WALESA AS GANDHI

Roger Boyes’ review of Lech Walesa’s “The Struggle and the Triumph” (Sept. 27) is adding proverbial insult to injury. Boyes is mostly trying to redraw the profile of Walesa, rather than review the book itself. Although there are many indications that Boyes is well-informed about post-communist Poland, he just does not get the big picture.

“He is not Danton, not Lenin, not even Havel,” writes Boyes, but does he not see that Walesa is Gandhi, who by practicing nonviolence initiated the collapse of communism from Elbe to Kamchatka? Without firing a shot, without major bloodshed, he started a dawn which many roosters are taking credit for. For this achievement, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Prize and elected first president of the new Polish Republic. . . .

The whole Freudian speculation about Walesa being a child of communism and having Gierek as a father figure is naive; who writes it is neither historian nor psychologist.

So far, Poland is not disintegrating like Czechoslovakia; there is no civil war like in former Yugoslavia and many parts of the former Soviet Union. Poland under Walesa, and its first woman prime minister, Suchocka, is progressing very well.

EDWARD ZBIGNIEW MROZ, MENLO PARK