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Chapter 11: Solidarity Charges Ahead, and the Regime Digs In Solidarity completed its own elections of delegates for its first national congress at the end of June, about the same time the party finished its delegate elections. Solidarity’s congress was not scheduled to take place until September, however, and was to be held in two parts. The first was to begin on 5 September, and was intended to be a short, three day assembly to debate draft proposals for the union’s organizational and constitutional statutes. The congress would then take a break to redraft the proposals in response to the first session’s debates, and reconvene on 26 September for what was envisaged as about a weeklong assembly to enact the statutes, set a program for the future, and elect the union’s leadership. In contrast to the party congress, where the leaders’ main challenge was to hold ground, Solidarity’s challenge was to forge an agreement on how far to go. A critical factor that would shape this path was the plummeting Polish economy, which was beginning to reach crisis proportions in midsummer. On 23 July, the government announced that monthly per capita meat rations would be cut by 20 percent, and published a list of price increases showing food items such as butter, bread, sugar, and milk had more than tripled in price while others such as flour and ham had more than doubled. By this time, the regime’s practice of simply printing money to deal with the wage settlements of the past year had resulted in production costs exceeding retail prices for many consumer items. A week later the parliamentary budget commission reported that per capita national income for 1981 was expected to be 15 percent lower the already dismal 1980 level.1 169 1. The price hikes and rationing cuts were reported in “Poland: Protests Over Food Shortages,” decl. NID, 25 July 1981. They had been previewed in the economic plan presented at the party congress. See “Poland: First Day of the Congress,” decl. NID, 15 July 1981. Descriptions of the Polish economic problems are contained in Andrews, Poland, 1980–81, 189–92, on the immediate issues of the July rationing and price actions, and chapter 13 on the broader programmatic issues. Garton Ash, Polish Revolution, 183–87, gives a vivid presentation of the societal and political impact of the government actions, and Raina, Poland, 1981, 298–301, gives a concise but data-rich account. 170 U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland These announcements were the match in the tinderbox. Protests and “hunger marches” erupted almost immediately. Local Solidarity chapters, over the objections of the union’s National Coordinating Commission, helped to organize and supervise some of these marches in an effort to channel the anger away from even more inflammatory reactions. The anger among the populace was intensified by stories, in an increasingly open national media, revealing the degree to which the economic suffering was being aggravated by gross incompetence and mismanagement of distribution of the already limited supplies. Adding still more fuel to the outrage was the ill-disguised corruption and skimming by party and government officials, and rumors of secret hoards. Solidarity called a special meeting of its National Coordinating Commission on 24–26 July to come up with a plan for coping with the deepening economic crisis. Such a plan could not, however, be addressed separately from the union’s overall vision of its institutional role in shaping national economic and social policies. These July discussions would thus have a powerful impact on the shape of the national congress slated for September. To deal with the immediate problem of shortages and rationing, the union demanded direct access to all government stores and to government data on food and other critical consumer goods. Initially interpreted as a demand for “control,” this was later clarified as a demand to audit the data and monitor the distribution, to remove incompetent officials, and to refer for prosecution any corruption that was discovered. In part, the demands put forth by the union leaders were aimed at easing the social ferment generated by the refusal of a distrustful populace to accept explanations from government officials even when they were truthful. Another issue shaping the backdrop for Solidarity’s upcoming congress was the concept of “workers’ self-government.” The principle of workers’ participation in enterprise management was a long-standing myth of the communist system, and with government concurrence it had been included as...

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