Hero or double agent? An encounter with Lech Walesa

Lech Walesa is probably the most famous of all the thousands — actually millions — who struggled against the oppression of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The only person with a similar level of fame is Vaclav Havel in what was then Czechoslovakia. Walesa was the leader of the Solidarity trade union which, according to the legend, grew from ten members to ten million in a single year, fundamentally challenging the totalitarian rule of the Communist party. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He was imprisoned multiple times. But eventually, Solidarity forced the government to allow other parties to compete for office, and this led to the fall of the Communist regime in Poland and contributed to the collapse of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. People of my generation remember the TV pictures of the dynamic, good-looking man he once was, addressing shipyard workers. For us, Lech Walesa is a hero.

Meeting him now, he has become a more rotund figure with a slightly puffy face. Apparently he has not been well, and I was fortunate to get an interview. But it proved a little trickier than I had expected. I asked him about the first time he was arrested. ‘I don’t want to talk about the past,’ he declared.

He said he couldn’t remember the past anyway, and it was more important to talk about the future. My heart sank. I had come all the way to Gdansk on the Baltic Sea. I tried reasoning with him. I said young people in Britain know practically nothing about what happened under Communism and if people do not know such things, they will repeat the same mistakes. He conceded the point but countered that this could be left to historians.