Word: walesa
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...takeover in 1945, the church provided a unique alternative to a "godless" Marxist regime. Going to Mass became not only a religious act but a quiet sign of rebellion against the state. Today, 75% to 80% of Poland's 36 million people are practicing Catholics. A deeply religious man, Walesa always wears on his lapel a badge depicting the so-called Black Madonna, a portrait of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child that is in the Czestochowa monastery, 125 miles southwest of Warsaw...
...Self-Defense (KOR), a precursor of Solidarity. The organization was the first significant link between the dissident intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and the workers who later founded Solidarity. Inspired by KOR activists, small independent?and illegal?labor unions cautiously began to form in various parts of the country. Lech Walesa joined such a unit and was arrested and briefly jailed scores of times...
...consistently outmaneuvered the government team. Every evening, Walesa would climb the flower-covered main gate to give news of the talks to the crowd outside. His appearance was greeted by cheers and rousing choruses of Sto Lat (May He Live a Hundred Years). He responded with his actor's instincts, regaling his audience with jokes and raising his clenched fist in salute. Bantering with foreign journalists, he announced, "I am the leader...
...form unions, the Warsaw regime granted concessions extraordinary in a Communist country, including reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks for the unions and the church. At a nationally televised ceremony, where strikers and government representatives stood side by side and sang the Polish national anthem, Walesa signed what became known as the Gdansk agreement with a giant souvenir pen bearing the likeness of John Paul...
...workers rushed to join up at hastily improvised union locals across the country, Walesa and the other ex-strike leaders quickly found themselves at the head of a labor federation that soon grew to 10 million members?fully a quarter of the Polish population. Organizing and controlling the loosely knit federation, which was divided into 38 semiautonomous regional chapters, soon became a major challenge for Walesa and the national commission that he headed in Gdansk. The job was complicated by an almost insatiable drive for democracy among a rank and file that had no experience with the democratic process. Most...