Solidarity

Yet everyday life brought quiet mockery of a system few truly believed.

Convinced that shipbuilding offered a route ahead, Bogdan entered university and found himself at the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980 just as Lech Walesa and Solidarity changed Poland forever before his eyes.

I'm delighted to welcome Bogdan Marczewski to our Cold War Conversation.

I was born in 1961.

Had they kept us in the dark, I believe, if the school was not oriented academically, Probably it would have kept them longer at power, in my opinion.

So this shipbuilding engineering program, as part of that, you happen to be, in August 1980, in the same shipyard that Lech Walesa is in.

At the time that Solidarity, the Polish free trade union, is founded, can you describe the shipyard, what it was like to be there and what you hear about and what happens? I'm sorry, we're going to have to leave it there.

Bogdan will continue his story next week.

At the time of the indictment was handed down, Takahashi, who was an apparently Japanese government operative, though he wasn't from Japan, uh, it was admitted that he was a member of this society.

He had served three years in a federal prison for proselytizing among African Americans in Detroit, and by 1943, he had already sown the seeds for what was being called the Afro-Nippon Solidarity Movement, which he'd sown in the '30s in a number of ways.

Um, I would like to go and talk about the Black Dragon Society and where it comes from, but do you have any questions?

No.

As far as European communism went, the winds of change really began to blow in the 1980s.

In Poland, the Solidarity Movement, led by Lech Wałęsa, called for a series of strikes which crippled that country's economy.

In Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania, governments came under pressure to roll back the oppressive restrictions of communism.

In previous times, the Soviet Union's response would have been swift and severe.

He was responsible for regime change in several different countries and has been credited with bringing about the demise of European communism in the early 1990s.

His support for Poland's Solidarity Movement, led by Lech Wałęsa, weakened communism in Poland and throughout Europe.

When President George W. Bush presented John Paul II with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he said that John Paul's principled stand for peace and freedom has inspired millions and helped to topple communism and tyranny.

He met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, shortly before the fall of communism.

You say unions? Well, there's good ones and there's bad ones.

We know that the Solidarity Movement, you and I are both old enough to remember that in Poland, and we were cheering for Lech Walesa, the future president of Poland, to stick it to the communists, to overturn communism.

And this is a good union.

So anything you're told is universally good, universally bad, is usually going to be corrupted by somebody who says, well, I don't want to be picked on, so I'm going to wrap myself in that flag.

You say unions? Well, there's good ones and there's bad ones.

We know that the Solidarity Movement, you and I are both old enough to remember that in Poland.

And we were cheering for Lech Walesa, the future president of Poland, to stick it to the communists, to overturn communism.

And this is a good union.