Tadeusz Mazowiecki, 1927–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

When Tadeusz Mazowiecki made his maiden policy speech as Poland’s first postcommunist prime minister, he felt so faint that he had to leave parliament for a breath of fresh air. He returned with an explanation the representatives applauded: He had felt as wobbly, he said, as the distressed Polish economy.

Mazowiecki, and Poland, took a long and difficult route to that moment in 1989, said the Associated Press. Mazowiecki studied law after the war before becoming an editor for Catholic journals, a career that hardly endeared him to the Communist authorities. “He made a crucial decision in 1980 to join thousands of workers on strike at the Gdansk Shipyard,” which spawned the Solidarity movement under strike leader Lech Walesa. The government imposed martial law in 1981, and Mazowiecki was detained for a year. Renewed strikes in 1988 “brought the Communists to the negotiating table with Solidarity,” and under terms largely authored by Mazowiecki, “Eastern Europe’s first partly free parliamentary election” was held on June 4, 1989. In August, Mazowiecki was selected as prime minister, a first milestone in the region’s “triumph over communism.”

In his 17 months in office, Mazowiecki “faced a nearly impossible task: building democratic political institutions while resuscitating the country’s torpid economy,” said New Europe. He endorsed economic “shock therapy” and was criticized for drawing a “thick line” between the young democracy and its communist past rather than trying Poland’s former leaders. But his tenure “set Poland on a path toward a market economy and NATO and European Union membership.”