WARSAW -- Zofia Bydlinska recently found out how much her years in the anticommunist underground are worth.

She had been an editor at Poland's leading daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, since its outlaw origins under martial law in the 1980s. Based on her long service, she had received a big block of shares at preferential prices when the newspaper's parent, Agora SA, went public. When the share price rocketed up early this month, she sat down with her son, Michal, in their cramped apartment and watched as he punched numbers into a pocket calculator.

A steel mill dominates the view from the flat. From the window of the calculator, Ms. Bydlinska learned that her stake came to one million zlotys -- about $231,500. By Polish standards, that made her rich. Then she realized that Michal had forgotten a zero. Her shares were actually worth $2.3 million.

In just 10 years, Gazeta Wyborcza's founders have turned the East Bloc's first legal opposition newspaper into a media juggernaut with interests in radio, television and the Internet. Now the Solidarity diehards who cranked out the paper's precursor for no pay are turning their dream of democracy into hard cash.

At its initial public offering last year, Agora sold shares to 1,600 employees at one zloty (about 23 cents) each, with the allotments based on years of service (the general offer price was 49.90 zlotys, or about $11.55). They couldn't sell their shares until the end of the lockup period, on July 1. On July 4, shares valued at $42.5 million went to institutional investors at 104 zlotys a share, automatically enriching Agora employees. The shares closed at 107 zlotys yesterday.

Among the wealthiest are those who worked for Gazeta 20 years ago, when Solidarity loyalists used hand-operated presses to help bring down communism and lockup meant jail. Many hope that their new riches won't spoil the culture of social activism that made Gazeta Wyborcza the paper it is. But they all realize that private wealth has transformed Poland in ways they never envisioned.

"Money brings freedom, and a certain power to help," says Wanda Rapaczynski, Agora's president. "You learn that 80% of life's problems can be helped with money."

Freedom is certainly the goal for Zofia Florianczyk, a 52-year-old woman who served as Gazeta Wyborcza's deputy managing editor during the upheavals of 1989. With her windfall -- worth about $2.6 million currently -- she plans to retire and get out of politics altogether. "In the underground, if you cared about social issues, you had to get involved politically," she explains. "Now, I have a choice."

Trained as an electrical engineer, Ms. Florianczyk was by day a professor at Warsaw's Technical University in the 1980s. At night, she moonlighted in a Warsaw publishing house, where she and fellow activists laid out the pages of Tygodnik Mazowsze, the underground precursor to Gazeta Wyborcza.

She was jailed for six months for her work in the underground. Later, as a Tygodnik Mazowsze reporter in early 1989, she sat in on Poland's historic roundtable talks between Solidarity leaders and the communist government. The negotiations led to Poland's first multiparty elections and allowed Solidarity to print its own legal newspaper during the campaign. Lech Walesa appointed Tygodnik Mazowsze staffers to produce Gazeta Wyborcza, or "Electoral Newspaper."

"I hate thinking about what to do with money," Ms. Florianczyk says, referring to her stake in Agora. But she has a few ideas. She plans to sell some shares, spend six weeks backpacking in Peru and buy a small apartment in a quiet Warsaw neighborhood.

She also has decided to found a recreational center that will provide activities and space to play for poor children from Warsaw's housing projects. "I get sad when I feel young people are growing up without values," she says.

Darek Cwiklak, 30, runs the paper's Web site, Gazeta Online. He shares Ms. Florianczyk's idealism, but feels squeezed by more mundane concerns. He sold all of his shares last week for about $13,000, the equivalent of about nine month's salary. He plans to use the cash to pay off his credit-card debt and buy a new Renault Megane.

With his translucent iMac computer and mobile phone, Mr. Cwiklak represents Agora's new guard. But he's hoping that the flow of cash won't wash away the atmosphere of the old days. "This will bring a change of one's state," he muses. "But what's unique about Gazeta is you never worked for money, but for the fun of it, the prestige. I mean, the salaries compared to other media aren't that great."

The spirit of solidarity -- with a lowercase "s" -- seems still to be alive at Agora. In the company's new printing plant outside Warsaw, a few workers who are buying new cars with share proceeds are selling their older cars at discounts to those with fewer shares. The paper's editor in chief, the well-known historian and former dissident Adam Michnik, refused to take any shares, even though his founder's role would have made him a wealthy man. He says he wants to maintain his editorial and intellectual independence.

Agora's president, Ms. Rapaczynski, feels she can do more with her shares -- a stake based mainly on her high management status and valued at about $32.8 million -- than without them. She already spends a chunk of her roughly $80,000 annual salary to assist a long list of family, friends, artists and assorted "bohemians."

Unlike many Gazeta Wyborcza staffers, Ms. Rapaczynski wasn't with the paper in the days of the Solidarity movement. She left Poland for the U.S. in 1968, when she was 19, and went on to get a Yale University business degree and nine years' banking experience. An old friend, Gazeta Wyborcza senior editor Helena Luczywo, lured her back to Poland in the early 1990s to run the business side of the operation. She and Agora Vice President Piotr Niemczycki, another founder, masterminded the employee share-purchase plan.

(Among many cooperative ventures Gazeta Wyborcza has launched with Western media, it prints a weekly page of articles from The Wall Street Journal Europe.)

Ms. Rapaczynski has ensured that the members of the executive board -- she, Ms. Luczywo, Mr. Niemczycki and two others -- are prepared for what she calls a "retirement of activism." The five are trustees of a trust that holds 9% of Agora's issued shares, valued today at about $150 million. When the fund matures, its proceeds must be used for a charitable cause. She and Ms. Luczywo's latest idea: education for rural children. "We spend many pleasant moments," she says, "imagining what we'll do with the money."

Back in the shadow of the steel mill, Ms. Bydlinska's grim flat made her big spending decision obvious. A slight woman with large tortoise-shell glasses, Ms. Bydlinska was one of Gazeta Wyborcza's first editors. In those days, the editorial group consisted mostly of women. They held news meetings around the kitchen table in the home of Ms. Luczywo, now the paper's deputy editor in chief.

After Ms. Bydlinska retires, she'd like to sell part of her stake to open a business "not focused on making money," she says. She toys with the idea of setting up a counseling center for people who live alone. Or perhaps a dance studio. Meanwhile, she just wants to live a little.

Communist authorities seized her childhood home, forcing her family into her 445-square-foot flat. Long divorced, she has lived here most of her 56 years, without closets or much privacy.

This month she'll buy a new, custom-built apartment twice the size of the old one, in a fashionable neighborhood. Its best feature, she says: "Space -- the space I recall from my childhood."

Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal