Word: gdansk
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Similar scenes were taking place elsewhere in the country as workers scrambled to form the independent unions they had been promised by the government in a series of extraordinary strike settlements. Negotiated separately in Gdansk, Szczecin and Jastrzebie, the accords had ended the country's major strikes after two months of labor turmoil. Now the workers were seeking the fruits of their hard-won victory. In Gdansk, the union headed by Lech Walesa, leader of the Lenin Shipyard strike, was already operating out of its new headquarters in the busy Baltic port. In the capital, faculty members of Warsaw...
Later that evening, authorities fulfilled another promise made by Jagielski: the release of some 30 dissidents who had been jailed during the crisis. At a press conference shortly after his liberation, Jacek Kuron, spokesman for the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), called the Gdansk agreement "a victory for the workers, but also for the government, which showed a sense of realism...
News of the Gdansk agreement failed to stem the tide of the mining protest, and tensions were further heightened when a runaway coal car killed eight men in the Halemba Mine near Katowice. By midweek, 200,000 workers from some 22 mines and 50 factories had allied themselves with a central strike committee at the Manifest Lipcowy Mine in the southern town of Jastrzebie. To the 21 Gdansk demands, the miners added several of their own, including improved safety measures and an end to the four-shift "brigade" system begun last year to enable the mines to operate 24 hours...
That he is the Kremlin's creature seemed certain by his selection over the wily Stefan Olszowski, 49, an economic reformer and Gierek's longtime rival. Speaking on his own, Kania urged political compromise in Gdansk, but denounced some of the strike leaders as "antisocialists" who were heading in a direction "that no longer has to do with the interests of the workers." Now he will have to satisfy Moscow without igniting his restive nation. Says a West German expert: "He faces a monstrous task...
Faced with the people's restlessness and the discrepancy be tween a dogmatic Marxian approach to economics and the evident reality, some Communist states have become surprisingly experimental- heretical even. In some of their demands, the workers of Gdansk were asking only for what their comrades in Hungary gained years ago. Yugoslavia practices a renegade Communism that allows for certain capitalist trappings...