He Dared to Hope

(9 of 18)

consistently outmaneuvered the government team. Every evening, Walesa would climb the flower-covered main gate to give news of the talks to the crowd outside. His appearance was greeted by cheers and rousing choruses of Sto Lat (May He Live a Hundred Years). He responded with his actor's instincts, regaling his audience with jokes and raising his clenched fist in salute. Bantering with foreign journalists, he announced, "I am the leader. I am No. 1."

Firmness and patience paid off: the government team finally gave in on almost all of the workers' demands. In addition to the right to strike and form unions, the Warsaw regime granted concessions extraordinary in a Communist country, including reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks for the unions and the church. At a nationally televised ceremony, where strikers and government representatives stood side by side and sang the Polish national anthem, Walesa signed what became known as the Gdansk agreement with a giant souvenir pen bearing the likeness of John Paul II.

As workers rushed to join up at hastily improvised union locals across the country, Walesa and the other ex-strike leaders quickly found themselves at the head of a labor federation that soon grew to 10 million members—fully a quarter of the Polish population. Organizing and controlling the loosely knit federation, which was divided into 38 semiautonomous regional chapters, soon became a major challenge for Walesa and the national commission that he headed in Gdansk. The job was complicated by an almost insatiable drive for democracy among a rank and file that had no experience with the democratic process. Most of the Solidarity activists were young. They were both angry and exuberant: bitter over the party's moral and material bankruptcy, giddy with the sense of new-found power. Their impatience for change fed radical tendencies opposed to Walesa's moderation. And those currents would grow stronger as the months went by with no improvement in the country's economic situation.

Even more important than the organizational problems for Walesa and Solidarity was the question of defining policy and strategy. In the beginning, Walesa insisted that Solidarity should be a pure and simple labor movement, not a political opposition. On the day he showed up at a Gdansk apartment building to open Solidarity's first makeshift headquarters, a wooden crucifix under his arm and a bouquet of flowers in his right hand, Walesa told a crowd of reporters, "I am not interested in politics. I am a union man. My job now is to organize the union."

Matters would never again be quite that simple for him, although he began by winning an extraordinary concession from the government on a strictly labor matter: a five-day work week, granted on Jan. 31 after decades of six-day work weeks in Poland. But that only aggravated the economic crisis by further reducing production—especially in the coal-mining industry, whose output fell by nearly 10% in 1981. In addition, the country was soon swept by a spate of wildcat strikes over local issues. In some cases, Solidarity chapters were taking on the Communist Party bureaucracy by demanding the ouster of corrupt local officials or the conversion of party buildings to public hospitals.

For the first time, rank-and-file militants threatened to spin