Word: leninization
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...developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of workers' protests in the 1970s and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age 37, to join the occupation strike. With his electrifying personality, quick wit and gift of the gab, he was soon leading it. He moved his fellow workers away from mere wage claims and toward a central, daringly political demand: free trade unions...
...Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. With support from the Pope and the U.S., he and his colleagues in the underground leadership of Solidarity kept the flame alight, until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin brought new hope. In 1988 there was another occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which Walesa again joined--though this time as the grand old man among younger workers. A few months later, the Polish communists entered into negotiations with Solidarity, at the first Round Table of 1989. Walesa and his colleagues secured semifree elections in which Solidarity proceeded to triumph...
Without Walesa, the occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard might never have taken off. Without him, Solidarity might never have been born. Without him, it might not have survived martial law and come back triumphantly to negotiate the transition from communism to democracy. And without the Polish icebreaking, Eastern Europe might still be frozen in a Soviet sphere of influence, and the world would be a very different place. With all Walesa's personal faults, his legacy is a huge gain in freedom, not just for the Poles. His services were, as an old Polish slogan...
Besides, the American civil rights movement wasn't just Martin Luther King Jr.; it was also Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks. As for nonviolent social activists and leaders--What about Jane Addams, Petra Kelly, Dorothy Day, Aung San Suu Kyi? And why flatter Lenin by leaving out two of his staunchest ideological opponents, the Polish-German socialist Rosa Luxemburg and the American anarchist Emma Goldman...
...Lenin leads Russia into revolution...