Word: polishing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Outside Poland, last week's unrest and the force used to quell it must have had a profoundly disquieting effect on the Soviet Union and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The economic reform measures at the center of the Polish dispute, after all, are the local version of Gorbachev's campaign of perestroika (restructuring), and early setbacks in a key satellite hardly bode well for the vaster and still more intractable economy of the Soviet Union. The proximate cause of the wave of strikes in Poland was the imposition of price hikes, ranging from 40% for food staples...
Little wonder that the Soviet press, which has been allowed to report politically sensitive news with increasing candor, was slow to discover the Polish unrest and even then used the pre-glasnost device of pinning it on "Western anti-Polish centers." For its part, the Reagan Administration deplored the Warsaw government's use of violence. White House Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said that the unrest in Poland could be a "point for discussion" at the upcoming Moscow summit but that he did not expect it to cause "significant damage...
...Polish riot police answer worker demands with force. -- Two sets of French captives are freed. -- Bizarre charges in Chile...
Like a familiar newsreel of some historic event, thousands of Polish workers walked off their jobs last week in a chain reaction of strikes that recalled the dramatic 1980 movement that gave birth to the independent Solidarity labor union. In the northwestern city of Bydgoszcz, bus and tram drivers paralyzed the public transport system for twelve hours and won a 63% pay raise. Next day workers struck at the sprawling Lenin steel mill near the southern city of Cracow, while employees at a military-equipment plant in the southeastern city of Stalowa Wola reportedly won large wage demands after putting...
...lived up to his promise of being the best and brightest of a new political generation. The Harvard-educated Viet Nam veteran had it all: a subtle and supple mind tempered by a self-aware sense of humor, the savvy of a Southern bull breeder mixed with the polish of a Georgetown Prince Charming. Yet somehow he managed to rack up a woeful string of defeats in the Northern states until he finally limped away last week, perhaps permanently bruised...