The Spirit of Solidarity

By Thomas A. Sancton

With caution and restraint, the opposition fights on

Lech Walesa was back in the spotlight last week, holding aloft a bouquet of flowers and basking in the cheers of 1,500 supporters gathered near the Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk. Four years ago, the outspoken electrician had scaled the shipyard gates and assumed the leadership of a strike that gave birth to Solidarity, the Communist bloc's first independent trade union. Solidarity was officially suspended in 1981, when the regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law and detained most of the union's leaders. But as Walesa and his fellow workers showed last Friday, the anniversary of the 1980 Gdansk agreement that legally recognized the union, the spirit of Solidarity was still alive.

With familiar chants of "Solidarnosc!"the crowd joined Walesa in defiantly flashing the V sign and singing the patriotic hymn God Who Watches Over Poland, as hundreds of grim-faced policemen looked on. But Walesa was seeking no showdown. After leaving his bouquet at the base of the monument to workers killed during antigovernment riots in 1970, he quietly thanked his supporters for coming and drove away.

The peaceful celebrations underscored the opposition's new mood of restraint in the wake of the government's decision last July to free 652 political prisoners. The Jaruzelski regime was taking a calculated risk in hopes of boosting its credibility at home and abroad. So far, the gamble has paid off: not only has the U.S. relaxed some of the sanctions it imposed after martial law, but the freed prisoners have shown little of the radicalism espoused during the heady days of Solidarity.

Their moderation is based partly on the need to take stock of new realities in Poland. Said Jacek Kuron, a leader of the dissident intellectual group KOR: "To make any political evaluations [now] would be irresponsible. The only perspective I have had is that of prison." Moreover, the sometimes bloody experience of martial law has taught dissidents the futility of opposing head-on a regime backed by tanks and guns. "We have learned our lesson," said Seweryn Jaworski, once the vice chairman of Solidarity's Warsaw-based Mazowsze chapter. "We will no longer play into their hands. We know we cannot beat them by gathering in the streets."

Although they have avoided overt confrontation, most of Solidarity's former leaders appear unwilling to abandon political activism. Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, the union's regional chairman for Lower Silesia from 1980 to 1981, disappeared for three days immediately following his release from prison. After resurfacing, he announced that he had been secretly conferring on future strategy with Zbigniew Bujak, Solidarity's fugitive Mazowsze branch leader. Possibly to hinder such activities, authorities last week detained Frasyniuk and Jozef Pinior, another former local union official, immediately after they laid flowers before a Solidarity commemorative plaque in Wroclaw. The pair were sentenced to two months' detention for disturbing public order. Dozens of others were briefly arrested at peaceful pro-Solidarity demonstrations around the country. Nonetheless, contacts among former activists have multiplied to the point where there is talk of holding a national summit to organize a "shadow cabinet" to monitor and comment on government actions.

Whether or not such a watchdog group materializes, the mere fact that men once locked up as subversives are meeting and planning again is symbolic of the new mood. Though rebuilding the old Solidarity as a spearhead of resistance is out of the question, its ideals are being put forward by those seeking government reforms. As Walesa said in a speech he prepared for, but did not deliver at, last week's anniversary, "We signed the social agreements believing in the good intentions of the other party. We were painfully disappointed . . . What about union pluralism? What about freedom of speech? What about lifting repression on matters of conscience?" Failing to satisfy the will of the people, Walesa declared, "brings on the threat of conflict."

But Walesa's warning did not herald a return to the mass strikes and street demonstrations of the old era. Underlying the oppositon's mood is an awareness that enduring reforms can be won only through a long, gradual process. Looking back on Solidarity's tumultuous beginning, Jaworski recalls sadly that "we tried to influence the authorities in too short a period of time. It was a mistake. There was too much euphoria too early in the days of Solidarity." Now, he feels, former union supporters show a greater willingness to work from within the system. Ultimately, they hope to become such an integral part of it that the Communist leadership will be forced to grant concessions to keep the economy working.

Yet the opposition movement is shunning party-controlled unions and institutions in favor of its own "parallel" programs, which bring it into direct contact with the population. The most successful of these has been a series of lectures on subjects such as Polish history and culture that are being conducted in churches throughout the country. Among the key targets: the young, some of whom were in grade school when Solidarity was founded; and peasants, who make up 43% of the population. Largely conservative by nature, Polish farmers can, according to the opposition, nonetheless be moved by arguments showing that state mismanagement was mainly responsible for the disastrous decline in the country's agriculture in the late 1970s and early '80s, and for its continuing problems today.

Despite its weakness on that score, the Jaruzelski government also has some grounds for optimism. The regime gained considerable confidence from the turnout at the June 17 regional and local elections, in which, according to official figures, some 75% of the voters went to the polls, despite calls for a boycott from Solidarity leaders. That electoral victory undoubtedly helped convince Jaruzelski, and his Soviet patrons, that the regime could at last afford to release the political prisoners.

Since then the authorities have made an ostentatious show of openness and reason, typified by Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski's televised debate last week with two former Solidarity members. Most viewers, however, quickly recognized the pair as apostates who had publicly recanted their allegiance to the union during the martial-law period. Nor have Warsaw's claims of liberalization persuaded the U.S. to lift its objections to Polish membership in the International Monetary Fund or to the restoration of Poland's most-favored-nation trading status. Both measures are crucial to the economic health and political stability of the regime.

--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by John Moody/Gdansk

With reporting by John Moody, Gdansk