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Solidarity
The end of the "propaganda of success" period (as Gierek's decade was dubbed) came in 1980.
An extremely strong wave of strikes engulfed Poland after another price increase, and the working people of Gdańsk organised a trade union strike committee. This time the Party did not resort to violence, and the subsequent negotiations resulted in the signing of the August Agreements (31 August 1980) and the emergence of Solidarity, an independent trade union organisation, headed by a Gdańsk shipyard worker, Lech Wałęsa. Edward Gierek was forced to resign, and replaced by Stanisław Kania and later, as of October 1981, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. Events in the Catholic Church also prompted the atmosphere of freedom and change, and the rising courage of the working people. In 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Metropolitan Archbishop of Cracow, was elected Pope, assumed the name John Paul II, and 8 months later made a pilgrimage to his home country. The millions who participated in the meetings with the Pope experienced a religious rebirth and an increased sense of social identity. They realised their collective strength. Solidarity quickly became a widespread social movement uniting over 9 million members, including a large number from the ruling Communist Party. It was an unprecedented phenomenon in the entire Soviet bloc, essentially irreconcilable with the political system. Despite the fact that, in general, it did not express any revolutionary political goals and only called for the "rationalisation of the existing system", it enjoyed widespread support of political and trade-union circles in the West, and became an inspiration to the independent milieux within the Communist bloc. A symbolic event in 1980, also for the Solidarity movement, was the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to an émigré Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz.
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