The Solidarity Decade
Journal: Humanities Research
Year: 2010

The Solidarity Decade began for me when, as a backpacker barely out of his teens, I visited Gdansk in the summer of 1980. Too young to sense the undercurrents of unrest that were simmering in the working-class areas of that port city, I was content to confine myself to the main tourist sites. I vaguely remember one of my distant aunts with whom I was staying grumble around the shortages of everything, the crumbling infrastructure and the many broken promises of the puffy-faced party apparatchiks