Listening to Solidarity

In her 2009 artwork Invisible Women of Solidarity, the Croatian artist Sanja Iveković arranges a series of seemingly plain monochromatic white images that, on a closer look, reveal subtly darker parts gradually forming shapes that are neither obvious nor easy to identify. Still closer inspection shows that the white surface of the paintings conceals contours of heads and shoulders. From the accompanying text we learn that the depicted figures are Anna Bikont, Krystyna Starczewska, Ewa Kulik-Bielińska, Aldona Klimczak, Krystyna Bratkowska and Magdalena Tulli – female activists of the 1980 Polish movement Solidarity. As its title suggests, the artwork refers to the elusive presence of these figures within contemporary popular memory. Rather than retrieving the narratives of these women by representing their particular stories, Iveković’s piece suggests the enormous obstacles facing an inclusive and open memory of Solidarity and thus tells a story historians would do well to heed.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research and books on Solidarity in Polish. They range from political biographies of the movement’s leaders (such as Lech Wałęsa and Alina Pieńkowska), via book-length interviews with its activists (such as Ludwika Wujec and Henryka Krzywonos-Strycharska) and autobiographies (by for example Danuta Wałęsa and Karol Modzelewski), to historical investigations of various hitherto under-researched aspects of the movement (such as the oppositional youth movement after 1981). Simultaneously, something like a canon of Polish historiography has been established with the more recent monumental works of Andrzej Friszke, Anna Machcewicz and Jan Skórzyńki taking their place among older works by Jan Józef Lipski, Jerzy Holzer and Jadwiga Staniszkis. Moreover, Solidarity as a collective historical experience and one of the founding moments of Polish civic identity after 1989 slowly enters Polish visual culture, especially contemporary art and cinema (think of Andrzej Wajda’s recent film Wałęsa. Człowiek z nadziei [Walesa. Man of Hope]). However, scholars interested in Solidarity, who come to study it as cultural and linguistic outsiders to Poland, will most likely start their research from the classic literature on the topic available in English produced by such authors as Alain Touraine, Timothy Garton Ash, David Ost, Roman Laba, Lawrence Goodwyn and Shana Penn.

Despite its recent revival as a research topic in Poland, Solidarity as an object of study seems to be either exhausted for or forgotten by international scholars. This decline in historical interest is manifest in the small number of recent publications on the movement in English – a development that stands in sharp contrast to the 1990s when the historiography on Solidarity was animated by discussion on the origins of the movement. At that time, the debate revolved around the question of the movement’s main political agent: was it workers or intellectuals? The discussion resulted in a reconsideration of the role performed by both intellectuals and workers, assessing their respective impact on the subsequent success or failure of Solidarity. In their contribution to the debate, Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn objected to the then predominant position that the dissident intellectuals from the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) functioned as its primary organizers and leaders. Laba’s claim, spelled out in his seminal book The Roots of Solidarity (1991), that ‘the roots of Solidarity were in the Baltic working class, and the intellectuals made a necessary but not causal or creative contribution’,¹ is part of his broader critique of what he calls ‘the elite thesis’. Laba positions himself in opposition to the widespread view that workers, lacking the required wisdom, were incapable of political organization and therefore needed the support, competence and insight of the dissident intellectuals. Laba suggests that this narrative not only reproduces an elite-centred account of the movement but also contributes to elite-oriented history writing in general. Along similar lines, arguing for an understanding of Solidarity as primarily a workers’ movement, Lawrence Goodwyn’s book Breaking the Barrier (1991...