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                                                                                January 4, 1982

Man of the Year:Lech Walesa

He Dared to Hope



Poland's Lech Walesa led a crusade for freedom


Anyone could read him at a glance.  When things were going
well, when it seemed for a while that the movement he led would
brighten and liberate the live of his fellow Poles, the face
that grew so familiar in 1981 radiated delight:  delight in his
crusade, delight in his vision of the future, delight in being
at the center of it all.  In those moments, he held nothing
back.  But when things began to go wrong, when the tensions
started to rise and the future he saw began to recede, the face
grew heavy.  The familiar walrus mustache sagged and the brown
eyes turned weary.  Again he held nothing back, and perhaps he
could not if he tried.  Lech Walesa is a man of emotion, not of
logic or analysis.  So was the movement which he all but lost
control of in the end, guided more by hope and passion than by
rationality.  That was the crusades strength--and its weakness.

What had begun as Poland's year of liberty ended dramatically
in violence, bloodshed and repression.  The beleaguered
government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, pushed to the wall
by Walesa's challenging Solidarity union, confronted with total
economic collapse, and pressured by the furious Soviets, struck
back in the classic Communist fashion.  Its minions came for
Walesa at 3 a.m. at his apartment in Gdansk, the gray Baltic
seaport whose windswept shipyards had given birth to Solidarity
in August 1980.  They hustled him abroad a flight to Warsaw and
then held him in a government guesthouse south of the city.
They cut off communications with the outside world and imposed
martial law. While the people slept, olive-drab tanks and
armored personnel carriers moved through the snow-filled streets
to take up positions in cities and towns across the country.

At 6 a.m., Jaruzelski went on the radio "as a soldier and the
chief of the polish government "to announce that the nation was
under martial law.  He later repeated the grim message on
national television, dressed in full military uniform with the
white Polish eagle prominently displayed behind him.  The
"rowing aggressiveness" of Solidarity's "extremists" in the
midst of an acute economic crisis, said Jaruzelski, had forced
him to make his repressive moves "with a broken heart, with
bitterness."  He assured Poles that military rule by Solidarity
would be resumed once disorder had been curbed.  And nobody
believed his assurances. Months of Poland's desires, months of
Poland's dreams had reduced themselves to one new, pervasive,
overwhelming condition:  fear. Freedom and self-determination
had been the goal through the inspired days of 1981.  Now the
goal was survival.

The crackdown had been harsh, fiercely and unexpectedly harsh.
Military authorities rounded up thousands of Solidarity
members, dissidents, intellectuals, artists and some 30 former
government officials, including ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek.
Tanks ringed factories and mines, and soldiers and police used
force to clear out resisting workers, leaving at least seven
dead and hundreds injured when miners in Katowice fought back
with axes and crowbars. The shock was doubly traumatic because
in the preceding months Poles had won more freedom than any
other nation in the Soviet bloc.  The country had developed a
thriving intellectual and cultural life.  People felt free to
criticize the government openly; so, in fact, did some party
members.  Then, literally overnight, the new freedoms
disappeared.

Behind the Polish military move loomed the shadow of the
kremlin. Indeed, if the government of General Jaruzelski had not
imposed the crackdown, the Soviets certainly would have.  The
presence in Warsaw of high-ranking soviet officers, including
Marshal Viktor Kulikov, even suggested a direct soviet role in
planning what amounted to an invasion by proxy.  For more than
a year, the Kremlin had made it clear that it would not
indefinitely tolerate the development of a union movement that
could challenge a Communist government as directly as Solidarity
had--a movement that was calling, in effect, for government by
consent of the governed.

Thus, as 1981 came to a close the courageous little electrician
from Gdansk stood out not only as the heart and soul of
Poland's battle with a corrupt Communist regime, but as an
international symbol of the struggle for freedom and dignity.
Both as a newsmaker in his own right and as a representative
of millions of Poles striving for a better life.  Lech Walesa
is TIME's Man of the Year.

There was almost a tragic inevitability about the whole
sequence of events that ended with Poland's night of the
generals.  The leading characters in the nation's drama seemed
to be following a script for a catastrophe that both Walesa and
Jaruzelski could see coming, that neither wanted--and that
neither could avoid.  For 16 months, solidarity and the
government had been locked in a struggle for control of the
country's destiny, while the leaders of Poland's Roman Catholic
Church, that age-old bastion of nationalism, appeared like a
Greek chorus to intone warnings and admonitions to all.

The nation tottered on the verge of total economic collapse.
Not since the disaster of Germany's Weimar Republic in the '30s
had a modern industrial state faced a peacetime economic failure
of such catastrophic dimensions.  As the economy faltered, the
shortages of food, clothing and other basic necessities made
queuing an increasingly exhausting and frustrating way of life,
an ordeal made all the cruel by the onset of an unusually harsh
Polish winter. In the end, Solidarity and the government were
unable to reach an accommodation as the crisis deepened.

The Polish experiment showed that a Communist government can be
forced to make some reforms, but that it cannot give up a
substantive measure of control without the fear of losing it
all. Solidarity's hope that a totalitarian Marxist system could
be made accountable to society proved to be an illusion,
evidence that a Communist society cannot tolerate freedom as it
is known in the West.  Walesa and his movement had made a
travesty of Communism's pretensions in the eyes of the world.
An authentic proletarian revolution had risen, just as Marx had
predicted, only to be put down by the guns of the oppressor
class:  the Communists themselves.  However Solidarity's
revolution may ultimately run its course, the movement brought
the heady taste of a new life to the Poles.  That memory will
die hard, if at all.  Nor will the world forget the lessons in
courage displayed by the millions of polish workers who were
inspired by Lech Walesa.

Other people and events commanded their share of attention
during 1981.  Ronald Reagan, whose sweeping electoral victory
made him TIME's choice as the Man of the Year in 1980, started
a revolution in domestic policy that curbed a Federal Government
which had been growing without restraint since the New Deal of
Franklin D. Roosevelt in the '30s.  Reagan also had his
failings.  He had an uncertain touch on foreign policy and he
made the astonishing discovery that his economic policies were
projected to leave the U.S. With a $100 billion budget deficit
in fiscal 1982.

