CLOUDS gathered over the Gdansk shipyard yesterday as the day shift filtered through the factory gate.

For a moment it seemed like the bad old days: workers refused to talk to strangers and bent their heads into the wind, eager to go home; hundreds of black-uniformed security guards waited for the crowd to clear.

This was not, however, a flashback to communism, when the shipyard, the cradle of the Solidarity revolution, bore the brunt of the anger of the Polish regime for much of the 1980s.

The guards were merely marking out the ground before a display of music, light and fireworks by Jean Michel Jarre, the French musician, to celebrate Solidarity’s 25th anniversary. He had promised, with a Gallic flourish, to make the cranes dance.

The workers’ stony silence was significant, though.

Twenty-five years after the strike in August 1980 that delivered the first big blow to the communist system, the workers are disappointed. For many it is a bitter anniversary. In 1980 victims became heroes. Today the heroes have become victims again.

Arkady Rybicki, an historian who was one of the first intellectuals to join and advise the strikers, said: “They count themselves among the losers of the Solidarity revolution.”

All revolutions produce winners and losers. Mr Rybicki can count himself as a winner: a professional politician with a good chance of national office if, as expected, his Civic Platform party does well in next month’s election. “I am happy with my lot,” he said.

Not so Zbigniew Stefanski, 46, a ships’ painter who has clung to his job while thousands of colleagues have lost theirs. As a Solidarity activist, he was put under constant pressure by the communist regime: jailed for two years and interrogated with such brutality that he lost a kidney.

He said: “They (the secret police) used to tell me, ‘Go on, emigrate, get out of this country’. And I would say, ‘If I do that, who will fight you bastards?’. Today it pains me to say they were right, I should have got out.”

At the start of the strikes in 1980, the shipyard employed 16,000 people. It was the pride of the communist economy, a big exporter to the Soviet Union and the catalyst of Gdansk’s postwar recovery. A postwar population of barely 117,000 had ballooned to 300,000 by the time Lech Walesa started to work at the yards as an electrician in the 1960s.

Today the communist showcase has become something of a capitalist wreck. Barely 3,000 have jobs there and the yards have been parcelled off into small private companies. Unemployment in the port has edged up to 12 per cent.

Kazimierz Kutz, a film-maker who is now a senator, said: “These Solidarity celebrations should not be so pompous. This should be a holiday for the workers and a day of reflection. But there is not space for them, many are unemployed and seriously poor. This show is not for them.”

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