Interviews with Bogdan Borusewicz

I am from Gdansk [Poland]. I am a man connected to the old democratic political opposition of the 1970s. The first time I was arrested was in 1968. I was a secondary school student at the time. 1968, this was a year of huge student demonstrations. We demanded freedom of speech, the chance to read the things we wanted to read. That censorship be abolished. This student movement was crushed rather quickly. These were very extensive demonstrations.

The student demonstration in Gdansk on March 15 [1968] had 20,000 people. Gdansk became a focus of the nascent Solidarity movement [labor union formed by Gdansk ship builders] and the huge worker strikes for two reasons. For one thing, 10 years earlier, Gdansk was the scene of a worker rebellion in December of 1970. So this was 1970. The number of people who perished then was 42. These people were shot.

This was a lesson for all at the People’s University. They were shot in Gdansk – the TriCity [metropolitan area], also in Gdynia and in Szczecin [Polish cities], and some hundreds of kilometers away. So this was the primary thing – the awareness was much higher than in other places about the nature of communist rule, that was the one thing. And the other was that in Gdansk it was possible for us to create opposition groups, a group with a mixed intelligentsia-worker profile. I created one such group, which was something I spent several years working on.

Later that group started a strike, and later this strike led to the creation of Solidarity. Now, the nature of this group [the Lenin Shipyard strike leaders] is shown by the fact that this group, my group, gave rise to two presidents of Poland [Lech Walesa and Lech Kaczynski], one prime minister [Tadeusz Mazowiecki], and one speaker of the senate [Bogdan Borusewicz].

Bogdan Borusewicz is the Speaker (Marshal) of the Polish Senate. He was born in 1949 and studied history at the Catholic University of Lublin.

Under communism, Borusewicz was an ardent democracy activist. His career as a dissident started in high school, when he was arrested in 1968 for engaging with the opposition movement. In the 1970s, Borusewicz became involved with the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and the Free Trade Unions of the Coast, workers’ advocacy organizations that preceded the Solidarity independent trade union.

Borusewicz rose to prominence as the principal organizer of Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard strike in August 1980, which led to the formation of Solidarity. When martial law was declared in 1981, Borusewicz went into hiding for four years. During this time, he married fellow freedom activist Alina Pienkowska in secret. When Alina gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Kinga, Borusewicz attended her baptism in disguise for fear of being arrested by authorities. He was later arrested in 1986 and imprisoned for two years. After receiving amnesty, Borusewicz renewed his activism, serving as deputy leader of Solidarity in 1990 and 1991. He was elected to the lower house of parliament in 1990, where he served until 2001.

In 2005, he was elected to the Senate, where he was chosen by his colleagues to serve as Speaker (Marshal). In 2010, he served briefly as the interim Polish President after President Lech Kaczynski died.

http://www.b-borusewicz.pl/