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Book Review: Historical Studies: Hoffa

societies. In Goodwyn's view, such interchanges gave shipyard workers a wider vision of the possibilities of working-class collective action than was available to workers elsewhere in Poland, and encouraged greater skepticism about the claims of the Polish Communist Party (pp. 103-4). A second important political factor was that, by 1970, much of the work done by shipyard workers was done for the Soviet Union. Although the terms of trade were actually quite favorable to Poland, workers in the shipyards assumed that the fruits of their backbreaking labor were being consumed at little cost by the hated Russians. The most significant of the factors that distinguished the coastal workers, according to both Laba and Goodwyn, were their experiences in December 1970 and their capacity to learn from those experiences. They show that when workers in Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin took to the streets (where a repressive party-state ultimately has all of the advantages) in the early days of the December protests, the Polish Communist Party's decision to use force against workers (officially 45 people were killed, although unofficial estimates have placed the number of dead as high as 200-300) helped workers to rediscover the advantages of the sit-down strike. Behind factory walls workers were relatively safe, if for no other reason than the fact that the regime did not wish to risk destroying its precious heavy industry to get them out. During these strikes, workers also learned how to maintain contacts between different factories to coordinate their activities, especially in the Szczecin region. Despite the impressive evidence Goodwyn and Laba have assembled to support their thesis about the autonomy of the Baltic workers' movement, both ultimately exaggerate the independence of working-class politics on the Coast and, reversing the bias of the authors they criticize, understate the role of intellectuals. In August 1980, for example, two regional strikes occurred in the Baltic region: one centered in Gdansk, the other in Szczecin. Separated by approximately 200 miles, the two strikes developed relatively independent of each other. As both Laba and Goodwyn show, the Szczecin workers had a broader range of experiences than the Gdansk workers, and carried their struggles much further in 197071. Following Laba and Goodwyn's logic, we should thus expect that, in August 1980, Szczecin workers would show greater foresight than their Gdansk counterparts. In 1980, however, it was the Gdansk workers who successfully held out for, and got, a much better "deal" from the authorities. It was the Gdansk strike, and its leaders, not the strike in Szczecin, that became the center of the Polish August and the Solidarity movement. How can this outcome be explained? Undoubtedly we can attribute it in part to the influence of intellectuals in the Gdansk strikes, and their relative absence in Szczecin. Intellectual activists affiliated with KOR and other dissident milieus played an important role in Gdansk (in particular in working with Lech Watesa) both before and during the August 1980 strikes in Gdansk, but virtually no role in Szczecin. Laba and Goodwyn also overlook other positive contributions intellectuals made to the emergence of the movement, both before and immediately after the Polish August. For example, intellectuals associated with KOR were a major force in convincing many educated Poles to abandon their historic dislike and distrust of the working class. They also contributed by cultivating contacts with "liberal" Party members and the powerful Polish Catholic Church. Finally, the widespread distribution of samizdat literature helped to expose a wider public to the possibility of alternatives to state socialism. In denying the importance of the role played by intellectuals, Laba and Goodwyn end up with a one-sided interpretation of the Solidarity experience. Although not all of the claims made in these two books can withstand close critical scrutiny, Goodwyn and Laba nevertheless perform a useful service in focusing our attention on the important issue of the relationship between workers and intellectuals in the development of Solidarity. Despite the polemical tone of both volumes, they unquestionably bring a much higher degree of rigor and seriousness to the analysis of the Polish workers' movement than anything else available in English. But a fullfledged scholarly analysis of Solidarity as a social movement in the 1980-81 period has yet to be written. When it is, it will have to treat Solidarity as a complex, multi-level movement rather than reduce it to a single variable explanation.