Lech Wałęsa

Lech Wałęsa was born on 29 September 1943 in Popowo, Poland. He worked as a car mechanic from 1961 to 1965, served in the army, and in 1967 took a job as an electrician at the Gdańsk shipyard. He was among the strike leaders there in December 1970 and was briefly detained. The shipyard fired him in 1976, and in 1978 he joined activists working to build free trade unions.

In August 1980 he led the shipyard strike that ended with the Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August 1980; the independent union Solidarity grew out of the strikes. He treated his Catholic faith as a source of strength and met Pope John Paul II in January 1981; that September, Solidarity elected him its chairman. When the government declared martial law in December 1981 he was interned, and he was held until November 1982. He received the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize "for non-violent struggle for free trade unions and human rights in Poland." His wife, Danuta, read his acceptance speech in Oslo, and his lecture held that "we can effectively oppose violence only if we ourselves do not resort to it" and that "even the most complex situations can be solved by a dialogue and not by force."

Poland elected him president in December 1990, and he lost the office in the election of November 1995. Since then his record under Communism has been the subject of official inquiry. A special court cleared him of collaboration with the security services in 2000. In February 2016 the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) seized files from the home of the late General Czesław Kiszczak after his widow offered to sell them. They contained a handwritten commitment dated 21 December 1970 and signed "Lech Wałęsa" and "Bolek," and receipts for payments; the files covered the years 1970 to 1976. Wałęsa said the documents were forged. In January 2017 the IPN announced that handwriting experts at the Jan Sehn Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków had found them authentic. Testifying as a witness, Wałęsa stated that he had never collaborated.

Prosecutors charged him with giving false testimony in 2021 and brought the case to court in 2023; in 2024 they asked for it back. In September 2026 the Warsaw district prosecutor's office discontinued it, citing "methodological errors" in the earlier handwriting comparisons and stating that the Kiszczak files were "most likely fabricated." Wałęsa responded that Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński had ordered the historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz to fake the files. Cenckiewicz said he had "never read a bigger lie" than the prosecutors' statement.