Word: lech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reformist, liberalizing trends sweeping the Communist world are essentially irreversible, requiring little more than the applause of the West. Even if updated to take account of the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the Politburo warnings of a crackdown in the Baltics, Fukuyama's thesis will probably not persuade Lech Walesa that history has yet reached a happy ending in Poland...
...Politburo marked the 50th anniversary of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact -- whose secret protocols resulted in the partition of Poland at the onset of World War II -- by denouncing the agreement as a violation of "sanctified moral norms of international coexistence." Lest anyone miss the point, Polish opposition leader Lech Walesa spelled it out in an interview with an Italian newspaper: "We are setting out . . . to return to the prewar situation when Poland was a capitalist country...
...daring reform campaign, many East Europeans are setting out to draw new conclusions from old lessons. If most Communist countries share a perception of the political and economic forces that have brought them to this juncture, they lack a common vision of where they are going. Acknowledged Solidarity leader Lech Walesa: "Nobody has previously taken the road that leads from socialism to capitalism." Poland and Hungary are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms that promise to disprove the theory that totalitarian regimes cannot change. Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Bulgaria tinker with old formulas in hopes they can stave off a reckoning...
...Administration is offering $119 million in aid to Poland's Solidarity- led government -- not a penny more than it was prepared to give the Communists who locked up Lech Walesa a few years ago. In contrast, U.S. aid to Israel this year will total $3 billion, and to Egypt $2.4 billion. Looking at the numbers another way, the total aid to Poland is less than one-quarter the price of one Stealth bomber...
...member of Solidarity was about to become Prime Minister, Soviet officials said simply that it was an "internal" Polish matter. A Moscow television reporter noted that "it is necessary to form a new government as quickly as possible," then ticked off a short list of potential leaders that included Lech Walesa. The reaction was expected. Visiting Paris in July, Gorbachev had said, "How the Polish people . . . will decide to structure their society and lives will be their affair...