Walentynowicz leads new protest against the regime WHEN THE workers in the Gdansk shipyards began their strike in my defence and against my sacking five years ago, I never imagined that this would be the trigger of a vast historical process. It was not my doing. It is God who made use of me and made me the detonator of the strike. But today, five years later, after the period of Solidarnose's legal existence, after the state of emergency, and in the middle of a period of repression and political trials, I view the future of Poland with alarm. We live in a difficult period, full of bitterness. Life is especially hard for us women. The standard of living is declining dramatically; shortages are a constant source of worry; the interminable queues are turning our lives into a hell on earth ...'
This was Solidarnose's Anna Walentynowicz speaking. Here she was attempting to explain why for her, the struggle which she sparked off in August 1980 should not be allowed to die.
had "new features," at least in its form (cf. Le Monde of June 13, 1985), should be reminded that the formulas are exactly the same as those in Malenkov's reports 32 years ago! That was immediately after the death of Stalin. You can find them as well in the speeches of Kosygin in the second half of the 1960s.
(The second part of this article will analyze the reforms proposed by Gorbachou and the state of the Soviet economy.] 1. This did not prevent General Jaruzelski from cooly telling the French Communist Party paper 'Humanite' (see the June 3, 1985, issue): "Our state assures its citizens more social benefits of a higher quality than the biggest and richest capitalist countries. " That's not just bureaucratic pretences, it's a total lack of shame. 2. The following story is going around in Moscow. Gorbachou was invited to banquet given by high dignitaries of the regime. He asked what the cost of the festivities was. The officials were distinctly unhappy about that and took their time in adding it up but, nonetheless, they finally came up with a figure. Gorbachou divided it by the number of guests and proposed that they ask fifty roubles from each person present.
Now, fifty roubles roubles is a is a quarter of a worker's monthly wages. The quarter of a worker's wages for a month for one meal for a bureaucrat! Moreover, fifty roubles a onth is the entire monthly pension for most of the 51 million retired persons in the USSR. That is a good index of the privileges of the bureaucracy in the country. It is hardly necessary to add that at such a banquet, a lot of the food consumed would be unobtainable for workers, even if they had the money to buy them, Trotuky wrote, when there is scarcity there has to be a cop to watch the lines a cop to watch the lines of the stores, and the bes first.
ARTHUR WILKINS
She continued: I am convinced that this is a period of transition, but it is also a period of great tests of human character. The Polish people as a whole must go through this test of strength. As women we know the value of life and how to safeguard it. We want peaceful reforms which guarantee a better future. It is up to us women to tell the truth about our daily lives and to testify to the way in which the joy and the beauty of life is snatched away from us. We are all worn out by hard work, crushed and consistently harassed. We are ruled by standards that we don't agree with ... For this reason I call on all people of good will and especially women to take up more vigorous activity and to protest against the life which those who rule are imposing on us.'
This demonstrates how Walentynowicz is still a rebel, still devoted to the interests of the working class and at the same time still a devout, even Messianic, Christian. For eight months she has been leading a rotating hunger strike in the church of Biezanow, near Cracow. Formerly a solderer at the Lenin Shipyards and the heroine of August 1980, Walentynowicz always seizes the initiative whenever the movement in Poland is not living up to its responsibilities or is in retreat.
Outside the control of the Solidarnose structures and prefering to address herself directly to the masses in order to make them move, Walentynowicz was forced out of the regional leadership of the union by Lech Walesa in the spring of 1981, for her opposition to a policy of compromise with the ruling bureaucracy. Today, also, Walentynowicz's actions are clearly upsetting Solidarnosc leaders in some circles. The almost complete silence surrounding the Biezanow protest in the press run by the underground Solidarnose leadership appears to testify to this.
In their May 3 bulletin, the Biezanow hunger strikers explained that through their action they were demanding an end to the persecution and imprisonment of people for their beliefs, to physical violence and psychological torture meted out to detainees and an end to the sacking of workers for political reasons. They are protesting against the constant threat of repression coming from the regime and against the drastic lowering of the standard of living, which is destroying the physical health of the people. They are opposed to attacks by the official propaganda machine on the Church and on Christian values. They are demanding that the basic principles of the constitution of the Polish state be respected, especially those which cater for freedom of speech and independence of the judiciary.
mal Viewpoint 30 September 1985
The hunger strikers adhere to a document entitled "Testament of a fighting Poland, of July 1, 1945, which they claim as their political heritage and which they consider as their guide.
