Dissent in Poland: Solidarity: Birth of a Social Movement
KARTA’s several collections are drawn from the immediate prewar period (1930s), the wartime occupations, and the Communist era (1945 to 1989). Solidarnosc—narodziny ruchu (Solidarity: The Birth of the Movement) is the final collection included from KARTA’s mass of materials. In 2003, its holdings were entered into the world list of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program. The collection began in 1982, when materials were first being gathered--clandestinely and without ties to other underground organizations. A group of activists and historians created Archiwum Solidarnosci (Archive of Solidarity) following a government raid on the Mazowsze Regional Solidarity radio station that resulted in their internment in a camp for oppositionists. The original archive was supplemented by materials from the Opposition Archive and it focuses most closely on the sixteen-month period from the founding of Solidarity in September 1980 to the imposition of martial law in December 1981. Martial law was imposed in December 1981, under General Wojciech Jaruzelski; Solidarity activists were arrested or otherwise punished, yet they continued to resist the military dictatorship until elections brought them into the government in 1989. The Polish opposition played a crucial role in the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and eventually, the complete collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents from this remarkable Warsaw collection will be of interest to scholars of democratization and opposition movements, and to those studying the politics of late Leninist party-states. They also chart the rise of human rights and the ascendancy of an autonomous civil society in a state which, since its inception after World War II, had tried various tactics to establish a one-party monopoly on politics and ideas.