Word: warsaw
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Solidarity Union Leader Lech Walesa was in high spirits as he marched up the steps of Warsaw's gray stone Council of Ministers building last week. Grinning and puffing on his pipe, he joked good-naturedly with the gaggle of supporters around him. But the walrus-mustached electrician was in no mood for levity when he emerged after nearly four hours of talks with Poland's Premier, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Looking fatigued and depressed, Walesa said only that "we did some things-and we did not do other things...
...wave of labor upheavals. In Radom the local Solidarity chapter was threatening strikes at 340 factories. In Poznan 490 farm delegates gathered from all over the country to join forces in a 2 million-member organization that was loudly demanding legal status as an independent agricultural union. In Warsaw and other centers, union members and their advisers claimed that they were being subjected to police harassment. Last week, for example, Dissident Leader Adam Michnik was detained by Warsaw police for three hours. Meanwhile, an ugly new outburst of anti-Semitic rhetoric was added to the apparent campaign to discredit...
Neither the popular labor leader nor the head of Warsaw's Communist government had much control over the most incendiary threat: the potential for armed Soviet intervention. If Moscow were to decide on such a move, a possible cover might be provided by the Warsaw Pact maneuvers scheduled to take place in and around Poland later this month. Though most Western analysts doubted that any imminent invasion plan was connected with the Warsaw Pact maneuvers, which are routinely held in the spring, Secretary of State Alexander Haig reiterated a sharp U.S. warning. A Soviet intervention, he said, would have...
Even as their tanks were being gassed up for the war games, Poland's East bloc neighbors intensified their warnings against further concessions to the workers. On a visit to Warsaw last week, East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer pointedly reminded his Polish comrades that their allies would never neglect their duty to enforce the principle of "socialist internationalism." Such warnings seemed all the more ominous in light of the new details that emerged last week about the stormy March 4 Moscow summit meeting between Polish and Soviet leaders. Led by Leonid Brezhnev and five Politburo members, the Soviet...
Then the first real crack appeared in Poland's shaky labor truce: Solidarity members in Radom, 60 miles south of Warsaw, laid down their tools for five hours at several plants. They were protesting the government's failure to prosecute officials responsible for repression against local workers following the 1976 food price riots. In an apparent effort to head off a spiraling new round of labor upheavals, Jaruzelski invited Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa to meet with him in Warsaw on Saturday...