Word: walesa
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Karl Marx could hardly have imagined that a socialist empire based on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would one day be shaken to its core by a son of the working class. Yet in 1980 an unemployed Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, rose from the masses to become one of the Communist world's most charismatic figures. When he scaled the gates of Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk last August, Walesa did far more than seize the reins of an angry strike movement. To millions of Polish workers, he became the symbol of their dreams...
...Walesa did not personally launch this revolution like some latter-day Spartacus. The strikes themselves made him a leader, just as the country's catastrophic economic condition had engendered the protest. Standing only 5 ft. 7 in., with a drooping reddish-brown mustache and an impish twinkle in his eye, Walesa, 37, speaks the simple, sometimes ungrammatical language of the Polish worker. His education was limited to high school level vocational training; his leadership abilities were honed during years of underground labor organizing-activities that eventually cost him three jobs and landed him in jail on several occasions...
...from his first appearance in the striking shipyard last August, Walesa showed an instinctive ability to inspire crowds and win their trust. Standing atop the shipyard gates, a microphone in one hand, the other raised in a clenched-fist salute, he mesmerized his audiences with a mixture of folksy quips and deadly serious admonitions...
...Walesa proved equally adept at hard-nosed political bargaining. After eight days of tense face-to-face negotiations with Polish Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, he won a historic agreement that made Poland the only Communist country to have independent trade unions. It was a daring deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that potentially challenged the Communist Party's monopoly of power and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the East bloc...
Fresh from that triumph, Walesa became the leader of Solidarity, the 10 million-member union federation, and led a tough legal battle to get its status recognized by a Warsaw court. As Solidarity moved toward new confrontations with the Warsaw government, 55 Soviet divisions massed on the Polish frontiers, a chilling reminder that Moscow would tolerate only so much innovation and defiance...