The deep concern among America's Eastern European allies over improved relations between Russia and the United States spilled into the open on Thursday when 22 prominent figures, including Poland's Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel, published an open letter to the Obama administration begging not to be forgotten. In the letter, the...

Lech Walesa, the hero of the Solidarity movement and former president now adrift in this political backwater, sat back in his office atop this city's historic Green Gate to reminisce about another Lech who worked for him years ago. ''His approach is to first destroy and then think about what to build,'' Mr. Walesa said of the country's current...

THE COLD WAR A New History. By John Lewis Gaddis. 333 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95. IN 1991, as the Soviet Union was cracking up, one of President George H. W. Bush's senior foreign policy officials told me, ''You historians are going to have a hard time explaining to the Americans of the future why we thought the cold war was so dangerous for 45...
Lech Wałęsa (udtales "Leh va-wen-sa", født 29. september 1943 i Popowo, Polen) er en polsk elektriker, fagforeningsaktivist og politiker.
I december 1970 var Lech Walesa en af de ledende skikkelser i konflikten mellem regeringen og værftsarbejderne i Gdansk.
I 1978 begyndte han, sammen med andre aktivister, at organisere arbejderne i frie, ikke kommunistiske, fagforeninger.
I august 1980 var han leder af strejken blandt værftsarbejderne på værftet i Gdansk.
I december 1981 indførtes millitær undtagelsestilstand og Lech Walesa blev arresteret. Han blev først løsladt i november 1982.
Han grundlagde Solidarność (Solidaritet), den første uafhængige fagforening i sovjetblokken, fik Nobels fredspris i 1983 og var Polens præsident fra 1990 til 1995.