Lech Walesa The Road to Democracy [Paperback]

Witness history in the making as you turn the pages of time and discover the fascinating lives of famous explorers, leaders of twentieth-century politics and government, and great Americans.

One August day in 1980, Lech Walesa pushed his way past the Polish police, climbed over a twelve-foot wall, and jumped onto a bulldozer, calling to Polish shipyard workers to continue their strike for higher wages and other demands. Walesa’s fiery speech inspired the workers and kept the strike alive. His call to action that day ultimately brought about important changes in Poland and established his leadership of the movement that became known as Solidarity.
 
Lech Walesa: The Road to Democracy chronicles Walesa’s dramatic role as the leader of his country’s democratic future and its transformation from a communist regime to a democratic government. The son of a farmer and an electrician by trade, Walesa overcame police oppression and imprisonment to lead Solidarity and win the Nobel Prize. In 1990, Lech Walesa became Poland’s first democratically elected noncommunist president.1
A Strike at the Lenin Shipyard
 
AS DARKNESS BEGAN to fall on July 31, 1980, bringing the long summer evening to an end, a 36-year-old man named Lech Walesa returned to his home in the city of Gdansk, Poland. It was an apartment on Wrzosy Street in a neighborhood called Stogi, a working-class district hemmed in by factories on one side and a shipping canal on the other. Crowded tenement buildings lined the streets. Next to them were small plots of sandy soil where people grew vegetables. Some had even built ramshackle sheds to house a few chickens or a pig. All in all, Stogi spoke of hard work and hard times. It was a neighborhood, Walesa reflected later, full of people “just waiting for things to improve.”
 
Returning home that evening, however, Lech Walesa may have been wondering whether things would evelSN