of defining policy and strategy. In the beginning, Walesa insisted that Solidarity should be a pure and simple labor movement, not a political opposition. On the day he showed up at a Gdansk apartment building to open Solidarity's first makeshift headquarters, a wooden crucifix under his arm and a bouquet of flowers in his right hand. Walesa told a crowd of reporters, "I am not interested in politics, I am a union man. My job now is to organize the union." The country's brief enjoyment of relative freedom ended in December 1981, when General Jaruzelski elevated to party leadership in October 1981, fearing Soviet armed intervention among other considerations, imposed martial law, "suspended" Solidarity, arrested many of its leaders, and interned Walesa in a country house in a remote spot. In November 1982 Walesa was released and reinstated at the Gdansk shipyards. Although kept under surveillance, he managed to maintain lively contact with Solidarity leaders in the underground. While martial law was lifted in July 1983, many of the restrictions were continued in civil code. In October 1983 the announcement of Walesa's Nobel prize raised the spirits of the underground movement, but the award was attacked by the government press. Wałęsa donated the prize money to the Solidarity movement's temporary headquarters in exile (in Brussels).
Solidarity's tumultuous revolution had been gagged and shackled. No one could know if Warsaw's leaders would honor their pledge to restore the people's freedoms once "order" returned. But one thing was certain; the flame that was lighted in August 1980 had brightened all Poland, and Poles do not give up easily. In the words that emblazon the tomb of the venerated Marshal Pilsudski: "To be defeated and not to surrender, that's victory." Wałęsa's importance is clearly shown by the international recognition he received. He was featured in many international media and depicted on the cover of TIME magazine, January 4, 1982. All the while, the Kremlin watched with rising anxiety. Solidarity's very existence was incompatible with the Communist Party's monopoly of power. But perhaps even more important, the drive for democracy within the Polish party challenged the Leninist doctrine of centralized party discipline.
From 1987 to 1990 Wałęsa organized and led the "half-illegal" Temporary Executive Committee of Solidarity Trade Union. As they had done many times before, Polish workers reacted with angry protests. But this time something was different. This time the workers occupied the factories. In Gdansk's Lenin shipyard, protest seemed to be on the verge of dying out when a stocky man with a shock of reddish-brown hair and a handle-bar mustache clambered over the iron-bar fence and joined the strikers inside. They all knew Lech Walesa. His working-class Polish was rough and often ungrammatical: his voice was hoarse and rasping. His speeches were frequently riddled with mixed metaphors and skewed analogies. His real strength as a speaker was an ability to reduce complex issues to simple words and images that everyone could understand. Said one Solidarity official: "He knows his audience. He can sense what they want, and he is almost always right."
“Solidarity” re-established. In 1988 Wałęsa organized an occupational strike in Gdańsk Shipyard, demanding only the re-legalization of the Solidarity Trade Union. After eighty days the government agreed to enter into round-table talks in September. Wałęsa was an informal leader of the "non-governmental" side during the talks. During the talks the government signed an agreement to re-establish the Solidarity Trade Union and to organize "half-free" elections to Polish parliament. In 1989 Wałęsa organized and led the Citizenship Committee of the Chairman of Solidarity Trade Union. Formally it was just an advisory body, but practically it was a kind of a political party, which won parliamentary elections in 1989 (Opposition took all seats in the Sejm that were subject of free elections and all but one seats in the newly re-established senate; according to the Round Table agreements only members of the Communist Party and its allies could stand for the remaining 64% of seats in Sejm). While technically just a Chairman of Solidarity Trade Union at the time Wałęsa played a key role in Polish politics. At the end of 1989 he persuaded leaders from formally communist ally parties to form a non-communist coalition government- the first non-communist government in the Soviet Bloc. In November 1989 he became the third person in history, after the Marquis de Lafayette and Winston Churchill, to address a joint session of the United States Congress
Walesa becomes the President of Poland. On December 9, 1990 Wałęsa won the presidential election to become president of Poland. His style of presidency was strongly criticized by most of the political parties, and he lost most of the initial public support by the end of 1995. However, during his presidency Poland was completely changed, from an oppressive communist country under strict Soviet control and with a weak economy to an independent and democratic country with a fast growing free-market economy. Wałęsa lost the 1995 presidential election. In 1997 Wałęsa helped to organize a new party called "Solidarity Electoral Action" (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność) which won the parliamentary elections. However, his support was of minor significance and Wałęsa held a very low position in this party. Wałęsa again stood for the presidential election in 2000, but he received only 1% of votes. From that time on he has been lecturing on the history and politics of Central Europe at various foreign universities. In May 10, 2004, the Gdańsk international airport has been officially renamed to Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport to commemorate the famous Gdańsk citizen. His signature has been incorporated into the airport's logo. A month later, Wałęsa went to the U.S., representing Poland at the state funeral of Ronald Reagan. Apart from his Nobel Prize, Wałęsa received several other international prizes. Walesa has been granted many honorary degrees from universities, including Harvard University and the University of Paris. Other honors include the Medal of Freedom (Philadelphia, U.S.A.); the Award of Free World (Norway); and the European Award of Human Rights.
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Lech Walesa" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
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Walesa's speech (in Polish)
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