He Dared to Hope

(13 of 18)
in 1970. Said a Polish historian: "The Poles have gone on a memorial binge." Freedom was being won. But the battle for bread was not, and if this failed, all else would fail as well.

Solidarity therefore resolved to overhaul the country's crumbling economic system and to share with the government in running it. "We wanted to make the authorities accountable to society," explained Bronislaw Geremek, Walesa's chief theoretician. As a start, the union decided to attack the corrupt and inefficient nomenklatura system, under which the government chose plant managers not for their skills but for their loyalty to the party. The union's stratagem: force the government to approve a system of self-management for the factories that would allow workers' councils to choose their own managers. Even Walesa was skeptical about the efficiency of such a system if it were put into effect. Said he: "I know we will fail.

It's a bad solution. But I don't have a different solution, so I must accept it. Self-management is better than what we had before." On that issue, as well as on a number of other points, Walesa was coming under heavy pressure from the radicals in Solidarity. During the first Solidarity congress in September, the delegates passed a truculent resolution demanding a referendum to let the people choose between the union's program for self-management and a government-proposed plan that would have left all effective economic control in the hands of the state. If the government enacted its own bill, Solidarity threatened to boycott the law and "carry out the reforms in our own way." Another militant resolution called for free elections to the parliament. But by far the boldest act was a declaration, which took Walesa by surprise, encouraging the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to "struggle for free and independent unions." Moscow called the act "openly provocative and impudent," as 100,000 Soviet troops staged maneuvers on the Polish border.

Walesa, who had taken no part in shaping the offending resolutions, concentrated on defusing the self-management issue before the second half of the congress met at the end of September. On the eve of that session, he and three other members of Solidarity's twelve-man presidium accepted a compromise version of the government's self-management bill. It would give workers' councils the right to choose managers at most enterprises; the state could veto nominees it found objectionable. Parlament passed the plan into law the day before the union delegates returned to Gdansk. A dangerous union-government showdown was thereby averted.

It was a deft move, but it cost Walesa some of his popularity. When the Gdansk congress reconvened, Walesa's high-handed style became the central issue. Attacked in speech after speech for compromising with the government without consulting the rank and file, Walesa had to fight three radical candidates to keep his job. He was elected, but his 55.2% of the vote showed that his hold over the movement had slipped markedly since his Lenin shipyard triumph.

Walesa was so angry that he scarcely showed up on the convention floor after the vote, preferring to watch the proceedings on a TV monitor in a well-guarded room near by. Nor did he even bother to read the session's final