Talk:History of Solidarity

General comments

Coming here from the Organized Labour project and making an assessment of the FA articles within the project. Referencing system and references need overhaul. over-reliance on journalistic pieces. Quite a few instances of duplicated citations; conversion to an {{sfn}} citation structure would be appropriate. Alternatives should be found for the Polish language sources. Some of the Polish language sources should be considered unreliable (on independence grounds, eg the PAP) and alternatives found. Official Polish government agencies (in English or Polish) should not be used as sources (eg Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The section Organization is redundant and does not assist a reader to understand the history of the organisation any better.--Goldsztajn (talk) 14:23, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Further comments

Leaving this here in terms of an FAR.

1. Relations with/role of the Catholic Church - far more complicated than the rather triumphalist material presented here. Solidarity was a coalition of counter-hegemonic forces (viz students, workers, Church) none of which on their own were strong enough to successfully confront RPD-ruled Poland. Previous isolated attempts (workers in 1970, students in 1968, the Church in 1966) had failed. Later, during the clandestine period (82-87), Solidarity adopts conservative social policies in order to maintain relations with the Vatican – which has the effect of alienating some of its membership. Furthermore, the complex nature of Solidarity's initial radical project (anti-heiracrical, democratic) stood in marked contrast to the Catholic Church's totally undemocratic nature. In earlier periods of the 1960s and 1970s there was a symbiotic concordance between the RPD and the Catholic heirarchy - it is Solidarity's emergence which breaks that concordance and brings the Church unambiguously into an anti-communist position. See John Stanley's Sex and Solidarity, 1980-1990 / Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes Vol. 52, No. 1/2 2010.
   
2. Role of foreign support (US / US intelligence services / Vatican) - this again is a complex issue and needs to avoid partisan, conspiracy points. Too much gets occluded by the CIA role and less on the broader international support which existed (both from states and non-state actors). There is fairly clear academic consensus on the existence of US intelligence programs (Eg QPHELPFUL) that were directed to support Solidarity. What is less clear is how effective those programs were and how they should be evaluated in the context of support offered by other actors. Of course, Cold Warriors and conspiracy theorists want to see the CIA role writ large, but the emerging historical literature seems to paint a mosaic. So CIA support in terms of propaganda (publications, broadcasting, radio etc) is considered a success, but the support of the very large Polish-expatriate populations in North America, France, Britain, West Germany, Australia is given less credit. See Anna Mazurkiewicz's review of Seth Jones "A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland. On other (ie non-US) foreign intelligence agency support (Swedes, Israelis) see the interview with Seth Jones (in Polish). Finally, the trade union movement in the West lent considerable support to Solidarity this should be discussed. (see for example the somewhat cryptic recollections of US Ambassador John Davis in The Polish Review Vol. 44, No. 4 (1999).

Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 21:21, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the review. I fully agree this article could use a revamp, I wrote it ~15 years ago when I was just a grad student staring his 'adventure' with proper article writing... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:10, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

• @Goldsztajn and Piotrus: Were these above issues ever addressed? Taking a quick skim through the article, I was surprised at the amount of very high-quality sources that were listed in "Further reading" that were not used as inline citations (like books from university presses) which might indicate missing information or the use of lower-quality sources that could be replaced. If these concerns are not resolved, would one of you like to bring this to WP:FAR to see if anyone is interested in making improvements to the article? Z1720 (talk) 01:55, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

  @Z1720 As one of the primary authors - I expect this is not up to FA standards. And I don't think I am interested in this topic area enough to fix this myself. So feel free to FARC this away... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:32, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

  FARC is truly one of the worst acronyms - at least the Colombians can be excused as they invented it in Spanish - but we English users have no excuse. Nevertheless, I like the turn of phrase in this context, if in five (!) years the extensive problems in this haven't been fixed, it can defintitely FARC off. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 07:28, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

• @Piotrus and Goldsztajn: Since WP:FAR only allows editors to post an article once a week, it will take several weeks for me to post this. Would one of you be willing to post this instead? Feel free to ping me if you need any help with posting this. Z1720 (talk) 01:36, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

  Done. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 05:07, 7 September 2026 (UTC)