After 18 days of strikes at the Lenin Shipyard, the Polish government capitulated to workers' demands, signing an agreement that recognized the right to form free trade unions independent of Communist Party control. Led by electrician Lech Wałęsa, the resulting movement, Solidarity, became the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc and a catalyst for the eventual collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
Lech Wałęsa, an unemployed electrician who had scaled the shipyard fence to join the strike he'd helped ignite, signed the Gdańsk Agreement with an oversized novelty pen featuring a portrait of Pope John Paul II, a wink at the Catholic faith that had helped sustain Polish resistance to Soviet control. Behind him, tens of thousands of workers who had occupied the Lenin Shipyard for eighteen days erupted in cheers.
The agreement conceded startling ground: the right to strike, the right to independent unions, reduced censorship, and Saturdays off. It created Solidarity (Solidarność), which within a year swelled to nearly ten million members, roughly a third of Poland's working population, becoming the largest opposition movement the Soviet bloc had ever tolerated.
The Polish government, under Soviet pressure, would impose martial law and crush Solidarity's legal status by December 1981, arresting Wałęsa and thousands of activists. But the movement survived underground, resurging in 1988–89 to negotiate Poland's first partially free elections, a domino that helped topple communism across Eastern Europe by 1991. Wałęsa later became Poland's president and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.