Word: polisher
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...came from the depressed depths of small-town Polish-Jewish life, which he left behind in 1906. Inspired by a Hebrew-Zionist upbringing, shocked by anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, he went to Turkish Palestine "to build it and be rebuilt by it," as was the motto of those days. He became a pioneer, a farmhand, active with early Zionist-socialist groups. At age 19 he was what he would remain all his life: a secular Jewish nationalist who combined Jewish Messianic visions with socialist ideals, a man with fierce ambition for leadership, extraordinary tactical-political skills...
...When the Polish communists made this concession, which was without precedent in the history of the communist world since 1917, the new union was christened Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Soon it had 10 million members, and Walesa was its undisputed leader. For 16 months they struggled to find a way to coexist with the communist state, under the constant threat of Soviet invasion. Walesa--known to almost everyone simply as Lech--was foxy, unpredictable, often infuriating, but he had a natural genius for politics, a matchless ability for sensing popular moods, and great powers of swaying a crowd. Again and again...
...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. In August, just nine years after he had climbed over the shipyard wall, Poland got its first non-communist Prime Minister in more than...
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...
Oxford historian and author Timothy Garton Ash wrote The Polish Revolution: Solidarity