Word: communisme
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...pyres. The events of any isolated year can be made to seem exceptionally grim, but one has to peer hard to find elevating moments in 1980. Only Lech Walesa's stark heroism in Poland sent anything resembling a thrill into the world. The national strike he led showed up Communism as a failure?a thing not done in the Warsaw Pact countries. Leonid Brezhnev, a different sort of strongman, had to send troops to Poland's borders, in case that country, like Czechoslovakia and Hungary before it, should prove in need of "liberation...
...gravest threat to the Soviet Union since it forcibly formed the East bloc after World War II. Indeed, events there have, in a sense, stripped the clothes right off the empire. Walesa and his colleagues in the Solidarity leadership know that they are, as it were, condemned to Communism; their basic goal is not to reject the system but to make it work better...
Nonetheless, the workers' revolt shouts out Communism's economic and ideological failures and reminds the world that the glue of Soviet hegemony is force and intimidation, not shared purpose. Says Seweryn Bialer, head of Columbia University's Research Institute on International Change: "Previous challenges to Soviet control have come from above, from the leaders of satellite nations. The Polish challenge comes from below, from the workers, the only class of which the Soviet Union is afraid...
...rests by refuting the claim of the Communist Party to be the sole authentic representative of the working class." Communist orthodoxy predicates authoritarian rule: a bedrock belief of Marxism-Leninism is the absolute dictatorship of the proletariat, as represented by its vanguard, the Party. In practical terms, Moscow-style Communism also insists on rigid central planning; that kind of "command" economy is in trouble if it cannot command its own workers. For these reasons, the Soviets are nervous that the Polish disease will catch elsewhere in the East bloc and touch off worker demands for free unions and other liberalizations...
...surprising that Poles, alone among East bloc peoples, are trying to shake up Communism. Rebellion is a dominant strain in Polish history, often against Russia and usually with catastrophic results. Russia helped partition Poland out of existence in the 18th century, and Polish uprisings were crushed by Catherine the Great in 1794, Nicholas I in 1831 and Alexander II in 1864. Poles accuse the Soviets of murdering 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest during World War II and of standing idly by while the Nazis brutally put down a heroic uprising in Warsaw by Poland's underground...