The Crane Operator
Nobody wanted a revolution. They got one anyway.
On the afternoon of August 7, 1980, a woman named Anna Walentynowicz walked out of the gate of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk for the last time, carrying her things in a bag.
She was four-foot-ten. She had worked at the shipyard for thirty years: sixteen of them as a welder, the rest as a crane operator in W-2 section. She was small enough that her bosses had used her, in her welding years, to climb deep into the hulls of ships where the men did not fit. They had given her a bronze cross of merit, then a silver, then in 1979 a gold. She was a widow. Her son was grown. She was five months from retirement.
She was also, in their view, a problem.
She had spent years writing for and distributing an underground newsletter called Robotnik Wybrzeża, The Coastal Worker, which talked about things the official press could not: thefts at the shipyard, accidents nobody was reporting, the corruption of the official union. Every December on the anniversary of the 1970 strike, when security forces had killed fifty striking workers on the Baltic coast, she went out and collected money to buy memorial flowers, and every year the police arrested her for it. They had been looking for a reason to be rid of her. On August 7 they found one.
She did not make a scene. She gathered her things. She walked out.
If you had been standing at Gate Number 2 of the Lenin Shipyard that afternoon and someone had told you that this small woman with a bag had just lit the fuse that would end the Soviet empire, you would have laughed. There were a million fifty-year-old women in the Eastern Bloc that summer who had been quietly told they were inconvenient and quietly shown the door. Almost all of them went home, and that was the end of the story.
This one’s colleagues did not let it be the end of the story.
A week later, on August 14, the workers at the Lenin Shipyard struck. Their first demand was that Anna Walentynowicz be brought back to work. The slogan ran through the shipyard like a current: Bring Anna Walentynowicz back to work.A young electrician named Lech Wałęsa, who had been fired four years earlier and was banned from the premises, climbed over the wall to join them. Within days the strike had spread to other shipyards, then to the mines, then to factories across Poland. By the end of the month the government had signed the Gdańsk Agreement, recognizing for the first time in the history of the Communist bloc the right to organize a free trade union.
The union was called Solidarność. Solidarity. Within a year it had ten million members. In a country of thirty-five million people, it was the largest trade union in the history of the world.
Nine years later the Berlin Wall came down.
Anna said about it later: We wanted better money, improved work safety, a free trade union and my job back. Nobody wanted a revolution.
What Anna set in motion went on to dissolve an empire that, on the morning she walked out, had looked permanent. She was just trying to keep her job and bring memorial flowers to dead workers and stop pretending the thefts weren’t happening. The empire was a side effect.
How does one laid off fifty-year-old crane operator set off a chain that ends with the Berlin Wall?
A year and a bit into the second Trump administration, with wars of choice being fought, the world economy teetering, the courts being defied, the agencies being purged, the dollar dropping, masked agents on the streets, and the chair of the Federal Reserve under criminal investigation, a lot of us are quietly asking the same question, on and off, and not finding an answer that feels equal to the question.
What can I do? Me, personally?
Maybe you have been to the marches. Maybe you have given money. Maybe you have called a senator and listened to the same staffer take down your ZIP code for the eleventh time. Maybe none of it has felt like enough.
The answer Anna Walentynowicz’s life points to is, I think, the truest one available. And to explain it, let’s take a short detour through Prague.
Two years before Anna walked out of the shipyard, in 1978, a Czech playwright named Václav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. He set it inside the imagined shop of a greengrocer.
Every morning, like every other shopkeeper on his street, the greengrocer placed in his window a small cardboard sign reading Workers of the world, unite!
The slogan was the closing line of the Communist Manifesto and the official motto of the regime that ran his country. Shopkeepers across the Eastern Bloc were expected to display it, the way American restaurants display health inspection scores. Nobody read it. Nobody cared what it said. Its only job was to prove that the shopkeeper was the kind of person who put up the sign.
The greengrocer didn’t believe it. He didn’t think about it. He put it up because the sign was what shopkeepers put up, and not putting it up would be a problem. The Party would notice. The neighbors would notice. There would be a conversation and there would be consequences.
What if, Havel asked, the greengrocer one morning stopped putting up the sign?
