The Gdansk agreement, though a great victory, was but the starting point of further struggle. In the months that followed, the power of the regime was increasingly paralysed by a new power that had arisen in opposition to it, in a way that characterises every serious pre-revolutionary condition.
Two irreconcilable forces were locked in combat. Against it stood the regime, forced to make concessions of a vast and unprecedented character, and thrown into internal confusion.
The state it faced had, if it were to maintain its central purpose, to force down living standards, yet it had temporarily lost a large part of its power of initiative. The scale of the economic crisis pressed on both sides, demanding a rapid solution. The state was under increasing pressure both from the Russians and from the western banks to cut living standards so as to pay off debts and restore economic expansion. Reform was thrust on to the state from below, as the population stepped up its demands for the sacking and punishment of the state bureaucracy who had committed uncounted crimes of corruption and repression in the previous decade.
As the two sides grappled with each other, the economic crisis turned into economic collapse. Before the eyes of the participants two urgent outside menaces lurked, the western banks and the Russian army, each threatening to intervene and further alter the terms of the conflict. Neither side, as it stood, could survive the the existence of the other.
The state, with its political and economic machinery crumbling around it, could not hope to re-establish control over Polish life without the destruction of Solidarity. For the existence of Solidarity, that flooding river of popular aspirations, was incompatible with the continued existence of the bureaucratic structure. To nine-tenths of the population Solidarity represented an alternative set of political, social, economic and moral principles from those of the old state power.
