Lenin returns to Poland's historic Solidarity shipyard

After two decades, the name of Vladimir Lenin made a comeback Monday to Poland's Gdansk shipyard, the famed 1980 birthplace of the anti-communist Solidarity trade union. The move coincides with the ongoing shooting of a biopic by Poland's Oscar awarded director Andrzej Wajda on Lech Walesa, the shipyard electrician-turned- Solidarity union icon. Over the next week, Wajda is planning to shoot scenes of the ground-breaking August 1980 shipyard strikes which gave birth to Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first and only free trade union. A steel sign bearing Lenin's name was fixed to the shipyard's historic Gate no. 2, the scene of the Soviet bloc's first mass strikes in 1980, which sparked an unprecedented anti-communist strike-wave that swept the nation. After a brutal military crackdown in 1981, Solidarity under Walesa's leadership went on to negotiate a peaceful end to communism in Poland in 1989, marking the first domino in the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc by 1991. Slogans including Karl Marx's iconic "Workers of the world unite" and the list of demands workers striking at the shipyard drew up in the landmark August 1980 strikes were also fixed to the shipyard gate Monday. Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz said Wajda's filming inspired him to re-create the original communist-era design of shipyard's historic gate. "The inscriptions and the name are a symbol of a time which has happily passed," Adamowicz wrote in his blog. "Passing by Gate no. 2 we must remember Lenin was a criminal, but also that workers brought an end to the criminal system he created," Adamowicz added. The move to bring Lenin back to the shipyard has however, sparked controversy. Solidarity union chief Karol Guzikiewicz has termed it "unacceptable". But winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize and Poland's ex-president Lech Walesa chuckled upon hearing the news. "If they can turn back the clock thirty years putting this name back, I'd like them to turn back the clock 30 years for me too," Walesa told Poland's commercial TVN24 news channel.