Poland: Must History Repeat Itself?

At the end of October 1981, I delivered a lecture at one of the higher educational institutions in southeastern Poland. When I finished, a young man rose to ask a question that had no relation to the subject of my talk, but which was clearly uppermost in the minds of my audience—indeed, in the mind of every thinking Pole at that time. “Do you think that Solidarity will be allowed to continue, or will it be suppressed? After all, what’s happening today is not exactly unprecedented. After the War we had an independent Polish Peasant party and a Socialist party. As a result of the Yalta Agreement, the Provisional Government of National Unity came into being, including Stanislaw Mikolajczyk and other representatives of democrat...