In a year marked by widespread political violence, assassins
shot a U.S. President, a Pope and a Nobel laureate.  The first
two victims recovered.  The third, Egypt's President Anwar
Sadat, died in a lash of bullets, casting a shadow over the
cause of Middle East peace that he had courageously espoused.
That turbulent region of the world was further shaken by the
aggressive acts of the government of Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin, which bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor; attempted
to destroy a Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in
Beirut, killing 300, mostly civilians:  and in effect annexed
the Golan Heights.

U.S. Soviet relations grew more tense as the Reagan
Administration adopted a hard-line approach to its dealings on
virtually every issue with the Kremlin and with Communism
worldwide.  As the Administration talked sternly, a powerful
movement swept through Western Europe in opposition to the
planned deployment of u.S. tactical nuclear weapons in NATO
countries.  The antinuclear crusade threatened NATO's solidarity
against the Warsaw Pact nations.  Urged on by the Europeans, the
U.S. met with the Soviets in Geneva on Nov. 30 to begin their
long-awaited talks on mutual reductions of their medium-range
missiles.

For Americans, the most moving moment of the year was the
return of the 52 U.S. hostages who had been held in Iran for 444
days. The most reassuring moment occurred on April 12, when the
space shuttle Columbia roared triumphantly into orbit, trailing
behind a fiery, orange-and-white plume--and all doubts about
U.S. supremacy in space technology.  The most delightful moment
for Britons, and for about everybody else, came when a demure
19-year-old with glowing cheeks and feather-swept blond hair
said yes to the future King of England.  The spectacular wedding
of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince Charles lifted hearts
everywhere.  None of these development in 1981, however, equaled
the drama of Poland's triumph and tragedy.  At the center of the
Polish revolution was one of history's more improbable heroes.
With a double chin, a bit of a paunch, and a height of only 5
ft. 7 in., Lech Walesa, 38, hardly has an imposing physical
presence.  His working-class Polish is rough and often
ungrammatical:  his voice, perhaps from years of heavy smoking,
is hoarse and rasping.  His speeches frequently are riddled with
mixed metaphors and skewed analogies:  Solidarity's leaders
admit that Walesa (pronounced Vah-wen-sah) is more intuitive
than intellectual.  He rather defiantly claims that he has never
read a serious book in his life.

Yet Walesa got through his message of hope to his countrymen.
Said a Warsaw journalist:  "Sometimes he doesn't even make any
sense, but he is always reassuring.  He energizes people.  "He
could work a crowd like an actor onstage, never reading a
speech--not even when addressing the Pope--and never speaking
too long, stabbing the air with oversize hand, making all the
right gestures with almost flawless timing.  His real strength
as a speaker was an ability to reduce complex issues to simple
words and images that everyone could understand.  Said one
Solidarity official:  "He knows his audience.  He can sense what
they want, and almost always he is right."

Walesa showed little patience for the details of union
organization or the niceties of parliamentary procedure.  He
loved to barnstorm the country, arguing, cajoling, sitting up
half the night with workers while the air turned blue with
cigarette smoke.  At the podium, and at the bargaining table,
where the arguments with government officials stretched wearily
on for hours, he was quick and voluble, and guided by sure
instincts.  As his fame and power grew, he was amused and
sometimes delighted by his celebrity status, whatever his
disclaimers.  There was, in fact, more than a touch of the
demagogue in him.  When his policies were opposed by other union
leaders, he would sometimes threaten to take his case directly
to the rank and file, or even to quit.  "He is like De Gaulle
of France in that regard, "says former Solidarity spokesman
Janusz Onyszkiewicz.

There was something to that.  Like De Gaulle, Lech Walesa was
a man guided by faith in himself and his destiny; he had no
qualms about speaking for the 10 million members of Solidarity.
He was certain that he knew what they--what the country--wanted.
"We eat the same bread," he would tell the crowds.  An urban
worker with rural roots, he was, as he claimed, a son of the
people.  Lech Everyman. Reflecting on his leadership role last
month, he told TIME:  "As believer, I think this was my mission.
This is the way fate threw me into it."

The son of a carpenter, he was born in a clay hut during the
Nazi occupation in the village of Popow, between Warsaw and
Gdansk.  His father, Boleslaw, was conscripted by the nazis to
dig ditches during the war and died in 1946 from the exposure
and beatings he suffered.  His mother, Feliksa, seemed to have
the most effect on Walesa.  The parish priest remembers her as
"the wisest woman in the parish.  She always had to be the most
important person around and was a fantastic organizer.  Lech is
an extension of his mother and even looks like her.  He has the
same face, size, build and smile."

Walesa was only an average student at his parish grammar
school. Ironically, he got his worst marks in a subject that now
deeply concerns him:  history.  One schoolmate remembers him as
a show-off, "always swimming out to the farthest point of the
lake."  At the state vocational school in Lipno, where he
learned the electrician's trade, Walesa was reprimanded several
times for smoking in the dorm, but he is also remembered as a
good organizer. By his own account, Walesa early had a knack for
taking command. "I had something me that made me the leader of
the gang, "he says. "I was always the leader of the class, I was
always the leader of the hooligans, the leader of the choirboys.
 I was always on top."

In his treatise on heroes and hero-worship.  Thomas Carlyle
wrote that "Universal History is at bottom the History of the
Great Men who have worked here."  A lowly worker like Walesa
would never have suited Carlyle's elitist view of greatness.
Walesa is a completely different king of hero:  a common man who
has taken his fling at changing history not by leading
governments, winning great battles or writing books, but by
embodying the hopes, faith, courage, even the foibles, of the
vast majority of his countrymen.

The national ideals that Walesa represents have their roots in
more than 1,000 years of polish history.  "They are accustomed
to liberty," wrote an anonymous Byzantine historian about the
Slavs in the 6th or 7th century.  Perhaps because they were so
open to invasion by the Germans and the Russians, the Poles
early developed a fierce sense of national unity.  In addition
to repeated foreign invasions, Poland suffered three partitions
in the 18th century that wiped it off the map as a separate
state until 1918.

