Word: gierek
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Church-state relations became more stable after 1970 under Gomulka's successor, Edward Gierek, although Wyszynski continued to lash out against specific abuses. Following the bloody repression of the 1976 food price riots, for example, he denounced the government's persecution of the demonstrators...
...military professional as well as a staunch party loyalist, wasted no time in taking command. His predecessor had hardly cleaned out his desk when the general sacked two Deputy Premiers and five of 40 Cabinet ministers, many of whom were holdovers from the regime of deposed Party Boss Edward Gierek...
Walesa insists that he is simply a "union man" and not a politician. Yet the labor upheaval that toppled Party Boss Edward Gierek also made Solidarity's leader one of Poland's three most powerful people. The other two-new Party Boss Stanislaw Kania and Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, spiritual leader of Poland's 32 million Catholics-now confer with this diminutive union man almost as if he were a high state official. Walesa takes his dizzying rise to eminence in stride. Says he: "I am not concerned with fame in the least. I have...
Kania has moved aggressively to rid the party of officials who were corrupt, incompetent or tainted by past associations with the Gierek regime. Only four of the 14 voting members of the Politburo last August are still on the ruling council: Kania; Defense Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski, 57; Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, 56; and President Jablonski, 70. All but Jablonski have at least a passing association with odnowa (renewal) and Jablonski has something better -a farewell embrace from Pope John Paul II at the Cracow airport last year...
Most of the new members of the Politburo are considered economic reformers. Stefan Olszowski, 49, who was thought to be in line to succeed Gierek last summer, privately criticized food price increases that touched off the 1976 riots and later drew up a blueprint for economic change. Tadeusz Grabski, 51, a trained economist, was bounced from the Central Committee in 1979 for assailing Gierek's "misguided" economic policies. In domestic political matters, the refashioned Politburo is believed to be pragmatic, though its newest member, Mieczyslaw Moczar, 66, is a ruthless hardliner. As Interior Minister in the late 1960s...