Word: lech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Year because he stands at the end of 1980 looking ahead, while the year behind him smolders in pyres. The events of any isolated year can be made to seem exceptionally grim, but one has to peer hard to find elevating moments in 1980. Only Lech Walesa's stark heroism in Poland sent anything resembling a thrill into the world. The national strike he led showed up Communism as a failure?a thing not done in the Warsaw Pact countries. Leonid Brezhnev, a different sort of strongman, had to send troops to Poland's borders, in case that country, like...
Karl Marx could hardly have imagined that a socialist empire based on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would one day be shaken to its core by a son of the working class. Yet in 1980 an unemployed Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, rose from the masses to become one of the Communist world's most charismatic figures. When he scaled the gates of Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk last August, Walesa did far more than seize the reins of an angry strike movement. To millions of Polish workers, he became the symbol of their dreams...
...kitchen preparing Sunday dinner as his six children, ranging in age from eleven years to four months, scamper about the flat. At one moment he glances briefly at a flickering TV screen, chuckles as Laurel and Hardy fall out of bed, then resumes his conversation. Six months ago, Lech...
Walesa, 37, was born during the Nazi occupation in the village of Popow, between Warsaw and Gdansk, and attended a state vocational school in nearby Lipno. After his father died, Lech's mother married her brother-in-law, Stanislaw Walesa; she was later killed in an auto accident while visiting the U.S. The stepfather, a lumberman, now lives in Jersey City...
...point of arrogance. In private conversation, he has a marked fondness for first-person pronouns. In public appearances, however, he can exhibit flashes of deep humility. A crowd of miners in Jastrzebie last October asked Walesa who could teach them democracy. His answer: "Who? Not Lesio [a diminutive of Lech], for he is too small, too stupid. Yourselves. Everybody." Yet he can be remarkably highhanded when chairing union meetings, often interrupting speakers in mid-sentence and imposing his own views...