Poles have revolted countless times against their oppressors,
only to fail heroically.  Almost every generation of Poles for
the past century and a half has risen in arms.  This penchant
for rebellion- -evident again in Solidarity--prompted Karl Marx
to call Poland the "thermometer of the intensity and vitality
of all revolutions since 1789."  Successive occupations and
uprisings, moreover, gave Poles a deep-rooted mistrust of
foreign-imposed governments and sharpened their skills at
organizing broadbased conspiracies.  It also increased their
pride in the past.  Many of Solidarity's buttons show the Polish
eagle adorned with the crown that was banned by the Communists.

The result of the defeated uprisings has left a scar on the
national psyche, a kind of ambivalence and fear that endure to
this day.  "On the one had," say Social Historian Wiktor
Osiantynski, "the Pole applauds the drive for democratic
freedoms.  On the other hand, not far below the surface roils
the thought that previous such efforts for national salvation
have ended in catastrophe."

Polish patriotism has been closely bound up with religion ever
since the baptism in 966 of the nation's first ruler, Prince
Mieszko I.  During occupation periods, the Catholic Church kept
polish language and culture alive and served as the main
bastion of nationalism.  After the Communist takeover in 1945,
the church provided a unique alternative to a "godless"  Marxist
regime. Going to Mass became not only a religious act but a
quiet sign of rebellion against the state.  Today, 75% to 80%
of Poland's 36 million people are practicing Catholics.  A
deeply religious man, Walesa always wears on his lapel a badge
depicting the so-called Black Madonna, a portrait of the virgin
Mary and the christ Child that is in the Czestochowa monastery,
125 miles southwest of Warsaw.

Religion, patriotism and tragic history fed a current of
romantic fatalism that runs deep in the Polish character.  Grand
gestures and heroic sacrifices come naturally to the Poles,
along with an alarming capacity for martyrdom.  The 19th century
playwright, Stanislaw Wyspianski called long-suffering Poland
"the Christ of nations" because of its capacity for anguish.
Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that bring Communism to
Poland was "like trying to saddle a cow."  He did it anyway, but
a nation of rebellious, romantic anti-Russian Catholics proved
to be troublesome from the beginning.  Most Poles never regarded
the party in warsaw as more than an outpost of soviet
imperialism.  As Walesa puts it:  "For 36 years, something
foreign was injected into us."

In 1956 Polish workers rioted to protest food shortages.  In
1968 Polish intellectuals protested censorship and other curbs
on freedom.  Seeking scapegoats for the rebellion, the
government, conscious of Poland's notorious anti-Semitism,
launched an "anti- Zionist" campaign that forced many Jewish
intellectuals, artists and officials to emigrate.

In 1970 the most bloody uprising until then flared in the port
cities along the Baltic coast.  The movement, touched off by
price hikes, was centered in the Gdansk Lenin shipyard, where
Walesa had begun to work as an electrician in 1967.

For the first time, Walesa showed that he really was a natural
rebel and leader, although even then he displayed his
instinctive fear of going too far.  When his fellow workers from
the Lenin shipyard occupied the first floor of police
headquarters, Walesa persuaded a crowd of 20,000 not to attack
the nearby prison. Later, as the protests continued in the
streets.  Party Boss Wladslaw Gomulka's police and army units
opened fire.  Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of workers died; the
figures have never been authenticated.

To this day, Walesa fears that he did not lead his fellow
workers with enough vigor or wisdom in 1970.  What inspired him
during the rebellion that began in August 1980 was, he says,
"the blood of the workers who had put their trust in me.  It was
my stupidity in not taking it to victory that time.  I wanted
to improve on myself."

In the wake of the 1970 riots, Gomulka was replaced by Edward
Gierek, a former coal miner who had earned a good reputation
for improving life in his fiefdom around the steel and coal
center of Katowice in southern Poland.  Gierek promised dramatic
gains in the nation's standard of living, mainly through a
massive influx of foreign investment.  Instead he destroyed the
economy, and it was that which proved to be the fulcrum of
Poland's crisis.  The disintegrating economy helped create
solidarity, and it remains the essential problem for general
Jaruzelski.

Gierek had the instincts of a high-rolling capitalist.  His
decision to borrow heavily abroad to finance an expansion of
heavy industry was based on the optimistic, and naive, theory
that new factories, using the best equipment and techniques,
would turn out products that would be sold to cancel the debts.
 In all, Gierek imported about $10 billion worth of modern
capital goods.  Then he wasted all of it in textbook cases of
how not to run an economy. For example, he put nearly $1 billion
into developing and producing a light tractor designed by
Massey-Ferguson and made at a gigantic new Ursus tractor
facility near Warsaw.  But it turned out that the company was
not licensed to sell its products in the West and that,
moreover, they were too expensive to be sold in the East.
Besides, most Polish farm equipment did not fit the tractor.
Result: production of about 500 tractors a year instead of the
expected 75,000.

Gierek also made a deal with the RCA Corporation and the
Corning Glass Works to build a color television factory outside
warsaw that was supposed to turn out 600,000 sets in 1981.
Result:  some 50,000 were produced this year, mainly because of
bad management and a shortage of parts.  Says Marshall Goldman,
an economist who is associate director of Harvard's Russian
Research center:  "It was like a heart transplant in which the
system rejects the foreign body.  The factories simply were not
working."

Meanwhile, to keep people happy, Gierek was allowing wages to
rise 40% from 1970 to 1975, compared with an increase of only
17% over the previous decade.  To give Poles enough meat, Gierek
quadrupled imports of grain and fodder; the per capita
consumption of meat jumped from 132 lbs. per year in 1970 to 154
lbs. in 1980.

The state's pricing system, designed to hold down food costs to
consumers, was a blueprint for bankruptcy.  The state was
paying farmers 10 zlotys for a liter of milk that sold it stores
for 4 zlotys.  Live hogs were bought from farmers at 130 zlotys
per kilogram and sold as butchered port at 70 zlotys per
kilogram. Farmers bought bread and fed it to their livestock
because it was cheaper than the wheat it was made from.  Price
subsidies began absorbing a staggering one-third of the national
budget.

