title: The Solidarity Decade
abstract: The Solidarity Decade began for me when, as a backpacker barely out of his teens, I visited Gdansk in the summer of 1980. Too young to sense the undercurrents of unrest that were simmering in the working-class areas of that port city, I was content to confine myself to the main tourist sites. I vaguely remember one of my distant aunts with whom I was staying grumble around the shortages of everything, the crumbling infrastructure and the many broken promises of the puffy-faced party apparatchiks
journal: Humanities Research