Lech Wałęsa

Born in 1943, Wałęsa worked at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, where his trade-union activism got him fired in 1976, surveilled, and arrested repeatedly. In August 1980 he negotiated the Gdańsk Agreement after strikes paralyzed the coast, then co-founded Solidarity - a movement that swelled past ten million members. Martial law drove it underground and put him back in custody, but he kept organizing from the margins. By 1989 he was central to the Round Table talks that produced semi-free elections and a Solidarity-led government, closing the book on four decades of Communist rule. He won Poland's first popular presidential vote in 1990 and steered the country through its lurch toward markets and democracy, then lost re-election in 1995. The Nobel, the Time cover, and an airport in Gdańsk followed.