Word: lech
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...Time were looking for one man who did break up the old bloc, it would have to go back to the beginning of the decade, when an electrician named Lech Walesa was trying to organize a union called Solidarity in the Gdansk shipyards...
Havel insists he will serve only until elections for a new Parliament are held, probably in June. Like the political figure he is increasingly compared to, Poland's Lech Walesa, he seems to prefer being kingmaker to being king. But in the brave new world of Eastern Europe, all axioms have been reduced to theorems and all vows rendered interim. Many Czechs think Havel will seek a more permanent role in politics, a pursuit he seems to love -- at least for this heady period of symbolizing freedom and basking in praise, before the hard task of transition sets...
...that program was aborted partly because the Soviet crackdown on "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia triggered a backlash against liberalism in the U.S.S.R. In Poland the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, preceded the advent of Gorbachev by five years. But Lech Walesa was officially considered an outlaw. The notion of Solidarity participating in government, not to mention dominating it, was unthinkable...
...laugh. But as the most prominent figure in Prague's rapidly coalescing opposition, Havel has rocketed to near cult status. "I am a writer and human rights activist, not a politician," insisted Havel. But as a Western diplomat in Prague put it, "Unlikely but true, he's the Lech Walesa of Prague...
...your job, of $ not getting promoted, of being thrown out of school, of failing to get a passport. People learned that if they ceased to fear the system, the system was helpless." Thus was born Solidarity, backed by the church and led by such friends of the Pope as Lech Walesa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who subsequently became the Soviet bloc's first Christian Prime Minister...