By Bradley Graham, Washington Post Foreign Service

"This was the best news I've heard since Karol Wojtyla was elected pope," one young woman exclaimed, likening the excitement in Poland today to the tremendous surge in national pride and emotion that accompanied the naming of John Paul II, former archbishop of Krakow, in 1978.

Just as that event, and the new pope's triumphal return to his homeland in 1979, provided much of the impetus that led to the organization of Solidarity the following year, word today that Lech Walesa had won the Nobel Peace Prize gave a renewed sense of mission to Solidarity supporters. Poland's Communist authorities, thrown on the defensive, sought to belittle the event as a politically motivated gesture that devalued the award.

The timing of the announcement was particularly welcomed by Walesa's supporters in that it coincided with an increasingly vicious official campaign to slander Walesa and humiliate those who have persisted in open opposition to the government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. Some Poles and western diplomats speculated that the authorities would now temper their harsh attacks against Walesa.