Quotable notes

"Walk down Long Market Street, past the shops selling amber beads and cavalry swords, through the medieval gates of the city of Gdansk, Poland. Cross the highway, head toward the shipyard and look up. When I did so a few days ago, I saw an enormous billboard featuring a list of cities: 'Gdansk. Budapest. Prague. Berlin. Bucharest. Sofia. Kiev [sic].' The list makes it clear that the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strikes, which broke the state's monopoly of power in the Soviet bloc and created the independent Solidarity trade union, set the pattern for the democratic revolutions that rolled across Eastern Europe in 1989 and that continue to roll across the nations of the former Soviet Union today. ...

"But what is most interesting about the billboard and the exhibit, along with the multiple conferences, concerts and celebrity speeches taking place in Gdansk this week, is the fact that they are happening at all. Until recently, it wasn't easy to find public displays of pride in Poland's democratic revolution. Five years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, giant screens set up to relay celebratory speeches to the citizens of Gdansk attracted no more than 50 or 60. Far from seeing themselves as part of a peaceful revolution that stretched from Gdansk in 1980 to Kiev in 2004, most Poles associated the collapse of communism with corrupt politics and personal hardship. ..."

- Columnist Anne Applebaum, writing in the August 31 issue of The Washington Post.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, September 25, 2005, No. 39, Vol. LXXIII

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