Poles Tussle Over an Icon of Their Past, With an Eye on the Future

A tug of war over the legacy of the Solidarity movement has much to do with the battle over which direction the country should go today.

GDANSK, Poland — Solidarity, the independent Polish trade union that four decades ago started an avalanche of dissent that swept away Communism, has more modest ambitions these days. For a start, it wants its plywood boards back. The boards, scrawled with demands for freedom and hoisted on a wall at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980, have been on display since 2014 at a museum built amid the ruins of a facility that laid off most of its workers years ago. The museum, an oasis of shimmering modernity constructed with European Union funds, is dedicated to the ideals that drove Solidarity in 1980 when it was a diverse, Western-looking opposition movement with 10 million members.