Twenty-five years ago, on Jan. 27, 1989, a joint statement from the communist government of Poland, the Solidarity trade union, and the Catholic Church announced a national “Roundtable” to discuss the country’s future, including major structural issues of political and economic reform. The Roundtable began the following month; basic agreements were reached in April; partially-free elections, swept by Solidarity candidates, were held in June; and in September, a Solidarity leader, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister since World War II.
Poland was the first of the Warsaw Pact dominos to fall. Its transition accelerated the Revolution of 1989, which was completed in late December 1989 with the swearing-in of Vaclav Havel, a political prisoner earlier in the year, as president of Czechoslovakia.
Read Full Article »