GUEST COLUMN
Vir Singh
These days, Lech Wałęsa’s ‘Grand Lecture Tour’ is being widely circulated in the media in the United States of America and Canada. The ‘Solidarity Movement’ led by former President of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa is completing 45 years. On this occasion, Wałęsa will deliver his lectures in 28 cities of USA and Canada. The eagerness of people to listen to this iconic political hero of the 20th century is echoing in the air. His first lecture is to be held in Los Angeles on August 31 and the lecture series will continue till October 31. Throughout his Grand Lecture Tour, Wałęsa’s addresses will not only reflect on the political turmoil of the past and present but will also present a philosophical vision with strategies to forge a brighter future for the world. Wałęsa says, “We are living in challenging times and are also facing a new turn in history”.
History distinguishes between those who reform their homeland and those who revolutionise the international order. There have been two such heroes in the twentieth century who changed the whole world. Wałęsa is the second while Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the first such personality. They became the antithetical forces of modern political thought, inspiring such fervent global allegiance that the entire century became a grand, oscillating narrative of their clashing doctrines.
The 20th century was dominated by two conflicting forces – revolution and counter-revolution, expansion and disintegration, communist zeal and democratic resistance. Lenin laid the foundations of Soviet communism, and Wałęsa played a key role in its collapse. One dreamed of bringing the world under the red flag, the other turned it towards freedom.
No one left as much of an impact on the 20th century as Lenin. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, under his command, toppled the Russian empire and birthed the world’s first socialist nation, the Soviet Union, i.e. the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). His dream – to spread communism throughout the world – was unimaginably successful. By the middle of the 20th century, three-quarters of humanity was under some form of communist rule, from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia and from China to Cuba. The Soviet Union emerged as a superpower, whose influence spread through the Warsaw Pact and proxy wars.
But Lenin’s legacy remained contradictory. They had pledged to liberate the working class, but their system became authoritarian. Centralised power, suppression of opposition and economic stagnation became the main characteristics of communist political systems. The revolution which aimed at freedom from exploitation, itself emerged as a bureaucratic monster. The storm of communist empire that raged in the first half of the 20th century, once it reached its peak in the second half of the century, slowly began to collapse due to its own contradictions. An unexpected rebel emerged—but not from the communist Soviet Union, but from the Gdansk shipyard in Eastern Europe, Poland, a stooge of Soviet communism. Wałęsa, a moustachioed trade union leader with no political background, became the face of the protest. His ‘Solidarity’ movement was not just a workers’ protest—it was the first legal opposition in the communist bloc, which ignited the spark of democracy in Eastern Europe.
Wałęsa demolished the walls of the Marxist-Leninist empires that Lenin had built after the establishment of the Soviet Union. The widespread impact was astonishing: by 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed like a house of cards, its satellite countries became independent, the last rites of communism were performed in the countries of Eastern Europe and Poland, once a Soviet puppet, began the process of democracy based on free elections. Wałęsa, a former electrician, had effectively pulled the plug on the communist circuit. Following the nation’s first open elections, Wałęsa secured his place in history by becoming the inaugural president of a newly democratic Poland. His victory was not just the conquest of Poland – it was the end of Lenin’s communist empires and Lenin’s dreams of bringing the whole world under the red flag.
The stories emerging from the perspectives of Lenin and Wałęsa form a contradictory symmetry of history. Lenin imposed collectivisation through theory and a kind of terror. He actualised the political theory of the dictatorship of the workers, whereas the practice of dictatorship is the same whether it is from the top or the bottom of the system. Wałęsa, in contrast, restored individual freedom through strikes and solidarity. Lenin was an austere intellectual who theorised a dictatorship; Wałęsa was a labourer who fought for everyone’s liberty. One unleashed revolution through party orders; the other lit the torch of a new political order through mass movements. Lenin’s system brought revolution in the name of establishing equality, but gave oppression; Wałęsa’s movement sought freedom and found democracy. Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent establishment of communist systems in the world took the lives of millions of people, while not a single person was killed or injured in Wałęsa-led movements.
Shallow empires built on transient ideologies inevitably fall, while the roots of freedom run deep and endure. The end of the Cold War and the birth of Polish democracy under Wałęsa’s leadership marked more than the USSR’s demise—it was Lenin’s dream finally negated and Wałęsa’s struggle conclusively won.
Based on his international lecture series, Wałęsa is looking across time. He is not complacent with the democracy whose foundation he laid. He says, “Democracy is sick today because we have forgotten the experience of dictatorship.” He also gives a solution for it. “Complete transformation of global governance: UN needs real power, not just a talking point. A new solidarity movement is necessary for the entire world”.
Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement did not end when it achieved its initial goal. A true movement does not allow any single victory or defeat to become a roadblock. The arrival of democracy after communism’s fall did not mean an end to society’s aspirations. The natural, social, economic, cultural, and moral frameworks within which societies seek to develop must continuously evolve, balance, and pulsate with life. This necessity is what fuels popular movements. The survival of constructive movements within governance is essential to prevent societies from growing complacent and to ensure the path of human progress remains unblocked. The man who once said, “History is written by those who don’t know how to write the future,” seems, in his eighth decade, to be writing the future history of global politics itself.
(The author is a former professor of environmental science, GB Pant University of Agriculture and Technology. Views expressed are personal)
