KEY POINTS:
Pavel shouts to be heard above power saws and the hammering. "I've been here through it all," the 54-year-old welder says. "And I never thought it would come to this."
Behind him workers swarm over a half-built container ship, 220m long. "The state of Poland these days?" he yells. "Frankly, I don't want to talk about it."
And Pavel turns away, showing the back of his blue, oil-stained overalls across which is printed the legend: Stocznia Gdansk - Gdansk Shipyards.
The end could be near for the yard where demonstrations by the Solidarity trade union under the leadership of Lech Walesa lit the fuse that led to the collapse of the communist regime in Poland and the eventual fall of Soviet satellite governments from the Baltic to the Black Sea 28 years ago.
Yet the Stocznia Gdansk cranes could soon be torn down and the workers joining the dole queue. "That would be a very, very great shame," mutters Pavel.
The future of the dockyards has revealed divisions in Polish society, already raw after two years of controversial rule by Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the right-wing nationalist twins who are President and Prime Minister respectively.
And now, with a snap election called for next month, political tensions are high.
Last week Walesa, 64, weighed into the debate. "The era in which Germany united, Europe united and the world started moving to a new global unity started in Gdansk shipyard," he said.
"It is the first monument to these events and it should be preserved for humankind. We should do our best to make the yards profitable, but without destroying them."
The Gdansk shipyard's glory days are long gone.
The old management headquarters outside which the striking dockers braved tear gas and tanks has been sold for a pittance to private developers - as has much of the land occupied by the sprawling complex of the yards.
There are plans to turn the famous "Gate No 2" and the workshop where Walesa once laboured into a museum.
The massed 17,000 workers of the eighties are now a mere 3500.
The final straw, according to senior officials at the yard, is a European Union demand made late last month that millions of pounds of aid be repaid and that two of the three remaining slipways where ships are constructed be closed.
"If we do what they want, it will be the end. The Gdansk shipyards will become economically unviable," said the yard's director, Andrzej Jaworski.
"This is a terrible injustice."
Jaworski, a former candidate for the Kaczynskis' ruling Law and Justice party, blames not the successive Polish governments which have failed to restructure the yards, or the mismanagement that meant Stocznia Gdansk was unable to profit from the recent shipbuilding boom, or even the current Government's failure to swiftly privatise and give shares to the workers as promised when it took power.
Instead, he blames the EU, hinting darkly at dodgy deals by bureaucrats to allow "luxury apartments" to be built.
"No one will spend a million dollars on a flat if there is a shipyard next door," he said.
"It is pretty clear what is going on: the EU wants to close the shipyards because they stand in the way of private developers. There are lots of rumours of corruption."
Such conspiracy theories riddle the thinking of the Kaczynskis and their party.
In coalition with some of Poland's most reactionary fringe groups, Law and Justice has mixed aggressive Polish nationalism and violent criticism of gay rights with attacks on a supposed all-powerful mafia of liberal intellectuals, ex-communist secret policemen and ruthless businessmen. The aim has been to woo the conservative rural masses of southern and eastern Poland who have yet to benefit from the economic progress made in the past decade.
"Their voters are not very well educated people with a narrow, small-town mentality who are looking for a government who will decide things for them," said one Warsaw-based political analyst.
For Walesa, Law and Justice "rely on populism, demagoguery and division when we need peace, agreement and dialogue. They are dangerous."
A key Kaczynski ally is a Catholic priest and media magnate who runs Radio Maria, which regularly registers audiences of a million or more and often hosts speakers who inveigh against abortion, Germans, Russians, homosexuals and Jews. Last week the twins risked another row with the EU by opposing the idea of an "anti-capital punishment day", suggesting instead a "right to life" day.
Public baiting of the Germans has also been common. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has boasted that his knowledge of his neighbours and historic enemies is limited to "the airside gents at Frankfurt airport".
Though polls remain close, the twins' gamble in calling parliamentary elections may not pay off. Their nationalism is far from universally popular and they are accused of creating a climate of insecurity and intolerance that has helped to drive away up to two million mainly young people - of whom around 600,000 are now in Britain.
The exodus has distorted the labour market to such an extent that the Gdansk shipyard cannot hire welders even though the unemployment rate is theoretically 15 per cent.
"The Poles are profoundly pro-European," said Eugeniusz Smolar, of the Centre for International Relations in Warsaw. And though Lech Kaczynski, who lives with his mother, will remain President, Jaroslaw is likely be forced out in favour of an economically liberal, centre-right party if, as expected, Poland's young people vote in numbers.
"We just look ridiculous in the world,' said Darita Wlodarek, 32, an advertising executive. "I feel ashamed."
What is clear is that Gdansk - where the Ikea (a home products retailer) is bigger than the airport, a tourist industry is booming in the restored 16th-century city centre and technology firms from India, China and the US are seen as the future of the local economy - is moving on, with or without the shipyard or the "terrible twins".
- Observer
