In August 1980, Lech Wałęsa, an electrician and worker dissident, scaled the walls of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk in order to join his angry co-workers. Workers throughout Poland were striking against the incompetent and unjust policies of the communist regime. They demanded economic justice and human rights, and trade unions independent of the Polish United Workers (i.e., communist) Party. The strikers hung pictures of Our Lady of Częstochowa and of Pope John Paul II on the gates of the Lenin Yards. These powerful religious and patriotic symbols broadcast to a mesmerized world precisely where the authentic values and popular convictions of Polish society lay. The strikers lined up to confess to Catholic priests, and scorned the party bureaucracy. After nearly thirty-five years in power, the communist party-state had failed to win the allegiance of the very class that it claimed to represent. When the Gdańsk Agreement was signed on August 31, 1980, this ideological defeat was publicly acknowledged. The party-state admitted that “labor union operations” had not come up to worker expectations, and conceded to the workers the organization of “new, self-governing unions, as authentic representatives of the working class.”

The subsequent establishment of NSZZ Solidarność (Independent, Self-governing, Free Trade Union—Solidarity) on September 17, 1980, was a new stage in the non-violent struggle for human rights within the Soviet Empire. The mere existence of Solidarity, which rapidly grew to nearly 10,000,000 members, and of rural Solidarity, with another 3,000,000 followers, threatened communist rule in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet Empire. The imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981, by General Wojciech Jaruzelski was an attempt to stem the tide, to crush Solidarity, and to restore the old order. President Ronald Reagan of the United States protested by imposing economic sanctions in a calibrated effort to compel Warsaw to abolish martial law and to restore Solidarity and human rights. Finally, in 1989, faced with a permanently failing economy, with an opposition supported by the Polish Diaspora and western trade unions and governments, and with Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost, Jaruzelski agreed to the re-legalization of Solidarity and to postwar Poland's first semi-free elections.