WARSAW, Poland — It began in Poland at the ballot box: A season of revolutions that toppled communist regimes from Berlin to Bucharest was set in motion 20 years ago this week by the first semi-free elections ever to take place in the Soviet-dominated eastern bloc.
On Thursday, Poles celebrate the anniversary of the ballot, which delivered a sweeping victory to Lech Walesa’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement, kicking off a stream of events that will culminate with celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall this November and the Dec. 25 anniversary of the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
On the eve of the anniversary, the Polish parliament held a special session honoring Walesa and other key players in the bloodless revolution.
Walesa was presented with red and white flowers — the national colors — after he entered the chamber and was given a standing ovation after a speech in which he praised Poles for showing the courage to fight a communist system that once seemed invincible.
“We managed to end an era of divisions, mistakes and confrontation,” Walesa said today. “No other generation had a chance to try to achieve that.”
Others were also honored, including Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the country’s first democratic prime minister. “Twenty years ago, what seemed impossible became possible,” Mazowiecki recalled.
In Gdansk, an enormous poster of Walesa as a young revolutionary hangs on a building overlooking the shipyard in the Baltic Sea port where Solidarity was born in 1980.
At that symbolic spot, Walesa, now 65, and Vaclav Havel, the playwright who led Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, will be feted Thursday for the bloodless revolutions that gave birth to a new world in eastern Europe.
The pair also are expected to speak at commemorations in the southern city of Krakow.
On June 4, 1989, Poles streamed to polling stations with Soviet troops still on their soil, but with a leader at the Kremlin — Mikhail Gorbachev — who was allowing unprecedented freedom to the Soviet satellites as he struggled at home to reform socialism.
Those reforms — which became known to the world by their Russian terms “perestroika” (rebuilding) and “glasnost” (openness) — eventually led to the undoing of the Soviet Union. Poland, a nation of 38 million, has loosened itself completely from Moscow’s orbit, joining NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004 along with several ex-communist neighbors.
But for all the gains of the past two decades, some Poles also grumble that much that was good — job security, free time, solidarity — has been lost with the arrival of a Western-style consumer society.
“I am disappointed,” said Kazimierz Kasztelan, a 59-year-old unemployed mechanic struggling to supplement a monthly welfare check of $220 with odd jobs. He said he voted for Solidarity in 1989 and had joined strikes that pushed the communist regime to allow the June 4 vote.
Today, though, he would gladly return to that old era, when a job for life was enshrined in the communist constitution, and to what he calls a sense of social “calm” that has been destroyed by the “nervousness” of the new times.
“If I had known how it would turn out, I wouldn’t have gone on strike,” he said with bitterness.
The changes in 1989 came after strikes the previous year born of frustration with worsening economic hardship pushed the communist authorities to sit down for so-called “Round Table” talks with Solidarity. The symbolism of the table — today on display at the president’s palace — was powerful because it had no head, implying a degree of equality among the participants.
The talks resulted in the communist regime legalizing Solidarity, which had been the object of severe repression in the previous years, and an agreement to hold the June 4 elections. The deal opened all 100 Senate seats to free voting and one-third of the seats in the more important lower house, the Sejm.
The results astounded everyone — even Solidarity activists, whose most ambitious dreams foresaw free elections four years later: Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and all of the contestable 161 seats in the Sejm.
The vote for democracy was all the more poignant given that, on the same day, pro-democracy activists in China were slaughtered at Tiananmen Square.
It created a surreal experience for Solidarity members as they watched TV broadcasts showing their own victory and the crushing of the same spirit for freedom on the other side of the globe.
The Polish communist regime wasn’t dead yet, since the communists still held most of the power. But the sweeping victory for Solidarity — the most sustained democracy movement behind the Iron Curtain — produced unstoppable momentum. Poland had its first democratic prime minister, Mazowiecki, in a matter of months and Walesa was elected president the next year.
Poland’s last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski, said the Polish plans for reforms, like those of Gorbachev, were meant to improve and preserve the socialist system — not bring it down.
“I’m not going to praise myself and say we were thinking about the possibility of giving up power or even sharing power,” Jaruzelski recalled in an AP interview last week.
“I imagined that the system would undergo deep reforms, but that the system would remain.”
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