Lech Walesa: biography, family, political activity, awards

Lech Walesa (born 29.09.43 in Popovo, Poland) is an activist who helped form and lead (1980-90) the first independent trade union of communist Poland "Solidarity". The charismatic leader of millions of Polish workers became president of the country (1990-95). In 1983 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lech Wałęsa: biography

During the Second World War in Poland, the father of Valensa Boleslav, before the birth of Lech, was interned in a labor camp and died in 1945 from exhaustion and beatings, before reaching the age of 34. His mother Felix had a great influence on her son. The local priest remembers her as the "wisest woman of the parish".

Walesa was a mediocre pupil of the parish school, and then graduated from the state vocational school in Lipno, where he received the specialty of an electrician. From 1961 to 1965 he worked at the Automotive Maintenance Center.

For two years he served in the army, where he received the rank of corporal.

Electrician shipyard

In 1967, Lech Walesa began to work as an electrician at the huge shipyard named after. Lenin in Gdansk. In 1970, he witnessed a hunger riots, during which police killed several demonstrators. When in 1976 new protests began against the communist leadership of Poland, he appeared as an anti-government trade union activist, as a result of which he lost his job.

In August 1980, when the Gdańsk shipyard was swept by protests caused by rising food prices, Lech Walesa climbed over the fence and joined the workers inside the enterprise who elected him head of the strike committee authorized to negotiate with shipyard managers.

After 3 days the demands were accepted, but when the strikers at other Gdansk enterprises asked Lech to continue the strike, he immediately agreed. He headed the inter-factory strike, uniting the enterprises of the Gdansk-Sopot-Gdynia region. The Committee put forward a number of bold political demands, including the right to strike and the formation of free trade unions, and declared a general strike. Fearing popular revolt, the communist authorities gave way to the main demands of the workers, and on August 31 an agreement was signed giving them the right to freely and independently organize themselves. The signing was attended by Mieczysław Jagielski, First Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, and Lech Walesa. The biography of the leader of the trade union movement has changed again: it was restored at the Gdańsk shipyard and headed the National Coordinating Commission.

Solidarity

After answering this landmark agreement about 10 million Polish workers and farmers joined the semi-autonomous professional unions, the Interfactory Strike was transformed into a national federation of trade unions with Walesa as its chairman and chief representative. In October, the Solidarity trade union was officially recognized by the Polish government, and Leh led the federation during confrontations with the authorities, limited by the possibility of Soviet military intervention.

Lech Walesa: The Nobel Prize

The victories of the federation turned out to be ephemeral. In December 1981 the Polish government imposed martial law, "Solidarity" was outlawed and most of its leaders were arrested, including Lech Walesa, whose biography was supplemented with a year of imprisonment. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to him in 1983 was criticized by the Polish government. Fearing unwanted expulsion, he stayed in Poland, and his wife, Danuta Walesa, went to the capital of Norway, Oslo, to accept the award on his behalf.

Victory in elections

As the leader of the underground Solidarity movement, Walesa was persecuted all the way to the point where another deterioration in economic conditions and a new wave of labor unrest in 1988 did not force the Polish government to negotiate with him and other trade union leaders. Their result was an agreement that resumed the legal status of Solidarity and authorized free elections for a limited number of seats in the restored upper house of parliament. In June 1989, the movement received the overwhelming majority of these seats, and after Valensa rejected the proposal to form a coalition government with the Communists, the parliament was forced to approve the Cabinet under the leadership of Solidarity, although its leader refused to be prime minister.

Head of State

In 1989, Valensa helped his colleague in the trade union Tadeusz Mazowiecki become the prime minister of this government, but he nominated himself against him for the post of head of state in 1990 and won the first direct presidential elections in the PPR with an overwhelming majority.

As President of Poland Walesa helped to hold free parliamentary elections in 1991 and took part in the process of transforming the state economy into a free market economy. He showed remarkable political skills as the leader of Solidarity, but his simple speech, confrontational style and refusal to ease strict restrictions on the production of abortions undermined his popularity at the end of his tenure at the presidency. In 1995, he participated in the elections, but was defeated by the former communist Alexander Kwasniewski, who headed the Union of Democratic Left Forces. Once again, Walesa ran for president in 2000, but received only a small fraction of the vote. In 1997 he founded and headed the political party "Christian Democracy of the Third Republic of Poland".

Leaving Policy

As a result of the defeat of 2000, Walesa announced that he was withdrawing from politics. Subsequently, he devoted most of his time to work at the institute of his name, which he founded in 1995 to disseminate information about the achievements of Solidarity, to promote democracy and build a civil society in Poland and in the world.

In August 2006, Walesa announced his resignation from an independent trade union in protest against his support for the ruling Right and Justice Party (PiS), as well as Lech and Yaroslav Kachinsky, twin brothers who once held a prominent position in Solidarity "And became the president and prime minister of the country, respectively. According to him, the organization became alien to him, another era has come, problems and people have changed. In particular, he opposed the removal of Kaczynski people associated with the former communist regime and the attempts of PiS to publish lists of employees of the secret police of the Polish People's Republic.

Since 2004, the Lech Walesa airport in Gdańsk operates. The squares and streets named after the former leader of Solidarity are in the US, Canada and France. In 2009 he was put a monument in the Alley of Polish Nobel Prize winners.

In 1981, he became the first Pole, awarded the title of "Man of the Year" magazine Time. From the hands of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, Lech Walesa received the title of Honorary Member of the Order of the Bath. He was also awarded many orders and medals of foreign countries, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the USA, the French Order of the Legion of Honor, the Order of Merit for the Italian Republic, the Swedish Order of the Seraphim, the Danish Order of the Elephant, the Finnish Order of the White Rose, the Portuguese Orders of Freedom and Infanta Don Enrique, the Norwegian Order of St. Olaf, the Ukrainian Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, the Czech Order of the White Lion, the Order of Merit for the Federal Republic of Germany, the Chilean Medal of Merit, ene Cross Mary Land, UNESCO medal and others.

Personal life

November 8, 1969 Lech Walesa married Danuta Goslo. The spouses had eight children: Bogdan (1970), Slawomir (1972), Przemyslaw (1974), Yaroslav (1976), Magdalena (1979), Anna (1980), Maria Victoria (1982) and Brigida (1985). Jaroslav Valensa also became a politician and was a deputy of the Saeima in 2005-2009, and since 2009 was elected to the European Parliament.

In 2008, Lech Walesa made a stenting of the coronary artery and installed a pacemaker.

Agent Bolek

For many decades, the former president of Poland was accused of being the informer of the communist special services in the 1970s, despite his categorical protests and the decision of the special court in 2000 that cleared him of accusations of collaborating. Nevertheless, the hype surrounding these statements rose again in 2008. Then the book was published, the hero of which was Lech Walesa. The biography of the trade union leader was supplemented by facts testifying that from 1970 to 1976 he worked as an operative of security services, code-named Bolek. The question reappeared in February 2016, when the Institute of National Remembrance, designed to investigate the Nazi and communist epochs in Poland, seized from the widow of the former Minister of the Interior materials, according to which Walesa was the informer of the security services. Among other things, it was found his commitment to cooperate with the Security Council, made his hand receipts on receipt of money, a personal file and reports on the cooperation of the secret agent Bolek. Lech Walesa himself rejected the probability of the authenticity of the documents and suggested that the records confiscated from him during the search could have appeared here.