was respected by the workers, the Polish intelligentsia had not worked very hard to unite itself with them. A social split existed that made the intelligentsia feel somewhat superior to the workers, feeling a change could only be made by intellectuals at the top. That view and feeling slowly changed, the biggest of these changes in social thought appeared when the printings of illegal, uncensored leaflets and books by a group of intellectuals calling themselves the Committee for the Defense of Workers' Rights (KOR) and the Movement for the Defense of Civil and Citizens' Rights (ROPCiO) emerged. In September of 1979, a press briefing by the Ministry of the Interior listed twenty-six 'anti-socialist' groups. These groups were not publicly denounced, but they were open to beatings and imprisonment by the secret police. One of the major events to occur in 1977 was an informal alliance between the Catholic Church and the opposition. The Church would be instrumental in uniting the cause of workers in the Baltic to those in other regions of the country.On the other side of the coin, Poland's economy was disastrous. In fact the national income fell by two percent in 1979. Industrial output was showing negative growth of five percent. From having one of the highest growth rates in the world, only five years later Poland had an economy in such shambles that it was dependent on Western banks to keep functioning. The time was perfect to strike.On the fourteenth of August 1980 the members of a little group called the Free Trade Union conspired to start a strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which employed 17,000 workers. The pretext was so a crane driver named Anna Walentynowicz, would get her job back after being fired. The reason behind this was that she was one of the most powerful orator's in the whole strike movement. They had tried to start a strike a month before under the pretext of a meat price increase, but they had failed. This time th...