Havel said something extraordinary would happen. Not to the regime, not yet, but to the greengrocer. He would have stopped pretending. And by the simple physical fact of an empty window, he would have addressed his neighbors. He would have said, in a language anyone passing the shop could read: I do not consent.
And other people, on their way to put up their own signs, would have to ask themselves a question they had been very carefully not asking.
Havel called this living in truth. He wrote that it was the most dangerous thing a person could do to a system that runs on lies.
He wrote it from inside that system. He went to prison for it. Eleven years later, in November of 1989, the playwright became the president of Czechoslovakia.
A month after Donald Trump first took office, in February of 2017, a Yale historian named Timothy Snyder published a book called On Tyranny that compressed Havel’s insight into five words. He put them as the first lesson, before all the others, because he believed they came first in time.
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Snyder calls it anticipatory obedience. Same coin as the sign in the greengrocer’s window. Anticipatory obedience is how the regime gets paid. Living in truth is how the payments stop.
Force-based regimes mostly do not run on force.
I wrote earlier this week about what I call the legitimacy subsidy. People obey governments mostly because they consent to them—they believe the system is legitimate, so they willingly comply. When that consent stops, enforcement becomes ruinously expensive. Pull the subsidy, and the regime starts paying retail for everything it used to get on credit.
Where does this subsidy come from? It comes from a hundred million tiny daily transactions we barely notice making. You stop at the stoplight, you pay your taxes, you follow the rules. The shopkeeper puts up the sign. Each person thinks ahead, imagines what the authorities might want, and offers it without being asked.
Taken alone, these offerings look trivial. Taken together, they are the budget that makes the whole authoritarian apparatus affordable. Without them, the regime cannot pay.
Anna Walentynowicz had been refusing the small daily payments for years. She refused to pretend the thefts weren’t happening. She refused to pretend the workers killed in 1970 hadn’t died. She refused to pretend the official union represented her. Every December she walked into the police station with the flowers anyway. The regime decided it could not afford her.
What it could not afford was not her. What it could not afford was the fact that other people had been watching her do it.
Within a week, twelve thousand of them stopped pretending. Within a month, ten million.
So: what do you do?
You follow Timothy Snyder’s advice: you do not consent in advance.
You look at what is happening on your block and you decide it is your problem.
Once you know what to look for, you see those empty windows everywhere. You see it in San Diego, where volunteers and teachers started driving early-morning patrols to push ICE vehicles out of Barrio Logan. You see it in Morristown, Tennessee, where teachers built their own meal delivery systems for kids too afraid to attend school after a raid. You see it across Los Angeles and Chicago, where ordinary people spun up mutual aid networks overnight to deliver groceries and medicine to neighborhoods in lockdown. Nobody asked them to do it. They just looked at what was happening on their block and decided it was their problem.
A few weeks ago, eight million people showed up to No Kings 3 at 3,300 events in all fifty states. It was the largest single-day protest in American history. Nearly half the events were in red or battleground states. People marched in Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than two thousand where Trump won with sixty-six percent of the vote. In Billings, Montana, five thousand people turned out for the largest protest in the city’s history. In Kotzebue, Alaska. In East Glacier Park, Montana. Someone in Portland held a sign that read: “So bad, even introverts are here.”
None of these people, taken alone, could bring down this authoritarian regime. But by refusing to look away, refusing to cooperate, each refusal was a withdrawal from the legitimacy account that this administration is burning through faster than any in American history. And each one made the next refusal easier for the person watching.
That is how it worked in Gdańsk. Anna Walentynowicz refused to cooperate in advance, every day, for years, until the regime decided it could not afford her. And then it could not afford the people who had been watching her. And then it could not afford the people who had been watching them.
She lived to see Solidarity win. She lived to see Wałęsa become the first non-Communist president of Poland. She lived to see the empire that fired her dissolve.
On April 10, 2010, at the age of eighty, she boarded a Polish Air Force plane bound for Smolensk. She was traveling with the President of Poland and ninety-four other leaders to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre, where the Soviets had murdered twenty-two thousand Polish officers in 1940 and spent fifty years lying about it. The plane went down in fog. There were no survivors. She spent her whole life refusing to pretend the dead hadn't died., and she died doing it.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. A four-foot-ten crane operator from Gdańsk understood that in her bones.
Live in truth. Do not obey in advance.