Lech Walesa was named TIME's Man of the Year in 1981
At the center of the Polish revolution in 1981 was one of history's more improbable heroes. As TIME noted in naming him Man of the Year in 1981, "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 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. The irony of his shipyard protests in Gdansk: An authentic proletarian revolution had risen, much as Marx had predicted, only to be put down by the guns of the oppressor class: the Communists themselves.
Researched by Joan Levinstein, the Time Inc. Research Center