Gorbachev responded creatively to Solidarity, and the world is better off for it, even if things did not work out as planned for him, writes Lucja Swiatkowski Cannon.
Mikhail Gorbachev died almost exactly 42 years after the movement that gave his life meaning was born. Gorbachev’s whole career as the leader of the Soviet Union was a response to the Solidarity movement, a mass protest against communist oppression. Solidarity was a working-class phenomenon, a traditional communist stronghold. Thus, Solidarity proved that communism does not represent the interests of the working people and therefore discredited it.
These protests were mainly about the state of the economy, which led to the deterioration of living standards of the working class throughout the Soviet bloc. Just when the Soviet Union seemed to be at the height of its power and spent big on its armaments and supported communist revolutions all over the world, at home, it could not satisfy the needs of ordinary people.
In 1983 to 1984, nervous meetings were held in the Kremlin. Yuri Andropov, chief of the KGB and new secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, was asking whether the Soviet Union could tolerate the existence of Solidarity and its participation in the governance of Poland.
Enter Andropov protege Mikhail Gorbachev with a reform program for the Soviet bloc, which was formulated during the Andropov reign: share information vital to the functioning of society and the economy, a policy known as glasnost, borrowed from Soviet human rights activists of the 1970s; include new groups in governing the country, particularly those sharing the same basic Marxist fundamentals; reform the state economy and decentralize it; reduce defense expenditures and international “class...
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