The whole absurd structure was bound to collapse, and it did.
 When the OPEC nations raised the price of oil in 1973-74 and
caused a worldwide recession, Poland's exports, instead of
continuing to rise as Gierek planned, began to falter.  Unable
to lay off any workers--a taboo under the full-employment
doctrine of Communism- -Gierek had to borrow more and more money
from the west to keep going.  Poland's foreign debt rose from
$4.8 billion in 1974 to $25.5 billion in 1981.  Servicing and
repayment of the loans, which are owed to 15 Western governments
and 501 Western banks, now consume all of Poland's hard currency
export earnings, estimated at $6.5 billion for 1981.

When Poland was forced to reduce its borrowing, the country
began to suffer from a lack of spare parts for the spanking new
equipment already in place.  Round and round the vicious circle
spun.  The nation's factories operated in 1981 at only 60% of
capacity.  To make matters worse, poor harvests from 1974 to
1980 ravaged the country's agriculture, which Gierek had
foolishly ignored in favor of industrial development, despite
the fact that agriculture accounts for 20% of Poland's domestic
gross national product. Moreover, a disproportionate amount of
supplies and equipment went to the inefficient state farms,
while the far more productive private farmers, who own 75% of
Poland's arable lands, were shortchanged.

Fearing a national outcry, Gierek was reluctant to ease the
strain on the budget by raising prices.  He was right.  When he
finally increased prices in 1976, there were major riots in
Radom and at the Ursus tractor factory.  The brutal repression
of these riots led to the formation of the committee for Social
self-Defense (KOR), a precursor of Solidarity.  The organization
was the first significant link between the dissident
intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and the workers who later founded
Solidarity.  Inspired by KOR activists, small independent--and
illegal--labor unions cautiously began to form in various parts
of the country.  Lech Walesa joined such a unit and was arrested
and briefly jailed scores of times.

Catholic intellectuals also began to work with the movement.
In Cracow, meanwhile, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla emerged as a
strong advocate of human rights and promoted an independent
intellectual life.  In 1974  Communist Party Ideologue Andrej
Werbian called the Cardinal "the only real ideological threat
in Poland."  The astuteness of Werbian's judgment became
dramatically apparent four years later when Wojtyla became John
Paul II.  The naming of the first Polish Pope caused an
explosion of national pride in Poland. As had occurred so often
in the past, a religious act had become a patriotic cause for
the Poles.

If any one event created the psychological climate in which
Solidarity emerged, it was the visit of John Paul to his
homeland in June 1979.  From the moment that the Pope knelt in
warsaw's airport to kiss the ground, he was cheered wildly by
millions of Poles.  John Paul never criticized the Communist
regime directly, nor did he have to:  his meaning was plain
enough.  "The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an
act against man," he told an enormous outdoor congregation in
Warsaw.  With that hardly veiled allusion to Communism, a
deafening roar of approval filled the great city square.  Says
a Polish bishop of that day:  "The Polish people broke the
barrier of fear.  They were hurling a challenge at their Marxist
rulers."

The spark that ignited solidarity's revolution was a government
decree that raised meat prices in July 1980.  As they had done
many times before, Polish workers reacted with angry protests.
 But this time something was different.  This time the workers
occupied the factories.  Still, the movement had no focus.  In
Gdansk's Lenin shipyard, protest seemed to be on the verge of
dying out when a stocky man with a shock of reddish-brown hair
and a handle-bar mustache clambered over the iron-bar fence and
joined the strikers inside.  They all knew Lech Walesa.  He was
an unemployed electrician, fired eight months earlier for trying
to organize an independent trade union.

Walesa took charge and became the head of an interfactory
strike committee that eventually became the bargaining
representative for most of the 500,000 strikers, from the Baltic
to the coal-mining heartland of Silesia, who had joined the
revolt.  Led by Walesa, the committee launched a bold set of
political demands, including the right to strike and form free
unions, that were unheard of in Communist countries and that
authorities at first refused even to discuss.

Meanwhile, the Lenin shipyard was becoming the emotional center
of an extraordinary national movement.  Festooned with flowers,
white- and-red Polish flags and portraits of Pope John Paul II,
the plant's iron gates came to symbolize that heady mixture of
hope, faith and patriotism that sustained the workers through
their vigil.  As the world watched and wondered if Soviet tanks
would put an end to it all.  Walesa and his fellow strikers
stood their ground.  Like soldiers before battle, they confessed
to priests and received Communion in the open shipyard.  To
reduce the risk of violence, Walesa called for a ban on alcohol
and insisted on strict discipline.  Through it all, his plucky
courage and infectious good humor helped keep up the workers'
spirits.

Walesa also proved adept at hard bargaining, once the Gierek
government, afraid that the rebellion would spread, finally
agreed to negotiate.  Meeting face to face across a wooden table
in the shipyard's conference hall in August of 1980, Walesa and
his fellow strikers consistently outmaneuvered the government
team.  Every evening, Walesa would climb the flower-covered main
gate to give news of the talks to the crowd outside.  His
appearance was greeted by cheers and rousing choruses of Sto Lat
(May He Live a Hundred Years).  He responded with his actor's
instincts, regaling his audience with jokes and raising his
clenched fist in salute. Bantering with foreign journalist, he
announced, "I am the leader. I am No 1."

Firmness and patience paid off; the government team finally
gave in on almost all of the workers' demands.  In addition to
the right to strike and form unions, the Warsaw regime granted
concessions extraordinary in a Communist country, including
reduced censorship and access to the state broadcasting networks
for the unions and the church.  At a nationally televised
ceremony, where strikers and government representatives stood
side by side and sang the Polish national anthem.  Wales signed
what became known as the Gdansk agreement with a giant souvenir
pen bearing the likeness of John Paul II.

As workers rushed to join up at hastily improvised union locals
across the country, Walesa and the other ex-strike leaders
quickly found themselves at the head of a labor federation that
soon grew to 10 million members--fully a quarter of the Polish
population. Organizing and controlling the loosely knit
federation, which was divided into 38 semiautonomous regional
chapters, soon became a major challenge for Walesa and the
national commission that he headed in Gdansk.  The job was
complicated by an almost insatiable drive for democracy among
a rank and file that had no experience with the democratic
process.  Most of the solidarity activist were young.  They were
both angry and exuberant; bitter over the party's moral and
material bankruptcy, giddy with the sense of new-found power.
 Their impatience for change fed radical tendencies opposed to
Walesa's moderation.  And those currents would grow stronger as
the months went by with no improvement in the country's
economic situation.

