Word: polished
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years, "lustration" has applied to the efforts of some historians in old Soviet-bloc countries to expose former communist collaborators. The word derives from the Latin for purification but, as the dramatic defenestration of two high-ranking Polish priests over charges they cooperated with communist police has demonstrated, it's a messy business...
...messiness looks likely to continue. Until recently, the Polish Catholic Church had remained immune from scrutiny, but that taboo has crumbled in recent weeks as anticommunist newspapers began printing accusations about Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus and, later, a senior Cracow priest, Janusz Bielanski. A new report in a right-wing daily lists the pseudonyms of 12 bishops allegedly recruited by the secret police in the late 1970s...
...Polish Academy of Sciences historian Andrzej Friszke and others estimate that 10% of priests cooperated in some way. "When they wanted to have a street procession or to renovate a church," he says, "they had to talk to the secret service, who used such occasions to entice priests into cooperation...
Despite concerns that such an exercise would devolve into a witch hunt, he contends it may acquit rather than implicate the clergy as a whole. Given the coercive pressure that priests were under, he says, a 10% cooperation rate is surprisingly low. The Polish church, he says, may go down as "a church of martyrs - not informers." The worst part is not knowing which...
...transit." Germany depends on the pipeline for one-fifth of its oil imports. Poland receives 50% of its oil from Russia and most of it comes through the pipeline. Warsaw, however, says it has enough oil for 80 days and, if needed, can receive shipments through Baltic ports. Polish newspapers have started calling the controversy "The Russia-Belarus...