Word: walesa
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...Lech Walesa, the fly, feisty, mustachioed electrician from Gdansk, shaped the 20th century as the leader of the Solidarity movement that led the Poles out of communism. It is one of history's great ironies that the nearest thing we have ever seen to a genuine workers' revolution was directed against a so-called workers' state. Poland was again the icebreaker for the rest of Central Europe in the "velvet revolutions" of 1989. Walesa's contribution to the end of communism in Europe, and hence the end of the cold war, stands beside those of his fellow Pole, Pope John...
...Walesa's life, like those of Gorbachev and the Pope, was shaped by communism. Born to a family of peasant farmers in 1943, he came as a young man to work in the vast shipyards that the communist state was developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of workers' protests in the 1970s and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age 37, to join...
...LECH WALESA 1981 Leading Poland's labor challenge to Moscow...
...Atlantic by air to become the most inspiring newsmaker of 1927. In seven decades, TIME's Men and Women of the Year have included the despicable (Adolf Hitler in 1938), the majestic (Queen Elizabeth II in 1952), the visionary (Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963) and the revolutionary (Lech Walesa in 1981). There has been the man in uniform (G.I. Joe in 1950), the younger generation (1966) and an entire gender (American women, 1975). The computer beat out flesh and blood in 1982. And the earth itself became the biggest newsmaker in 1988. But more often than...
Another demonstrator, Barbara Noll, a graduate student at MIT and former member of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement in Poland, began to sing "Yahweh, I know you are near" once Woodward's defense team stepped outside...