the POLSKI blog

Can’t believe it’s already been twenty years since Communism in Poland collapsed. I was still at school, had just a year or so to go till my matura (final secondary school exams) and couldn’t quite believe it when my literature teacher asked us to start reading  The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You what?! Solzhenitsyn? Until a few months earlier his books – like thousands of other books, plays etc – were banned in Poland and I suspect all other neighbouring Communist countries too.

But that was 1989, the year when Communism in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed for good (with a few exceptions), largely thanks to Solidarity’s victory in what is referred to as the first free parliamentary elections in modern Polish history. (For those of you who are not familiar with Solidarity, it was the first official union formed  in 1980 and led by Lech Wałęsa; Solidarity was the first non-Communist trade union in a Communist country – the fact it was formed is widely perceived as the beginning of the end of the Communism in Europe).

Tadeusz Mazowiecki (above) becomes the first non-Communist Prime Minister in Poland after the war. And the rest is history.

Today Poland celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 parliamentary elections. It’s been a couple of very eventful decades: numerous governments have formed and collapsed, Poles slowly (and not without problems) got used to the newly-regained freedom and the fact they were also able to travel freely, Poland’s economy had to learn how to cope with the notion of the free market, there have been some dramatic changes in the cultural, moral and spiritual fabric of the society.

But now, twenty years later, Poland – a member of NATO and the European Union (both as abstract and unimaginably unattainable in 1989 as a walk on the Moon) – remembers the events and can largely be proud of its achievements of the past two decades. Yes, there will be those who will always complain, question and see the bad sides. But without what happened in June 1989 I doubt I’d be able to write this blog.

Were you in Poland in 1989? Do you remember the events? I’d love to know what your memories are – post a few words in the comment box below.

Image © ewewlo via Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence