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respectable clothes, a shabby gray suit that looked as if it needed a good dry cleaning, Wałęsa wondered why he had not been arrested again. He could see a Polish Fiat trailing the tram: the secret police were keeping a close eye on him. The authorities were expecting trouble in Gdańsk. A few days previously the party’s top ideologist had boasted that the police knew the names and addresses of twelve thousand opposition activists in Poland. Rounding up potential troublemakers in a city like Gdańsk was a relatively simple affair.A dark thought flashed across Wałęsa’s mind: Perhaps they actually want us to go on strike, so they can gun us all down once again . 73
    By the time he arrived at the shipyard thirty-five minutes later, he had overcome his doubts. He thought of baby Ania and the life that awaited her in the People’s Poland. There was no going back. It was up to ordinary Poles to assume responsibility for their own destiny, regardless of the Machiavellian calculations of Communist Party apparatchiks.
    A crowd of people was milling around gate number two, the main entrance to the shipyard. Wałęsa could see that the guards were checking every pass. In order to get back into the yard, from which he had been banished four years previously, he climbed over a nearby brick wall.
    A meeting was under way in the main square of the shipyard, just outside the red-brick hospital building. The shipyard director, Klemens Gniech, was attempting to persuade the workers to end the strike. He appeared to be having some success. There were boos and catcalls, but some people were drifting back to work. Wałęsa climbed up on the excavator. “Do you know who I am?” he asked angrily, tapping Gniech rudely on the shoulder. “I worked in this shipyard for ten years, and still feel myself to be a shipyard worker. I have the confidence of the workforce. It’s been four years since I lost my job.” 74
    The director was so astonished that he found it difficult to speak. The workers cheered one of their own. Sensing that he had got the upper hand, the quarrelsome electrician threw in several more demands for good measure. These included his own reinstatement and the construction of a monument to the fallen shipyard workers. He upped the demand for a pay raise to two thousand zlotys. The cheers grew even louder. Feeling the crowd behind him, Wałęsa announced an “occupation strike” and promised the workers that he would be the “last one” to leave the shipyard.
    “I landed a straight left and put him down so quickly that he almost fell out of the ring,” Wałęsa recalled later. “I shouted at him that the workers wouldn’t go anywhere if they weren’t sure that they had obtained what they wanted. So they felt strong, and I became their leader.” 75

WARSAW
August 15, 1980
    E DWARD G IEREK WAS ON HOLIDAY in the Soviet Union when he heard about the strike at the Lenin Shipyard. Vacations by the Black Sea had become an annual ritual for the men who served as Moscow’s proconsuls in Eastern Europe. Every August, at Brezhnev’s invitation, the first secretaries of the ruling Communist parties assembled at a nineteenth-century palace on the southern tip of the Crimea. Luxuriating in tsarist splendor, they inhaled the sea air, gloated over the misfortunes afflicting the capitalist world, and issued self-congratulatory communiqués.
    The trips to the Crimea gave Gierek an opportunity to demonstrate his good standing with Brezhnev. The obligatory television pictures of the two Communist Party chiefs embracing each other on the cheeks sent a message to political rivals back home. That was one reason why he had gone ahead with his vacation at a time when labor unrest was sweeping the country. His Politburo colleagues might grumble about his economic policies and engage in the endless game of bureaucratic intrigue behind his back. But there was little chance that they would make any serious move against him as long as he