Even more important than the organizational problems for Walesa
and solidarity was the question of defining policy  and
strategy.  In the beginning, Walesa insisted that solidarity
should be a pure and simple labor movement, not a political
opposition.  On the day he showed up at a Gdansk apartment
building to open solidarity's first makeshift headquarters, a
wooden crucifix under his arm and a bouquet of flowers in his
right hand.  Walesa told a crowd of reporters, "I am not
interested in politics, I am a union man.  My job now is to
organize the union."

Matters would never again be quite that simple for him,
although he began by winning an extraordinary concession from
the government on a strictly labor matter; a five-day work week,
granted on Jan 31 after decades of six-day work weeks in Poland.
 But that only aggravated the economic crisis by further
reducing production-- especially in the coal-mining industry,
whose output fell by nearly 10% in 1981.  In addition, the
country was soon swept by a spate of wildcat strikes over local
issues.  In some cases, Solidarity chapters were taking on the
Communist Party bureaucracy by demanding the ouster of corrupt
local officials or the conversion of party buildings to public
hospitals.  For the first time, rank- and-file militants
threatened to spin out of Walesa's control.  "We must
concentrate on basic issues.  "Walesa pleaded as the protests
spread.  "There's a fire in the country."

Putting out those fires kept wales busy through much of the
year. Since he hates to fly, he crisscrossed poland in a
union-owned white Polski-Fiat 125 P driven by his personal
chauffeur and assistant.  Miezyslaw Wachowski.  Walesa was at
his best plunging into a midnight meeting of angry workers and
then persuading them, by force of rhetoric, shouting or
cajolery, to end a strike.  He mad the 340-mile round trip
between Gdansk and Warsaw countless times, tires screeching as
Wachowski dodged plodding farm wagons. During this drives Walesa
would spend his time catching up on his sleep, or tuning in to
rock played by Radio Free Europe.  Lately, he had been listening
to English lessons on his tape recorder in preparation for a
trip that he had planned to make to the U.S.

But for all Walesa's skill as a moderator, Solidarity was
increasingly forced into the path of contentious political
activism by the regime's failure to deal with it fundamental
problem; the economy.  The authorities could not act effectively
because the party and government had fallen into a state of near
terminal paralysis.  Decades of blatant propaganda and economic
failures had long since discredited the rulers in the eyes of
the public.  If the government had actually produced a golden
egg, gibed Dissident Kuron, "people would say that was not
golden; second, that it was not an egg; and third, that the
government had stolen it."

Some 900,000 Poles quit the Communist party after August 1980,
reducing its strength to a mere 2.5 million, only 7% of the
population.  The resignations increased in October when the
Central Committee urged party members, about 1 million of whom
belonged to Solidarity, to quit the union.  In a strikingly
candid statement, Central Committee Member Marian Arendt
recently told a Polish weekly: "Mostly it is workers who are
leaving (the party). Once I was so naive as to think that a few
evil men were responsible for the errors of the party.  Now I
no longer have such illusions. There is something wrong in our
whole apparatus, in our entire structure.  "The party was on the
verge of total collapse.  What was more, Solidarity's surge had
started another surprising movement in Poland: a grass-roots
crusade for reform that sought to democratize the party from
within.  Adopting the workers' slogan of ODNOWA (renewal), party
reformers tried to make the leadership more responsive to the
rank and file.  Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, a pragmatic
politician who had replaced Gierik in September 1980, shrewdly
adopted the cause of renewal in the hope of controlling it from
the top and limiting its scope.  At the same time, he cooperated
with Solidarity to avoid a possibly disastrous confrontation.

All the while, the Kremlin watched with rising anxiety.
Solidarity's very existence was incompatible with the Communist
Party's monopoly of power.  But perhaps even more important,
the drive for democracy within the Polish party challenged the
Leninist doctrine of centralized party discipline.  Poland's
festering economic crisis also put a drain on the whole Soviet
bloc, whose member nations' economies were interlocked within
the COMECON trade organization.  And in Moscow's worst-case
scenario, the "Polish disease" might infect other East bloc
countries and the Ukraine, posing a threat to the future of the
Soviet empire.

"Emotionally, the Soviet leaders must have wanted to intervene
dozens of times in the past year," says a Western diplomat in
Moscow.  But the Soviets also realized the diplomatic and
economic consequences would be costly; they would risk armed
resistance the proud Poles, exacerbate relations with the U.S.
and Europe, affront the Third World nations they were so
ardently wooing, and take on responsibility for the Polish
economy.

The Kremlin kept constant pressure on the Poles with sallis of
vituperative propaganda, sword-rattling threats and hints that
a reduction of Soviet economic aid might put backbone into
Warsaw's faint-hearted leadership.  Kania was summoned into
Moscow and lectured at least three times.  He and his fellow
centrists were forced to perform a precarious high-wire act; on
the one hand, they sought to accommodate demands for
liberalizations coming from Solidarity and from their own rank
and file; on the other hand, they had to protect themselves
against Warsaw party hard-liners and convince the Soviets that
they were still in control.

In June the Soviet Central Committee sent Warsaw a letter, as
ominous as a drum roll, that criticized by name the Polish
Communists for tolerating counterrevolution; "We are disturbed
by the fact that the offensive by antisocialist enemy forces in
Poland threatens the interests of out entire commonwealth and
the security of its borders - yes, our common security.  "In
early July, a chill settled over Warsaw; Soviet Foreign Minister
Andrei Gromyko dourly descended upon the Polish capital with yet
another admonition against any liberalizing tendency within the
party.

Moscow's sobering warnings helped Kania curb his radicals and
marshal a safe, moderate centrist majority at a crucial party
congress in July.  The party reformers were still strong enough
to purge most of the old Central Committee, and only five top
party officials, including Kania and Jaruzelski, were
re-elected.  But control stayed in the hands of Kania's
centrist, who, under pressure from Solidarity, had allowed an
amount of freedom in Poland that would have been unthinkable
just twelve months before.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Solidarity and
Walesa was that they made it possible for Poles once again to
speak their minds.  In Solidarity bulletins and hundreds of
newly established independent newspapers, articles regularly
appeared that would shock the most tolerant censor in any other
East bloc country.  Solidarity's national weekly Solidarnosc,
for example, last month ran a blistering two-part expose' on the
privileges of top Communist officials.  In student clubs,
journalists' groups and literary unions, there were open
discussions of topics that had been forbidden in the
universities, such as Poland's history between the world wars.
 New publications bloomed like wild flowers.  Edited by Catholic
Intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the weekly Solidarnosc quickly
reached a nationwide circulation of 500,000, easily
outdistancing the once-prestigious party weekly Polityka (circ.
350,000).

