Word: communists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this day two decades ago, Polish patriots took on the world’s largest army and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, eventually toppling the Communist regime in Warsaw. They achieved this feat not through violent revolution, but through a series of negotiations that became famous as the Round Table talks. The defeat of Communism in Poland—which was soon followed by its total collapse in Eastern Europe and, in 1991, the Soviet Union itself—should properly be regarded as one of the greatest triumphs in European history...
...Solidarity, led by the charismatic electrician Lech Walesa, had gained international sympathy after the 1980 shipyard strikes in Gdansk. It would eventually gain huge popular support; 1.5 million Poles would claim membership in April 1989. However, the Communist regime felt threatened by the union and responded with force. In 1981, Wojciech Jaruzelski, the secretary of the Polish Communist Party, declared martial law, criminalized Solidarity, and imprisoned much of its leadership. For two years, Poland suffered under military rule...
...From February to April of 1989, the Communist leadership met with the leaders of Solidarity in what became known as the Round Table talks, which resulted in an agreement to hold semi-free elections that summer. The results of these elections favored Solidarity’s candidates even more than its own leaders had expected; of the available seats, Solidarity won nearly every single contest. To many observers, it seemed as though Poland would move rapidly toward capitalism and democracy...
...savior of the Polish nation but proved to be much less effective as a governing party. Just four years after the Round Table talks, the once-dominant coalition led by Solidarity had fragmented and lost power to its Social Democratic opposition, some of whom had served in the Communist government. This was not due simply to the economic climate; in the first truly free elections, the movement split violently when Walesa ran for president against Tadeusz Mazowiecki, another Solidarity politician who was then prime minister...
...European community. Instead, it took a new generation of political leadership to accomplish the unthinkable: turning a mismanaged and unproductive command economy into a functioning and streamlined market system. Yet all this hard work paid off in the end; on May 1, 2004, Poland and seven other formerly Communist countries in Central Europe joined the European Union...