Poland's first post-communist PM Mazowiecki dead at 86
Source: Reuters
Polish statesman Tadeusz Mazowiecki, whose appointment in 1989 as the first non-communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc helped usher in democratic change across eastern Europe, died on Monday aged 86.
Tributes poured in from Poland, Germany and beyond for the shy former dissident intellectual who was famously photographed making a victory sign in August 1989 after his appointment by the Soviet-backed Polish president, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.
By the end of that year, the Berlin Wall had fallen, communist regimes in Moscow's other satellite states had collapsed and the Cold War division of the continent was over.
"It is a shame that such a person has passed away," Lech Walesa, who replaced Jaruzelski as Poland's first postwar non-communist head of state in 1990, told public broadcaster TVP.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/us-poland-mazowiecki-idUSBRE99R07M20131028
See also:
Polskie Radio, Tadeusz Mazowiecki dies aged 86
The New York Times profile from Aug. 19, 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki; A Catholic at the Helm
