28 August 1980: Lech Walesa has become the effective leader of hundreds of thousands of strikers along the country’s northern Baltic coast
As the Polish journalist surveyed the committee hall at the Lenin shipyard crammed with strikers’ delegates from some 300 factories, he kept repeating one sentence over and over again: “I never thought I would live to see such a scene in Poland.”
In Poland, over the last fortnight, much that was previously unthinkable has now become thinkable. The extraordinary scenes in Gdansk – of conflict, of uninhibited free speech, of unity and discipline among the strikers – are a measure of that change. The movement for independent trade unions in Poland has grown from scattered groups of dissident activists to what can only be described as a huge and efficient mass organisation. So large has the movement become that it is difficult to see how it can either now be crushed by force or gently persuaded to disband itself.
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