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Anna Walentynowicz

Polish free trade union activist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 6, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Anna Walentynowicz was a Polish trade unionist and co-founder of Solidarity, the first recognised independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc. Her firing from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980 was the event that ignited the strike at the shipyard, set off a wave of strikes across Poland, and quickly paralyzed the Baltic coast. The Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) based in the Gdańsk shipyard eventually transformed itself into Solidarity; by September, more than one million workers were on strike in support of the 21 demands of MKS, making it the largest strike ever.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Anna Walentynowicz” is polish free trade union activist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anna, Walentynowicz and Polish, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1980—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Anna, Walentynowicz and Polish is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “polish free trade union activist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1980.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Anna Walentynowicz primary sources, Anna Walentynowicz archive and Anna research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Anna Walentynowicz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.