Word: gdansk
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...Despite the painfully obvious problems, the Communist Party seemed to be doing nothing of substance to improve the situation," he recalls. "Intellectuals and dissidents were warning that the people's patience was about at an end." Last week Kalb was back in Poland, talking with shipyard workers in Gdansk, coal miners in Silesia, government ministers and party officials, as the Polish regime struggled to cope with the two-month-old workers' revolt...
Kalb started his career as a journalist with the Washington Star, covering the anti-Viet Nam protests of the late 1960s. He finds the parallels-and the contrasts-with the Polish situation intriguing. Describing the high emotion and palpable patriotism of the strike settlement signing in Gdansk, he says: "To grasp its improbability, try to imagine Attorney General John Mitchell and Antiwar Organizer Jerry Rubin after the November 1969 march on Washington standing together and singing the Star-Spangled Banner...
Poland had scarcely begun to savor the remarkable triumph of the workers of Gdansk and the miners of Silesia in wresting a series of unprecedented reforms from the Communist government when there was unsettling news. There had been rumors all week long, perhaps inevitably in a Communist country, that the price for Polish Leader Edward Gierek might be stiff. One version had it that his entire Politburo had been called on the red carpet to Moscow. Nonetheless, in downtown Warsaw the country's parliament assembled on schedule to discuss and ratify the government's settlement with the striking...
...gates of the Lenin Shipyard. "I'm just a simple worker, so forgive me if I use simple language." Simple it may be, but it is the language the striking workers of Poland's Baltic coast understand and respond to. In the three weeks since the Gdansk strike began, Walesa (pronounced Vah-wen-sah) has become an authentic hero. Wherever he walked across the idle yard, workers would break into spontaneous applause. A few would run up for his autograph. Each evening when he climbed the flower-covered main gate to deliver news of the strike, the crowd...
...leader," gushed an adoring young worker. Added a Gdansk taxi driver, "He has courage. People here admire him." The authorities too soon realized that Walesa, as head of the Interfactory Strike Committee, which forced the government to the bargaining table, commanded respect. At the negotiating table, First Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski unfailingly addressed him as "the Honorable Mr. Chairman...