Bezpečnostní služba proti Solidaritě 1980–1981
The Security Service Against Solidarity 1980–1981

Summary/Abstract: This study is chiefly focused on examining the strategy of the Polish secret police – the Security Service – against the Solidarity trade union movement in the period when the movement was an officially permitted mass organisation. It is a very broad subject, so the author confines himself to outlining the main activities of the Security Services and its results. He maps the subject, presenting the development of the Polish opposition movement and the views of the leadership of the Polish Communist Party in 1980, and the assignment of strategy to the chief unit of force, the Security Service, describing in detail its approach in the subsequent period. Its main strategic task in that period was to manipulate Solidarity and rule it „from within“ by means of operative-based operations and deployed influential collaborators, while curtailing its activities „from without“. The author demonstrates that the governing regime played a two-sided game with the independent union and from the off prepared for the complete control of Solidarity. This was meant to culminate with the faked creation after its banning of a „neo-Solidarity“ fully controlled by the Security Service. However, this never came to pass due to the plan’s excessive riskiness and the fact that the movement was in any case sufficiently pacified.

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