2005 Poland 2zl UNC Coin "Solidarity Union"

• Mint: Polish Mint
• Denomination: 2 Zloty
• Quality: Uncirculated
• Issue limit: 1 million pcs.
• Alloy: Base Metal
• Diameter: 27 mm
• Weight: 8.15 grams
• Obverse Design: Ewa Tyc-Karpinska
• Reverse Design: Ewa Olszewska-Borys
• Box/Capsule: No/Yes
• Certificate: No

Launched on August 17, 2005, this coin issue celebrates the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Solidarity Trade Union, Solidarnosc.

Solidarity is a Polish trade union federation founded in September 1980 at the Gdansk Shipyards, originally led by Lech Walesa. In the 1980's, it gathered a broad anti-communist social movement ranging from people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-communist Left. The union was backed by a group of intellectual dissidents - the Workers' Defense Committee or Komitet Obrony Robotnikow - KOR in Polish (formed in 1976). This was renamed the following year - Committee for Social Self-defense (KSS-KOR). Solidarity advocated nonviolence in its members activities.

The survival of the Solidarity movement was an unprecedented event not only in Poland, a satellite state of the USSR practically ruled by a one-party Communist regime, but also in the whole Eastern bloc (Warsaw pact).

It meant a break in the hard-line stance of the Party which in another protest in 1970 had ended in bloodshed with dozens of people killed by machine gun fire and over 1,000 injured. In 1968, the Prague Spring was crushed by a Soviet-led invasion in the streets of the capital of Czechoslovakia.