Word: gdansk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Solidarity, led by the charismatic electrician Lech Walesa, had gained international sympathy after the 1980 shipyard strikes in Gdansk. It would eventually gain huge popular support; 1.5 million Poles would claim membership in April 1989. However, the Communist regime felt threatened by the union and responded with force. In 1981, Wojciech Jaruzelski, the secretary of the Polish Communist Party, declared martial law, criminalized Solidarity, and imprisoned much of its leadership. For two years, Poland suffered under military rule...
...distinguished brother, John Darnton, who succeeded me as East European Bureau Chief for The New York Times, and who has spent 40 years as a journalist for that eminent institution where he won the Pulitzer Prize for describing the rise of Solidarity and the strikes at the shipyards of Gdansk, Poland...
...Unfortunately, Walesa, an electrician from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland who would later serve as the country’s president, could not set foot on U.S. soil for fear of being unable to return to his country, thus becoming the first to have his speech read in absentia at a Harvard Commencement...
...gray, windswept afternoon in Warsaw, and Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, is running late. His flight in from Gdansk has been delayed by a storm; the schedule is tight. The Georgian President has come to visit, and then there's the weekend trip to Washington to talk over missile defense with George W. Bush. Three guests are waiting in the Chancellery when Tusk arrives. "I am not crazy about this job," he sighs, plunking down in an armchair and unbuttoning his jacket. That's understandable. Nineteen years after his country broke free from the Soviet bloc, it is still...
Tusk has never been out for the quick fix. Raised in Gdansk as a member of the tiny Kashubian ethnic minority, he joined the anticommunist Solidarity movement in the 1970s while studying history at university. He was later forced by the authorities to work as a house-painter because of his dissident activities. Tusk shared with Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders an antipathy to the government that he says was self-evident: "Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around...