Word: walesa
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Solidarity is not a monolith, nor is it a creature of Walesa, though he is certainly its symbol and central force. Solidarity's 18-member leadership sprang directly from 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...
...fourth and fifth floors of the seedy Morski Hotel in Gdansk, where Solidarity has its headquarters, there is unanimity on goals but little agreement on tactics. Indeed, listening to the leaders talk strategy, it seems remarkable that Walesa has managed to check Solidarity's innate militancy. Says Bogdan Lis, 28, the only union leader who belongs to the Communist Party: "None of us has trust or belief in those people [the authorities]. We consider them opponents." Alina Pienkowska, 28, a meek-looking nurse who is actually a firebrand, says the authorities have to prove that "the renewal...
...what we want or we will strike. But the rank and file became more cautious late last month after the Warsaw local threatened a general strike over a series of political demands, some of which were aimed at the state security apparatus, the bedrock of Communist authority. Said Walesa then: "Let us not forget that tanks and rockets could also be the reply." On Dec. 5, Solidarity declared a six-week moratorium on strikes. It also toned down its rhetoric. When the government suspended screenings of Workers 80, a film about the strikes, the union raised only a mild protest...
...Soviets are wary of it. Terms like "democracy" and "pluralism" crop up frequently in Solidarity conversations. At an outdoor rally late last month, one woman demanded full public disclosure of the Katyn Forest massacre, and another asked about rumors that a new mass grave had been found. Walesa tried to deflect these inflammatory questions, but his answer must have troubled the Kremlin even so: "We do have to have a settling of accounts. Right now we have to work on odnowa." Some Solidarity theoreticians, while conceding the party its "leading role," tend to define that role narrowly. Says Jacek Kuron...
...would be targeted for harassment or arrest by Kama's government, which needs to prove its toughness to Moscow. But the alliance between workers and dissidents, even if temporary, gives the dissidents a kind of protective coloration. "We won't allow for any crackdown, particularly on KOR," Walesa told TIME. "They are our friends and they can always count...