The Gdansk accords had promised Solidarity access to the state
broadcasting networks, but it never was given regular
television time.  Solidarity protested so vehemently that top
TV officials at times literally barricaded themselves in their
studios at night for hear that bands of workers might burst in
and take over the station.  Solidarity never went that far, but
it did bar government camera crews from attending the Gdansk
congress in September and October 1981, thereby forcing Poland's
state television network to run British Broadcasting Corporation
footage on their own news shows.

The church too gained from the new liberalizations.  Just three
weeks after the Gdansk accords were signed, the voice of Bishop
Jerzy Modzelewski, who was preaching from the pulpit of
Warsaw's Church of the Holy Cross, echoed across the country.
 It was another first; the beginning of regular Sunday radio
broadcasts of the Mass, something the church had been seeking
in vain for decades.  Other concessions followed.  Priests and
nuns, for example, were allowed to do pastoral work in hospitals
and other state institutions.

Previously banned authors were published again, including
Nobel- prizewinning Poet Czeslaw Milosz, a prominent defector
of the '50s who returned to Poland for a triumphant visit last
June.  Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady, a 19th century play with
anti-Russian overtones, was shown on television.  State employed
actors elected a new director of the national Polish theater,
Kazimierz Dejmek, who had been ousted from the troupe during the
1968 purges. Political films like Workers 80, a documentary on
the Lenin shipyard strike, and Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, a
fictionalized version of the Gdansk events (in which Walesa
played a walk-on part), cleared the censors and played to packed
houses in Poland.

A liberal new passport law led to an unprecedented freedom of
movement.  Lech Walesa, the Communist regime's most prominent
critic, traveled almost as freely as a Western jet-setter.  In
January he make an emotional trip to Rome to see Pope John Paul
II. Falling to his knees, Walesa kissed the papal ring and then
briefly resisted the Pope's efforts to pull him to his feet.
The union leader then had a rare private meeting with the Pope,
which lasted for half an hour.  Later, in his public remarks,
John Paul II warmly supported Solidarity.  "I wish to assure
you," he told Walesa, "that during your difficulties I have been
with you in a special way, above all through prayer."  He
declared that the right to form free associations was "one of
the fundamental human rights."  But the Polish Pope also
cautioned Walesa to follow a moderate course.

Thousands of less illustrious Polish travelers also crossed the
borders unimpeded, although many failed to return; some 33,000
Poles fled to Austria and became official refugees during the
year, a dramatic reflection of Poland's economic and political
uncertainties.

One of the most striking cultural changes was the frank
treatment of the Polish past.  Solidarity persuaded the regime
to throw out thousands of schoolbooks that twisted and falsified
Polish history. The memory of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, Poland's
popular anti-Soviet military leader between the world wars, was
rehabilitated and recognized even by the Warsaw government.
Near the Lenin shipyard, three 138-ft. towers, crested by
symbolically crucified anchors, were erected to commemorate the
strikers killed by government troops in 1970.  Said a Polish
historian; "The Poles have gone on a memorial binge."

Freedom was being won.  But the battle for bread was not, and
if this failed, all else would fail as well.  Solidarity
therefore resolved to overhaul the country's crumbling economic
system and to share with the government in running it.  "We
wanted to make the authorities accountable to society,"
explained Bronislaw Geremek, Walesa's chief theoretician.  As
a start, the union decided to attack the corrupt and inefficient
nomenklatura system, under which the government chose plant
managers not for their skills but for their loyalty to the
party. The unions's stratagem; force the government to approve
a system of self-management for factories that would allow
workers' councils to choose their own managers. Even Walesa was
skeptical about the efficiency of such a system if it were put
into effect.  Said he; "I know we will fail.  It's a bad
solution.  But I don't have a different solution, so I must
accept it.  Self-management is better than what we had before."

On that issue, as well as on a number of other points.  Walesa
was coming under heavy pressure from the radicals in Solidarity
. During  the first Solidarity congress in September, the
delegates passed a truculent resolution demanding a referendum
to let the people choose between the union's program for
self-management and a government -proposed plan that would have
left all effective economic control in the hands of the state.

If the government enacted its own bill.  Solidarity threatened
to boycott the law and "carry out the reforms in our own way."
Another militant resolution called for free elections to the
parliament.  But by far the boldest act was a declaration which
took Walesa by surprise, encouraging the workers of Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union to "struggle for free and
independent unions." Moscow called the act "openly provocative
and impudent," as 100,000 Soviet troops staged maneuvers on the
Polish border.

Walesa, who had taken no part in shaping the offending
resolutions, concentrated on defusing the self-management issue
before the second half of the congress met at the end of
September.  On the eve of that session, he and three other
members of Solidarity's twelve-man presidium accepted a
compromise version of the government's self-management bill.
It would give workers' councils the right to choose managers at
most enterprises; the state could veto nominees it found
objectionable.  Parliament passed the plan into law the day
before the union delegates returned to Gdansk. A dangerous
union-government showdown was thereby averted.

It was a deft move, but it cost Walesa some of his popularity.
When the Gdansk congress reconvened, Walesa's high-handed style
became the central issue.  Attacked in speech after speech for
compromising with the government without consulting the rank
and file.  Walesa had to fight three radical candidates to keep
his job.  He was elected, but his 55.2% of the vote showed that
his hold over the movement had slipped markedly since the Lenin
shipyard triumph.

Walesa was so angry that he scarcely showed up on the
convention floor after the vote, preferring to watch the
proceedings on a TV monitor in a well-guarded room near by.  Nor
did he even bother to read the session's final resolutions,
which called for sweeping political, social and economic
reforms.  He charged that some of his radical opponents wanted
"to destroy the Sejm [parliament] and government, take their
place, and become more totalitarian than they are."

