Word: shipyards
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...army bullets ten years before in riots along the Baltic coast. At long last a monument had been built: three slender trunks of steel crowned by crosses that bore dark anchors, like stylized Christ figures. To some, the 138-ft.-high sculpture outside the main gate of the Lenin Shipyard symbolized the futile workers' uprisings against Poland's governments in 1956, 1970 and 1976. To others, it recalled specifically the three workers gunned down there early one December morning in 1970. But most of all, last week's ceremonies represented the revolution of the moment: a danger...
...purge of both Politburo and lower-level cadres testifies to the clout of Solidarity. From a ragtag bunch of shipyard workers and dissidents, it has grown into a labor leviathan, with an estimated 10 million members (out of 17.3 million employed) in 54 chapters around the country. When a strike loomed in Warsaw, no less than Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski offered to dispatch a government helicopter to Gdansk to pick up Lech Walesa. Solidarity has even acquired a modicum of official respectability. To raise funds, it has sponsored a benefit performance at the National Opera House and auctions...
...last summer's 21-day strike, and thus has a distinct Baltic coast flavor. Many are experienced labor activists who have been in trouble with the authorities before. One presidium member, Anna Walentynowicz, 51, was fired from her job as a crane operator a week before the Lenin Shipyard flare-up last August. "The immediate cause of the strike was to have me rehired," she says with a trace of wonder. "Nobody thought it would have the effect it had." Wojciech Gruszecki, 44, who has been advising Poland's private farmers, has a doctorate in chemical engineering. Says...
Walesa became a strike leader at the Lenin Shipyard during the 1970 food price riots. Fired for his attempts at labor organizing in 1976, he found work in a machine repair shop and helped found the underground Baltic Free Trade Unions Movement. He was sent as a delegate to the official union elections in 1979, but was outraged to find the local party secretary controlling the vote. "Why have I come here, to elect or to applaud?" he demanded. The answer: an unceremonious sacking...
...fire on rioting workers in Baltic seaports, killing at least 49. "It really started here in 1970," says an intellectual in Gdansk. "After 1970, both sides behaved differently." Tuesday is the tenth anniversary of that fateful day, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were expected to gather outside Lenin Shipyard's main gate to honor the fallen workers by dedicating a 138-ft.-high monument with three steel-girder crosses on top. To the old men sitting 730 miles away in the Kremlin, that scene would be a disturbing one indeed...