Word: baltics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Baltic seaport of Gdansk, sirens wailed to signal the start of a four-hour "warning strike" that interrupted public transport and shut down more than 800 plants. In Warsaw, red-and-white Polish flags fluttered defiantly over idle buses and streetcars as drivers joined workers from some 60 local factories and offices in a related half-day stoppage. On the outskirts of Bydgoszcz, 140 miles northwest of the capital, police turned back columns of angry tractor drivers who were seeking to stage a demonstration in the middle of the town. The snowballing protest climaxed on Saturday, when millions of workers...
...against the background of terror . . . which does not spare the lives of innocent men." The meeting concluded with an exchange of gifts. Walesa gave the Pope a ship model made by the Gdansk shipworkers and a replica of the recently constructed monument to the slain workers of the 1970 Baltic seaport MSA riots. The Pope presented Walesa and his wife with rosaries and a signed photograph of himself...
...been Dönitz's U-boat successes that led a desperate Hitler to designate him as his successor near the end of the war. The admiral subsequently ran the doomed country for 23 days, staving off the inevitable surrender while he operated a hasty sealift through the Baltic, enabling 2 million Germans to escape from the eastern provinces that would later be occupied by the Soviets...
...shaken to its core by a son of the working class. Yet in 1980 an unemployed Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, rose from the masses to become one of the Communist world's most charismatic figures. When he scaled the gates of Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk last August, Walesa did far more than seize the reins of an angry strike movement. To millions of Polish workers, he became the symbol of their dreams for a better life. In the process, he helped launch a bold experiment to bend the rigid lines of Communism...
Walesa became a strike leader at the Lenin Shipyard during the 1970 food price riots. Fired for his attempts at labor organizing in 1976, he found work in a machine repair shop and helped found the underground Baltic Free Trade Unions Movement. He was sent as a delegate to the official union elections in 1979, but was outraged to find the local party secretary controlling the vote. "Why have I come here, to elect or to applaud?" he demanded. The answer: an unceremonious sacking...