This document was the final declaration of the Council of National Unity, a kind of parliament of underground Poland which existed under Nazi occupation and which was dominated by the socialist and populist left. It was also the political leadership of the Resistance. Adopted at the beginning of the Stalinist era the Testament demanded an end to the USSR's domination over Poland; and free elections open to all democratic parties, and establishing a system along the following lines:
- For full territorial and socioeconomic self-management, as well as for self management in education and culture.
-The socialisation of large capitalist property and equal distribution of the wealth of society.
- Co-management and control of the whole of the national economy by the working masses along with the guarantee of minimum subsistence for every family and the cultural development of each individual.
- Freedom of struggle for the working class with rights to form free trade unions?
On July 22, 1985, the official commemoration date for the establishment of Stalinist rule in Poland in 1944, there was a public demonstration in Biezanow, led by Walentynowicz and including Solidarnosc supporters from several different towns, displaying trade union banners. The demonstrators paid homage to the memory of the workers killed in Poznan in 1956 and on the Baltic coast in 1970. They paid homage to the thousands of Polish soldiers killed in Katyn by the Soviet political police at the beginning of the Second World War and to those soldiers of the anti-Nazi resistance who after the war disappeared into the "Gulag Archipelago'.
According to a communique from Solidarnose in Cracow issued on August 12, 351 women and men including workers, peasants and intellectuals from 11 regions of the country and 39 towns and villages had participated in the hunger strike up to that date. A total of 74 underground factory committees of Solidarnose from several regions, including the 'Lenin' steelworks in Nowa Huta and the University of Jaguellons in Cracow have expressed support. Trade union leaders like Andrzej Slowik, Grzegorz Palka, and Jerzy Kropiwnicki from Lodz; Marian Jurczyk from Szczecin; Andrzej
Anna Walentynowicz rallies dock workers in historic 1980 strike in Gdansk. (DR)
Gwiazda from Gdansk and Seweryn Jaworski from Warsaw have all visited the hunger strikers. They have received a message of support from Kornel Morawiecki, leader of the Fighting Solidarnosc Organisation. The Biezanow protest is also supported by the Provisional Coordinating Committee of Solidarnose in the mines (TKKG) in Upper Silesia which is conducting an intense propaganda campaign in support of this protest in its own region and which has sent delegations of miners to Biezanow.
On June 16, the strikers sent a letter to Lech Walesa asking him to take the correct position in relation to the situation in the country and to actively support the actions of different bodies inside Solidarnose tending to reunite the movement in struggle. In a statement on August 21 they called on all those who, *after five years of tactical and strategic errors' are 'persevering in their support for the ideals of Solidarosc by preserving the unity of aims and keeping an open mind about the different forms the struggle for freedom can take.' In this statement the community of hunger strikers, organised around Anna Walentynowiez' , affirm that the ideas of Solidarnose are not only those of a trade union, but also map out the road which, in starting with unity will lead to the liberation of the mind and the independence of society?
This willingness to take action against the crisis that the movement and its leadership are going through, even though it is at times more moral than political, is evidenced in the Biezanow protest.
Divisions within the Catholic Church are also increasing at this time. Some priests, beginning with those in the parish of Biezanow, support the action and are even helping it to be extended to other churches. Frowned upon by primate Glemp and his entourage, it is boycotted by the other priests who refuse to réad messages from Biezanow in their churches. During the last traditional pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa - the largest annual demonstration organised each year by the ecclesiastical hierarchy - the 52-strong delegation of hunger strikers from Biezanow were treated like outcasts by the priests responsible for organising it. Some functionaries of the Church apparatus accused the delegation of giving out political leaflets and of 'behaving like provocateurs. They even aceused some of being 'suspect' and in the pay of some sinister powers.
Under pressure from the organisers the delegation had to fold up Told up their banners and finally entered Czestochowa with the poles held up in the form of a "V' for victory. This provoked a great deal of ferment among the crowd around about who could not conceal their sympathy for the stikers.
As a Christian worker, Anna Walentynowiez has a particular conception of the Church which does not correspond to that of its hierarchy. She will not give in in the face of more and more energetic attempts by Glemp to roll back the social movement expressed within the Church. In the January 1985 issue of the Biuletyn Dolnolaski, an underground publication in Lower Silesia, she declared, a few weeks after the beginning of the strike that, We should gather in the churches, because they offer an asylum for free expression. The struggle must not take place in churches ... But the pulpit must serve the people, since we have got no other means of communication.'
This approach seems to be very popular among the workers. At the end of another workers' pilgrimage to Czestochowa on September 15, a mass involving between forty and a hundred thousand people, according to press estimates, openly declared their loyalty to the illegal trade union and did not attempt to hide the banners which they had brought in large numbers or to refrain from shouting 'No freedom without Solidarnose!'
International Viewpoint 30 September 1985