(6 of 18)
In 1956 Polish workers rioted to protest food shortages. In 1968 Polish intellectuals protested censorship and other curbs on freedom. Seeking scapegoats for the rebellion, the government, conscious of Poland's notorious antiSemitism, launched an "anti-Zionist" campaign that forced many Jewish intellectuals, artists and officials to emigrate.
In 1970 the most bloody uprising until then flared in the port cities along the Baltic coast. The movement, touched off by price hikes, was centered in the Gdansk Lenin shipyard, where Walesa had begun to work as an electrician in 1967.
For the first time, Walesa showed that he really was a natural rebel and leader, although even then he displayed his instinctive fear of going too far. When his fellow workers from the Lenin shipyard occupied the first floor of police headquarters, Walesa persuaded a crowd of 20,000 not to attack the nearby prison. Later, as the protests continued in the streets, Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka's police and army units opened fire. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of workers died; the figures have never been authenticated.
To this day, Walesa fears that he did not lead his fellow workers with enough vigor or wisdom in 1970. What inspired him during the rebellion that began in August 1980 was, he says, "the blood of the workers who had put their trust in me. It was my stupidity in not taking it to victory that time. I wanted to improve on myself."
In the wake of the 1970 riots, Gomulka was replaced by Edward Gierek, a former coal miner who had earned a good reputation for improving life in his fiefdom around the steel and coal center of Katowice in southern Poland. Gierek promised dramatic gains in the nation's standard of living, mainly through a massive influx of foreign investment. Instead he destroyed the economy, and it was that which proved to be the fulcrum of Poland's crisis. The disintegrating economy helped create Solidarity, and it remains the essential problem for General Jaruzelski.
Gierek had the instincts of a high-rolling capitalist. His decision to borrow heavily abroad to finance an expansion of heavy industry was based on the optimistic, and naive, theory that new factories, using the best equipment and techniques, would turn out products that would be sold to cancel the debts. 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. For example, he put nearly $1 billion into developing and producing a light tractor designed by Massey-Ferguson and made at a gigantic new Ursus tractor facility near Warsaw. But it turned out that the company was not licensed to sell its products in the West and that, moreover, they were too expensive to be sold in the East. Besides, most Polish farm equipment did not fit the tractor. Result: production of about 500 tractors a year instead of the expected 75,000.
Gierek also made a deal with the RCA Corporation and the Corning Glass Works to build a color television factory outside Warsaw that was supposed to turn out 600,000 sets in 1981. Result: some 50,000 were produced this year, mainly because of bad management and a shortage of parts. Says