In turn, many of Walesa's critics felt that he had been too
moderate toward an intransigent regime.  "He has an enormous
tendency to give in, to agree with the government," complained
Economist Stefan Kurowski, the principal author of Solidarity's
economic program.  "He is not intelligent enough.  He is prone
to listen to advisers who want to make careers."  Andrzej
Gwiazda, a radical who challenged Walesa for the leadership
post, contemptuously called him a "dictatorial, vain fool" and
a "blockhead with a mustache."

Walesa's populist style and personality, as appealing as they
were to the public, irked many of his fellow union leaders.
Mieczyslaw Lach, a regional union leader, charged that "Walesa
takes too many decisions himself.  We often need quick, clear
decision, but he has gone too far."

Walesa tried to show that he understood the forces that drove
Solidarity critics, both at the local and national levels.
Said he:  "You have to remember that in the factories people are
not normally interested in politics.  They are just normal,
gray people, and they say, "Look, it was pretty bad before
August [1980], but at least we had our bread, we had some sort
of living conditions, and life was possible then.  Now, after
you [Solidarity] took over, it is worse.  So activists at the
local level are under pressure.  Some people want solutions
fast.  This is the only thing we differ in.  I want to be more
careful:  I don't want to see the renewal collapse.  But those
guys want to make a blitzkrieg."

In the end, of course, a different blitzkrieg came, launched by
the distant, enigmatic figure who was trained to attack.  On
Feb. 9 General Jaruzelski had been made Premier by the
government and had begun to spar with Walesa's union.  But on
Oct. 18 the Communist Party's Central Committee accepted the
resignation of the ineffectual Kania and elevated General
Jaruzelski to the party leadership, the real source of power in
the country.  Jaruzelski was thus the head of the party, the
government and the army.  The very fact that the Soviets allowed
the Poles to violate the Communist dogma that party civilians
must always control the military was a sign of their dismay over
the Polish party's disarray, and of their faith in the
Soviet-schooled general.

Jaruzelski was a man whom Moscow could trust.  He had been
trained by the soviets and fought in the Red Army during World
War II.  In contrast to the corrupt leaders of the Gierek
regime, he had a clean personal record and a spartan life-style.
 Although he had spent ten years on the Polish Politburo, he
stayed aloof from the political and ideological infighting
within the party.  As Defense Minister, moreover, he controlled
the regime's only disciplined and organized institution:
Poland's 210,000-man army, which still had the respect of the
people.

In contrast to Walesa, the balding, stern-faced general
projected no charisma.  His image of cold detachment was
heightened by the dark glasses he normally wore because of a
chronic eye inflammation.  But the people respected him because
of his well- known refusals in the past to use the military
against strikers, and his celebrated declaration.  "Polish
soldiers will not fire on Polish workers."  On hearing
Jaruzelski's appointment as Premier, ex-Army Draftee Lech Walesa
commented:  "Jaruzelski is a military man, and Poland loves its
soldiers."

One of Jaruzelski's first acts after assuming power was to call
out the army.  Using a sure touch that foreshadowed what was to
come, he sent some 3,500 officers and enlisted men  to 2,000
towns and villages scattered across the country during the last
week of october.  Their ostensible mission; to help clear up
food distribution bottlenecks and tackle other economic
problems.  But the officers were also filling their notebooks
with information on the corruption and negligence of local party
officials and, presumably, on the activities of Solidarity.  The
operation was generally popular with people, who welcomed the
soldiers as harbingers of efficiency and order.  In retrospect,
the deployment seems to have been a rehearsal for the military
crackdown.

Before he resorted to that extremity, however, Jaruzelski
appealed for national unity.  He asked Solidarity and the church
to join with the party in a "front of national accord" that
would cooperate on economic recovery.  The overture raised hopes
that Poles might at last find a way out of the impasse by
forging the vital element that had been missing from their body
politic for more than three decades; a true social compact.

On Nov. 4 a potentially historic meeting took place at the
government's Parkowa guesthouse in Warsaw.  There the bemedaled
boss of Poland's Communist Party received the head of a 10
million- member labor union and the spiritual leader of more
than 30 million Polish Catholics.  For two hours and 20 minutes,
Jaruzelski, Walesa and Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Polish
Primate, discussed the state of their troubled nation.  Walesa
came away with Jaruzelski's offer to open negotiations with
Solidarity on a wide range of social issues.  The three leaders
also discussed the general's plan to involve the union and the
church in the government's recovery effort.  Glemp pronounced
himself "a little more optimistic" after the meeting.

Before Walesa went to the summit meeting, Solidarity's ruling
body had chastised him for presuming to represent 10 million
workers on his own.  "We want democracy, not a dictatorship!"
one angry union official had shouted.  "All right, let's vote
that we don't want talks with the Primate and the Premier!"
yelled Walesa, tears of frustration running down his cheeks.
"But then you go out and explain your vote to the nation."  Now
that the Warsaw meeting was over, Solidarity grudgingly endorsed
the tripartite dialogue.  It threatened, however, to call a
general strike if the negotiations brought its members no
satisfaction within three months.  The commission also refused
to endorse Walesa's call for an end to wildcat strikes around
the country.

Though Walesa and Jaruzelski continued to talk of entente and
national unity after their meeting, the idea was not gelling.
 As always, the union was suspicious of government motives, and
with good reason.  The government wanted Solidarity to support
an economic plan to raise prices, but it had never given the
union any concrete guarantees that its rights would be
respected.  The authorities seemed to be stalling in hopes that
the economic crisis would wear down Solidarity's popular support
and split the union. In fact, the regime had never fully carried
out any of its major promised reforms.  Now the authorities were
even talking about curbing the right to strike, which had been
at the heart of the hard-won Gdansk accord.  The obdurate
position of the government, which made any concessions seem
increasingly unlikely, goaded the radicals in solidarity to
press even harder for reforms and made the final confrontation
inevitable.

