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If any one event created the psychological climate in which Solidarity emerged, it was the visit of John Paul to his homeland in June 1979. From the moment that the Pope knelt in Warsaw's airport to kiss the ground, he was cheered wildly by millions of Poles. John Paul never criticized the Communist regime directly, nor did he have to: his meaning was plain enough. "The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man," he told an enormous outdoor congregation in Warsaw. With that hardly veiled allusion to Communism, a deafening roar of approval filled the great city square. Says a Polish bishop of that day: "The Polish people broke the barrier of fear. They were hurling a challenge at their Marxist rulers."
The spark that ignited Solidarity's revolution was a government decree that raised meat prices in July 1980. 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. Still, the movement had no focus. 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 handlebar mustache clambered over the iron-bar fence and joined the strikers inside. They all knew Lech Walesa. He was an unemployed electrician, fired eight months earlier for trying to organize an independent trade union.
Walesa took charge and became the head of an interfactory strike committee that eventually became the bargaining representative for most of the 500,000 strikers, from the Baltic to the coal-mining heartland of Silesia, who had joined the revolt. Led by Walesa, the committee launched a bold set of political demands, including the right to strike and form free unions, that were unheard of in Communist countries and that authorities at first refused even to discuss.
Meanwhile, the Lenin shipyard was becoming the emotional center of an extraordinary national movement. Festooned with flowers, white-and-red Polish flags and portraits of Pope John Paul II, the plant's iron gates came to symbolize that heady mixture of hope, faith and patriotism that sustained the workers through their vigil. As the world watched and wondered if Soviet tanks would put an end to it all, Walesa and his fellow strikers stood their ground. Like soldiers before battle, they confessed to priests and received Communion in the open shipyard. To reduce the risk of violence, Walesa called for a ban on alcohol and insisted on strict discipline. Through it all, his plucky courage and infectious good humor helped keep up the workers' spirits.
Walesa also proved adept at hard bargaining once the Gierek government, afraid that the rebellion would spread, finally agreed to negotiate. Meeting face to face across a wooden table in the shipyard's conference hall in August of 1980, Walesa and his fellow strikers