The story of this place
In August 1980, an electrician named Lech Wałęsa climbed over the wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk to lead a strike that spread across Poland. The Gdańsk Agreement that followed legalised Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, which at its peak counted nearly 10 million members. Crushed under martial law in 1981, Solidarity survived underground and, in the 1989 Round Table talks and semi-free elections, helped topple communist rule — setting off the chain reaction that brought down the Berlin Wall. The rust-clad Solidarity Centre, opened in 2014 beside the shipyard gate and its memorial to workers shot in 1970, tells the story where it happened.