As the split between the union and the government grew wider,
the church was wary of getting too closely involved in trying
to work out a political agreement.  The Pope, says a bishop in
the Vatican, felt that it was "the duty of the church to
proclaim the rights of man, including the right to form trade
unions, but the organizational work should be done by laymen."
 Walesa shared the Pope's beliefs and his concerns.  He told
TIME:  "We cannot put the church at risk, because we do not know
how this will end.  We may be wrong, but the church has to be
right."

As the unity talks dawdled, an astonishing event occurred that
showed how much the Communist Party itself had disintegrated
during the turmoil set in motion by Solidarity.  Trying to put
more pressure on the union, Jaruzelski asked the parliament to
approve a bill banning strikes during declared emergencies.  In
Communist countries, anything the regime wants, the parliament
automatically approves; the party controls all governmental
institutions.  But Jaruzelski was told in early December that
the parliament would not pass the antistrike bill, stark proof
of the collapse of party discipline.

With the party disintegrating, the Soviets pressing him to take
stern action and the economy in ruins, Jaruzelski turned to the
one institution he still trusted; the army.  Quietly, he began
to complete plans for imposing martial law while gradually
taking the offensive against Solidarity.  With army units held
in reserve, he used riot police to break-up an eight-day sit-in
at Warsaw's Fire Fighters Academy by students who were demanding
academic reforms. Next, the government went on radio with
illegally obtained tapes of Walesa warning, at a hot-tempered
Solidarity meeting, that "the confrontation is unavoidable and
will take place."  The union leader not deny the quotes; he only
said that they had been distorted by being taken out of context.
 The tone of the government's attacks reached a new pitch.  For
the first time Walesa himself was singled out for criticism; the
army newspaper called him "a great liar and provocateur" leading
a group of "madmen" striving for "anarchy and chaos."

Then on Dec. 12, Solidarity radicals gave Jaruzelski the excuse
to do what he probably had been planning all along.  From the
start, the government and the Kremlin had made it clear that
they could not tolerate a challenge to the existence of Poland
as a Communist state, or any loosening of ties with the Soviet
Union.  That is precisely what the radicals voted to do at their
last meeting in Gdansk.  While Walesa looked on in frustrated
silence, they called for a national referendum on the future of
the Communist government and a re-examination of Poland's
military alliance with the soviet Union.

That was the perfect pretext for the government to impose
martial law.  Near the end of the session, when communications
with the outside world had already been cut, Walesa stood up,
raised both arms in a gesture of despair, and angrily told his
fellow leaders: "Now you've got what you've been looking for."

The end had begun.  Within in hours, most of the union leaders
had been arrested.  Walesa had been flown to Warsaw, and army
vehicles were clanking across the country.  By the time
Jaruzelski appeared on television, Solidarity's tumultuous
revolution had been gagged and shackled.  No one could know if
Warsaw's leaders would honor their pledge to restore the
people's freedoms once "order" returned.  But one thing was
certain; the flame that was lighted in August 1980 had
brightened all Poland, and Poles do not give up easily.  In the
words that emblazon the tomb of the venerated Marshal Pilsudski:
 "To be defeated and not to surrender, that's victory."

Jaruzelski's brutal crackdown will only multiply the problems
of governing Poland and building its economy.  The Poles's
suspicion of the government prevented them, and Solidarity, from
cooperating with Warsaw to aid the economy.  That mistrust will
run even deeper now that the officer who had promised never to
shed Polish blood has done so.  Moreover, the workers could
totally sabotage the economy.  As Walesa put it in a discussion
with TIME editors last October, "We can be defeated, but we will
not be compelled to work. Because if people want us to build
tanks, we will build streetcars. And trucks will go backward if
we build them that way.  We know how to beat the system.  We are
pupils of that system."

Nor can Jaruzelski expect much help from the Western banks and
governments.  Indeed, the banks are resisting Poland's attempt
to rewrite its present loans, and President Reagan has ordered
a series of economic reprisals against the country.  The
Administration is also urging its European allies to consider
invoking trade sanctions against the Jaruzelski regime.  To
help save off disaster, Poland has applied for membership in
the international Monetary Fund.  But the IMF will undoubtedly
demand economic reforms painful for a Communist regime.  Among
them; decentralized planning and a price rise that would lower
standard of living.  In any event, the presence of martial law
will indefinitely delay IMF action on Warsaw's application.  So
Poland may have to turn even more to the Soviet Union and the
other East bloc countries and thus automatically be pulled back
into the morass of Communist control.

As long as solidarity existed, Jaruzelski had some chance of
enlisting its help to sell a skeptical nation on the need for
belt tightening.  But the general has now cut his main link to
the people.  The church, moreover, has accused the government
of turning the country into a "nation terrorized by force."
Having silenced all dialogue, Jaruzelski may be condemned to
continue his rule by force, thereby giving the world yet another
glaring example of Communist government by repression.  And
should he fail to restore order, the Soviets are still poised
to come in and finish the job for him.  If it comes to that, a
chapter of Polish history that began in hope will truly have
ended in catastrophe.

"There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess."  Winston
Churchill once remarked, "and there are few mistakes they have
ever avoided."  To an extraordinary degree, Lech Walesa embodies
the Polish virtues of courage, faith, patriotism, spontaneity.
 But neither he, nor his lieutenants, nor the men who ruled the
country were able to avoid the errors that finally led to
tragedy.  They were unable to reach a compromise to save the
"renewal' that they all claimed to have wanted.

Perhaps the root of that failure lay in the fundamental
incompatibility of Marxism-Leninism with freedom.  A Leninist
party must assume that it is infallible; it can brook no
opposition. That system, as imposed on Poland by the Soviet
Union, almost seemed capable of making significant changes
during the past 16 months.  But the survival instincts of the
party and the geopolitical realities facing Poland doomed
Walesa's mission.

Lech Walesa had the overwhelming majority of the Polish people
behind him, and to them he conveyed a compelling message of
hope. The Poles will not forget--they never have.  During
Poland's 16- month awakening, the priests ad parishioners of a
church in central Warsaw used to sing together joyfully:  "O
Lord, please bless our free fatherland."  On the first Sunday
after martial law was declared, the words of that hymn were
changed back to those traditionally sung when the country was
under foreign domination. "O Lord," the congregation sang,
"please return us our free fatherland."

--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Richard Hormik and Gregory
H.   Wierzynski/Warsaw with other bureaus