Word: gdansk
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...deft move, but it cost Walesa some of his popularity. When the Gdansk congress reconvened, Walesa's high-handed style became the central issue. Attacked in speech after speech for compromising with the government without consulting the rank and file, Walesa had to fight three radical candidates to keep his job. He was elected, but his 55.2% of the vote showed that his hold over the movement had slipped markedly since his Lenin shipyard triumph...
Even more important than the organizational problems for Walesa and Solidarity was the question of defining policy and strategy. In the beginning, Walesa insisted that Solidarity should be a pure and simple labor movement, not a political opposition. On the day he showed up at a Gdansk apartment building to open Solidarity's first makeshift headquarters, a wooden crucifix under his arm and a bouquet of flowers in his right hand, Walesa told a crowd of reporters, "I am not interested in politics. I am a union man. My job now is to organize the union...
...concessions extraordinary in a Communist country, including reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks for the unions and the church. At a nationally televised ceremony, where strikers and government representatives stood side by side and sang the Polish national anthem, Walesa signed what became known as the Gdansk agreement with a giant souvenir pen bearing the likeness of John Paul...
...head of a labor federation that soon grew to 10 million members?fully a quarter of the Polish population. Organizing and controlling the loosely knit federation, which was divided into 38 semiautonomous regional chapters, soon became a major challenge for Walesa and the national commission that he headed in Gdansk. The job was complicated by an almost insatiable drive for democracy among a rank and file that had no experience with the democratic process. Most of the Solidarity activists were young. They were both angry and exuberant: bitter over the party's moral and material bankruptcy, giddy with the sense...
TIME'S Eastern European Bureau Chief Richard Hornik spent the first ten days of Poland's state of emergency in Gdansk and Warsaw, operating as best he could under a communications blackout, tight censorship and restrictions on travel. Last week he flew from Warsaw to Paris, where he wrote this firsthand account of life under General Jaruzelski 's martial-law regime. His report...