Solidaritys legacy

last updated 8 January 2015

Gdansk, Poland

The manifesto of Solidarity, the Polish political movement that helped bring down communism, has made UNESCO’s list of the world’s historical treasures. Two wooden tablets containing Solidarity’s “21 postulates” will join the Gutenberg Bible, documents from the French Revolution, and musical manuscripts by Chopin and Beethoven as part of the U.N. agency’s registry of the “memory of the world.” Solidarity, founded in 1980 by electrician Lech Walesa, started as a movement of shipyard workers demanding better working conditions. They nailed a list of demands to the shipyard wall that eventually included freedom of speech, the right to strike, the release of political prisoners, an end to censorship, and religious freedom. Walesa, who became Poland’s first post-communist president, said he never expected his handwritten list of demands to change history. “I certainly did not think so far ahead,” he said.