in Stockholm Sweden
It started in Poland
Exhibition "History behind the Iron Curtain" in Kungsträdgården, Stockholm, Sweden, May 3 -10.
The great upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe took place in 1989,
but were preceded by events in Poland as early as in 1980, when the
Communist rulers, after a wave of nationwide strikes, were forced into
negotiating with the strikers, allowing them to form an independent
worker's union. Solidarity was founded as a result of a 1980 agreement.
However, that victory did not prove lasting. Not even 16 months later,
a state of war was declared, with all independent organizations (among
them Solidarity) being banned, and thousands of active union members
imprisoned and interned.
But the will of the people can never be crushed. Solidarity never gave
up, and their public support never waned despite threatened reprisals,
resulting in the rulers yet again being forced into negotiations with
the representatives of the people in February 1989. The round table
discussions between the government and the opposition resulted in the
first free elections in the Eastern Bloc. The democratic opposition
were allowed to run in the elections for the Parliament House of
Commons with their own list, and were guaranteed 35% of the seats.
Furthermore, completely free elections to the Senate were guaranteed.
In the June 1989 election, the oppostition won an overwhelming
victory. In September, Tadeusz Mazowiecki formed the first
non-Communist government in postwar Poland. This became a starting shot
for the fall of Communism and for the democratic changes in Central and
Eastern Europe.
The peaceful transfer of power paved the way for democracy. In May
2004, Poland was accepted as a member state of the European Union.
The exhibition, compiled by the European Solidarity Center in
cooperation with Solidarity Center Foundation in Gdansk, presents the
history of Poland from 1945 to the present, with special emphasis on
the role of Solidarity and its influence on the geopolitical changes in
Europe and the world.
For news, galleries, schedules and more information on the exhibition, please visit the
European Solidarity Center
(available in Polish, English, German, Russian, French and Spanish).
Voices on Solidarity:
"That this movement would cause the collapse of a whole system,
however, that this "round table" would be the epicentre of a political
earthquake that changed not only Poland but also Germany, Europe and
the whole world: that was beyond not only my wildest imaginings….
With good reason Bronislaw Geremek has called the successful struggle
people waged for freedom that year’s "second founding act" of European
unity.
We Germans know how much we owe the Poles for courageously blazing the
trail and are deeply grateful."
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Berlin, February 9, 2009
"In retrospect, it seems predictable that the first opposition
group in the Soviet bloc to succeed in unseating a communist regime
would be Poland’s Solidarity movement. Discontent with economic
hardships and the suppression of civil liberties had long been evident
in Poland, erupting in workplace unrest and mass protests more
frequently than anywhere else in Eastern Europe: 1956, 1968, 1970,
1976. In 1980, during yet another wave of strikes and demonstrations,
the Solidarity trade union had been formed in the port city of Gdansk."
James Bjork, King’s College of London, England
"I should say, if I may, that I did once slightly step outside this
role which I had set myself of chronicler and analyst, but not prophet
or politician. If you remember, the rebirth of Solidarity in the 1980s
in Poland began with some strikes in the Lenin Shipyard in May of 1988.
I managed to get into the shipyard, climbed over the shipyard wall, and
got into the headquarters. There was Lech Walesa asleep on the floor. I
woke him up, at which point someone came into the room and said, "An
English Lord is sitting in the vicarage, he has a message from Mrs.
Thatcher." And the message was, did Lech Walesa have a message for Mrs.
Thatcher? Lech Walesa turned to his aide and said, "Look Andrzej, I'm
much too busy. Can you write this?" Andrzej Celinski turned to me and
said, "I don't know what to say to Mrs. Thatcher." And so I sat down at
an old typewriter in the occupied Lenin Shipyard and wrote a plangent
appeal for help from Lech Walesa to Margaret Thatcher -- which is not
strictly the role of the neutral observer."
Timothy Garton Ash, interview in the Intellectual Odyssey
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The exhibition is arranged by the Embassy of Poland in Sweden and the Polish Institute in Stockholm, The 20th Anniversary of the Liberated and
Reunited Europe Alliance and the UOK/IICC
