Word: lech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Meanwhile, in Gdansk, Solidarity's national commission held an emergency session on how to deal with the government. For three days, union leaders angrily debated the question of just how far they could push the beleaguered officials under the threat of possible Soviet intervention. Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa later described their dilemma: "Should we behave as a typical trade union that makes demands or should we attempt, as Poles and citizens, to go in a slightly different direction...
Whatever form it takes, Warsaw's economic program will ultimately depend on the cooperation of Solidarity's 10 million members. Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa admitted last week that price increases were necessary but said they should be accompanied by broad economic reforms. Charges one Solidarity official: "Incredible incompetence in management is the problem." Despite the party congress, Poland's problems are clearly far from solved...
Strikes. Economic debacle. Invasion jitters. It might seem at a quick glance that nothing much had changed in Poland since those turbulent days last summer, when an obscure electrician named Lech Walesa clambered over the gates of Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to take control of a burgeoning national strike. In reality almost everything is different. The 1980 strikes shook the Communist world to its roots, engendering the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, Solidarity, and launching a far-reaching process of reform and re-examination called odnowa (renewal...
...week completed the election of delegates to an extraordinary party congress. Its purpose: to elect party leaders and act on a series of proposed structural reforms that are expected to make the Polish Communist Party by far the most liberal in the Soviet bloc. Even prominent nonparty members like Lech Walesa, leader of the independent Solidarity union federation, were hoping that the congress would succeed and thus help stabilize the country...
...renewal," the committee's final resolution promised a "re-evaluation of journalistic cadres" -signaling a probable purge of journalists -and called for the forces of public order to crack down on open dissent. The resolution also labeled political strikes "inadmissible." On this last point, even Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa was moved to agree, telling workers at a Warsaw auto plant that "we [Solidarity] do not exist to change the government or to engage in political activities." It remains to be seen how aggressively the party's pledges will be carried out. The Poles have found ways to circumvent...