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Article: The return of the reds. (ex-communists run Eastern European governments)
- Article from:
- Newsweek
- Article date:
- December 4, 1995
- Author:
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The communists of the old Soviet bloc were always scared of their own people. Nothing frightened them more than a genuine mass movement--it showed how phony their own party-inspired "mass movements" really were. And no single person frightened them more than Lech Walesa, Nobel Prize winner and leader of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in the 1980s. Their fears were well founded, of course. As soon as glasnost in the Soviet Union offered a sliver of an opening, Walesa led Solidarity to power in the Polish Parliament in 1989, and communism quickly crashed across Eastern Europe. Walesa became president of Poland in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed the next year, and there ...