Tadeusz Mazowiecki: Scholarly Journalist Who Struggled for the Rights of Solidarity’s Workers

WARSAW — As speculation on the choice for Poland’s prime minister shifted like the clouds of cigarette smoke in the gallery behind the floor of the Polish Parliament, a longtime observer of opposition politics saw little hope for the prospects of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the editor of Solidarity’s weekly newspaper, who had risen to sudden prominence virtually out of nowhere.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s a moralist, not a politician.”

In the end, however, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa settled on Mazowiecki, 62, one of his closest and oldest advisers--and a man who has spent much of his life fighting the Establishment--to present to President Wojciech Jaruzelski as Solidarity’s choice to head the first non-Communist government in post-World War II Poland.

Gaunt-faced and white-haired, Mazowiecki is a journalist and lay Roman Catholic intellectual who founded the journal Wiez (Link), devoted to scholarly articles on church and social issues. Between 1961 and l971, he was an outspoken member of Parliament and a leader of the Znac group of lay Catholics that were given limited expression by Poland’s Communists. In 1957, he helped found Warsaw’s Catholic Intelligentsia Club, a center for quiet but steady opposition to Communist ideology.

Rapport With Walesa

He joined Solidarity at its inception, in the 1980 strikes in the V.I. Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, organizing support among intellectuals for the striking workers. He became the editor of Tygodnik Solidarnosc (Weekly Solidarity) when the paper was launched in 1981 and went to jail for a year when the authorities closed it down during martial law.

Despite his reputation as an intellectual and his taciturn manner, he has always had a rapport with the rough-cut manner of Walesa. During strikes in the shipyard last year, he stayed in the yards with the workers, sleeping on a blanket on a concrete floor, seemingly subsisting on little more than cigarettes and coffee, and mapping strategy with Walesa and the other strike leaders.

Mazowiecki was at the center then of a renewed effort by the Catholic Church to mediate between Solidarity and the government. Those mediations were instrumental in bringing about the “round-table” negotiations that brought back the union’s legal status, the subsequent partially free elections--and now the prospect of a Solidarity prime minister.

Mazowiecki is a widower and the father of three children. Like Walesa, he is a devout Catholic and makes frequent reference to his faith.

“I am a believer,” he said Friday, “and I believe that Providence will take care of us.”

When reporters asked him what his first steps would be, his reply seemed in keeping with the thoughtful, reserved manner familiar to his colleagues in Solidarity.

“I’m going to take a trip to the woods tomorrow to think about it,” he said. “And then get to work.”