Polish opposition reached a new stage in 1976. After a quiescent five years, in which living standards rose steadily, the authorities felt confident enough to raise basic meat prices by 50 per cent and other staples by 30 per cent. Despite careful preparations, the measures were emphatically rejected by Polish workers. After spontaneous nationwide protests, the prime minister appeared on television to state that the increases had merely been 'consultative’. Their withdrawal was an unprecedented admission by a Communist leader that workers now had the ability to veto a major policy.
As before, strike leaders and their supporters were dismissed or demoted. This time, however, a group of Warsaw intellectuals formed a Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR). They offered medical, financial and legal help to those being persecuted and to their families. In an 'Appeal to Society’, KOR declared that 'solidarity and mutual aid’ were the only means for social selfdefence against the arbitrary actions of the authorities.
KOR leaders set up an independent information network that escaped censorship. They published a thick factual bi-monthly Information Bulletin, modelled on the Russian dissident Chronicle of Current Events, to record and publicise all cases of government persecution and violence. These initiatives were extraordinarily successful. By the autumn of 1977, their original demands had been met. All those dismissed for the 1976 protests were released and reinstated, though sometimes to lesser positions. Rather than disband, as the authorities no doubt hoped, KOR then widened its agenda to cover all forms of persecution. It was renamed the Committee for Social Self-Defence (KSS).
The major innovation of KOR and its successor was that they acted openly. Its leaders signed their own names on public statements and listed their professions, addresses and home telephone numbers. While this information opened the authors to police repression, it also gave them greater credibility. In calling for civic courage, they showed the way themselves. They demonstrated to a wider public that Communist claims to subservience and obedience could be resisted. It became possible to say 'no’ to demands from the state. This theme was also being stated openly by the Polish Catholic Church.
After the election of a Polish pope, the first non-Italian for 455 years, the Church began to play a more active role in Polish political life. John Paul II devoted his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis to the dignity of man and the protection of human rights, 'which can be trampled on so easily and annihilated’. This heralded a Vatican Ostpolitik.
The pope’s first pilgrimage to his homeland (June 1979) became a massive festival in which the nation experienced itselfas a community. Twelve million Poles saw the pope in person and heard his cycle of thirty-two speeches and sermons. He called for an authentic dialogue between Church and state, while recognising their 'diametrically opposed concepts of the world’. Though tactful towards the Soviet Union, the papal message was clear: 'It is necessary to work for peace and understanding amongst peoples and nations of the whole world. It is necessary to seek reconciliation. It is necessary to open the borders.’
15. Strike at Gdarisk shipyard, 1980. Poland exemplified burgeoning East European resistance to Soviet domination. The Church played a key role in nurturing dissent.
Although thousands of Czechoslovak Catholics had been prevented from crossing the frontier to hear him, the pope addressed them: 'Remember, Father, all your Czech children.’ Broadening his message, he spoke to all the peoples of Eastern Europe - to Bulgarians, whose Prince Boris was baptised a century before any Poles, to Moravians and Ruthenians and others. He alluded to the 'forgotten and neglected nations’. 'There can be no just Europe,’ he said, 'without the independence of Poland marked on its map’. The divided continent needed to be reunited. The 'balance of forces’ might be changed without using force itself.
The pope told his congregations that the future of Poland would depend upon how many people were 'mature enough to become non-conformists’. Two million watched his departure from the Krakow meadows. The authorities had left stewarding of these vast gatherings to the Church itself. There had been a temporary suspension of the Communist state.
Emboldened by the visit, Polish oppositionists promulgated a Charter of Workers’ Rights. This document, with signatories from twenty-six towns and cities, including the founders of a Free Trade Union on the Baltic Coast, remonstrated against inequality and social injustice. The Charter called for institutions to defend working people. The official trades unions were failing in their mission. Moreover, workers were deprived of a basic instrument they needed for self-defence, the right to strike. Working people had to have the capacity to defend themselves, above all to form independent trades unions.328 These unions emerged much sooner than anyone expected. The greatest of all Polish strikes in August 1980 led to the birth of Solidarity.329
World History
