LECH WALESA stepped down from the barricades yesterday and issued a warning to the West: beware of Russia! One of the world’s best-known revolutionaries was giving his swansong — he will resign this week from Solidarity, the union he led to help shatter communism — to journalists eager to know whether his revolution was ready to roll eastwards.

Warsaw is abuzz with rumours about how the West and in particular Poland, should force the hand of President Lukashenko of Belarus.

Mr Walesa sounded an unusually nervous note. The Russian bear, he said, should not be provoked by an over-ambitious West keen to establish democratic governments on Russia’s borderlands, be it in Belarus or Moldova, or in Central Asia. “Russia is at a crossroads,” he said with his customary quick-fire delivery. “Will Russia in future be a threat or a friend? That is the question. Russia is needed by every country — it has huge resources, but of course it is needed not as a hegemonic system but as a developed, democratic country.”

Mr Walesa was speaking as veteran Solidarity underground activists, erstwhile dissidents from across Eastern Europe and Western human rights campaigners met to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Solidarity. The union was born as the result of strikes led by Mr Walesa in August 1980.

Western non-governmental organisations believe that they helped towards a remarkable Solidarity-like change of power in Ukraine and in Georgia. Polish Solidarity activists are now actively helping Belarussian dissidents to set up printing presses.

Mr Walesa fears that Poland is stumbling into a dangerously anti-Russian policy. Were the regime in Belarus to fall soon, with a helpful push from Poland, relations with President Putin would deteriorate. “Belarus is propped up by Russia, so the question is whether the European Union and the West are prepared to compensate the Belarussians for what they lose,” Mr Walesa said. “So I say to the Belarussians, go for democracy — but don’t make the mistakes we did in Poland.”

The Gdansk shipyards, he recalls, were dependent on orders from the Soviet Union. When communism collapsed, so did that market, and the yards — Mr Walesa’s old workplace — were all but bankrupt.

“We have to offer these societies a new Marshall Plan,” he told The Times, referring to the US postwar reconstruction aid for Europe. Were the Belarus regime to be toppled and the West to be reluctant to bail out its economy, the outcome would be an unstable state on the edge of the EU and an angry Russia.

The old-time revolutionary is thus using the 25th anniversary celebrations to discourage the spread of revolution.

Mr Walesa received support yesterday from Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Adviser to President Carter. Revolutions, he said, had to be sparked from within, not transplanted from the West. “Building democracy as an imposition from abroad is a form of imperialism,” he said.

The message from Mr Walesa and Professor Brzezinski is not particularly popular in Poland. The impatience with Belarus is growing and most politicians on the Centre Right — likely to come to power in impending elections — are willing to risk upsetting the Kremlin.

A radio station is being built up in Poland to transmit into Belarus. Non-governmental organisations are helping to train independent-minded Belarussian teachers. Polish universities are taking in Belarussian students banned from universities at home. Two EU members, Poland and Lithuania, see themselves as in the vanguard of change ahead of next year’s Belarus presidential elections.

“Russia’s problems are in proportion to its size,” Mr Walesa said. “As long as Russia is burdened by vast economic and social dilemmas, it will be liable to seek out scapegoats elsewhere. We have to find a way of talking with the Russians, sitting together and sorting out problems, freely, and as equals.”

Mr Walesa is making a kind of peace with the communists at home. Yesterday at the celebrations, sitting next to his successor as President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former communist whose term expires soon, he leaned over and suggested in a loud whisper: “We can forge a trade union for former presidents of Poland.”

“I’m in favour,” Mr Kwasniewski replied, “but I think I know who is going to be the chairman.”

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