Word: walesa
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...when things began to go wrong, when the tensions started to rise and the future he saw began to recede, the face grew heavy. The familiar walrus mustache sagged and the brown eyes turned weary. Again he held nothing back, and perhaps he could not if he tried. Lech Walesa is a man of emotion, not of logic or analysis. So was the movement, which he all but lost control of in the end, guided more by hope and passion than by rationality. That was the crusade's strength?and its weakness...
What had begun as Poland's year of liberty ended dramatically in violence, bloodshed and repression. The beleaguered government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, pushed to the wall by Walesa's challenging Solidarity union, confronted with total economic collapse, and pressured by the furious Soviets, struck back in the classic Communist fashion. Its minions came for Walesa at 3 a.m. at his apartment in Gdansk, the gray Baltic seaport whose windswept shipyards had given birth to Solidarity in August 1980. They hustled him aboard a flight to Warsaw and then held him in a government guesthouse south of the city. They...
Indeed, perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Solidarity and Walesa was that they made it possible for Poles once again to speak their minds. In Solidarity bulletins and hundreds of newly established independent newspapers, articles regularly appeared that would shock the most tolerant censor in any other East bloc country. Solidarity's national weekly Solidarnosc, for example, last month ran a blistering two-part expose on the privileges of top Communist officials. In student clubs, journalists' groups and literary unions, there were open discussions of topics that had been forbidden in the universities, such as Poland's history between the world...
...plea for calm was issued by the government in Walesa's name, but few Poles seemed to believe that he had authorized it. Informal cells of worried activists were forming in the capital. One such group was operating out of a bakery in downtown Warsaw. If any of the cell's dozen members failed to show up at least once every three days, the sales clerk was to alert one member, who would pass the word along...
...leaders of Solidarity gathered in Gdansk for their final, fateful meeting before the crackdown, TIME Correspondent Gregory H. Wierzynski was with them. He was scheduled to spend the entire next day with Lech Walesa and his family, an interview that never took place. After scouring Gdansk for details of the mass arrests and strikes, Wierzynski drove to Warsaw, into a setting of total censorship. It was five days after the military takeover that Wierzynski was able to make his way to West Berlin, from where he sent his reports. Among them was this personal look at Poland under siege...