Word: lodz
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...drab Polish industrial city of Lodz has a tradition of defiance dating back to the 1890s, when the city's textile workers staged violent demonstrations against the Russian czarist occupiers. Last week Lodz once again showed its rebellious spirit as 10,000 textile workers, most of them women, went on strike. Their action was a warning to the regime of Party Leader Edward Gierek, who succeeded Wladyslaw Gomulka in December after bloody workers' demonstrations against higher food prices and a cut in earnings...
Gierek's tactics in settling the December riots helped create the Lodz situation. To placate workers in Poland's big Baltic shipyards, Gierek did what no Communist leader in history had ever dared to do: instead of crushing the protesters, he gave in to their demands. Bargaining personally with the strikers, Gierek agreed to rescind a complicated new bonus system that workers feared would reduce their take-home pay. He also raised the minimum wage and pensions. But Gierek held fast on one crucial point: he refused to cancel an average 17% increase in food prices...
Soviet Help. Gierek's maneuver seemed to defuse the dangerous situation. But then the Lodz workers struck, demanding a 16% wage increase and better working conditions. Gierek sent Premier Piotr Jaroszewicz and three other Politburo members to reason with the workers. After several sessions, including one that lasted until 4 a.m., the officials returned to Warsaw with no settlement in sight...
...Gdansk-but it was too late. Within hours, similar popular explosions, equally violent, had broken out in the nearby towns of Gdynia and Sopot. Like a sizzling fuse, resentment over the higher prices and other government policies spread to cities and towns across Poland: Wroclaw, Poznan, Katowice, Slupsk, Lodz, Cracow and Warsaw itself...
...bespectacled 22-year-old American out of White Plains, N.Y., who greatly resembles a tight end recently became the darling of countless Poles from Cracow to Lodz by doing something very dear to the Polish heart: playing Chopin with great power and feeling. His name is Garrick Ohlsson. At Warsaw during the three-week-long International Chopin Competition, he was awarded first prize over 80 other pianists. He is the first American ever to win the contest and the first young American pianist since Van Cliburn back in 1958 to become an overnight national hero behind the Iron Curtain...