Word: gdansk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kalb started his career as a journalist with the Washington Star, covering the anti-Viet Nam protests of the late 1960s. He finds the parallels-and the contrasts-with the Polish situation intriguing. Describing the high emotion and palpable patriotism of the strike settlement signing in Gdansk, he says: "To grasp its improbability, try to imagine Attorney General John Mitchell and Antiwar Organizer Jerry Rubin after the November 1969 march on Washington standing together and singing the Star-Spangled Banner...
Poland had scarcely begun to savor the remarkable triumph of the workers of Gdansk and the miners of Silesia in wresting a series of unprecedented reforms from the Communist government when there was unsettling news. There had been rumors all week long, perhaps inevitably in a Communist country, that the price for Polish Leader Edward Gierek might be stiff. One version had it that his entire Politburo had been called on the red carpet to Moscow. Nonetheless, in downtown Warsaw the country's parliament assembled on schedule to discuss and ratify the government's settlement with the striking...
...victory the workers believed they had won, remained to be seen. There were those, understandably, who did not take much comfort in Kama's background. But there were also those who recalled that at the height of the strikes Kania had been quoted as telling the Gdansk party organization that it was a time "for a political solution-not for force." The only thing that could be reasonably certain, given the risky experiments the country and the workers had embarked upon, was that Kania was surely a man to Moscow's liking...
...week had begun with life in the Baltic port of Gdansk getting back to normal. Before dawn, city trams and buses began their rounds through the chilly, rainswept streets. Workers filed through factory gates. Dockers started to unload the dozens of ships stacked up in the harbor. As seagulls wheeled and cried overhead, the multicolored cranes at Lenin Shipyard arced through the air hauling heavy metal parts. Indeed, it almost seemed as if nothing much had changed since 16,000 shipyard workers had walked off the job and occupied the sprawling complex for 18 days...
...reality, all of Poland had been shaken. The Lenin Shipyard strike had transformed a series of scattered protests over rising meat prices into a workers' crusade for sweeping economic and political reforms. From its nerve center in Gdansk, the movement quickly swept the Baltic coast, spread southward, and finally reached deep into the coal-mining heartland of Silesia. Before the strikes had ended, some 500,000 workers at over 500 enterprises had joined the peaceful but crippling revolt. The work stoppages had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, pushing the country to the brink of disaster and testing...