The Gdańsk Agreement

Lenin Shipyard, Gate No. 2 · Gdańsk, Poland · 1980-08-31

The strike that began in the Lenin Shipyard in August 1980 ended on 31 August with the Gdańsk Agreement, signed with a giant souvenir pen, which conceded the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Solidarity enrolled ten million members within a year. Gate No. 2, where Lech Wałęsa announced the agreement to the crowd, still stands with its flowers and the board of 21 demands.

The record

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

• Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
• The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
• Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
• National and municipal archives of Poland, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Films are matched to this event editorially or by search; if one is wrong, tell us and we will replace it.