BiblioVault - Books about 1980-1989

From Solidarity to Martial Law

The Polish Crisis of 1980–1981

The National Security Archive Paczkowski

Central European University Press, 2007

95 documents on the events that represent a pivotal moment in modern Polish and world history: 16 months between August 1980 when the Solidarity trade union was founded and December 1981 when Polish authorities declared martial law and crushed the nationwide opposition movement that had grown up around the union. Transcripts of Soviet and Polish Politburo meetings give a detailed picture of the goals, motivations and deliberations of the leaders of these countries. Records of Warsaw Pact gatherings, notes of bilateral sessions of the communist camp provide additional pieces to the puzzle of what Moscow and its allies had in mind. Materials are included from Solidarity, too.

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Liberalism After Communism

The Implications of the 1993 Elections to the Federal Assembly

Jerzy Szacki

Central European University Press, 1995

This study is devoted to recent developments in Central European (especially Polish) political thought, and concentrates on the emergence of liberal ideas, a subject largely neglected by Western observers. It provides a clear account of protoliberal and liberal thinking in Central Europe both before and after 1989, a critical appraisal of the democratic opposition to communism, and an analysis of economic liberalism as its rival orientation. The author examines the changes which occur in classical liberal ideas when they are implemented in a region with practically no liberal tradition and no socioeconomic infrastructure, and shows how liberal ideas in Central Europe are becoming constructivist, functioning as the ideological justification for a new kind of Utopian social engineering that aims at constructing capitalism.

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Solidarity's Secret

The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland

Shana Penn

University of Michigan Press, 2006

"This important book explores one of the most pivotal periods in Polish history and deals with a topic nearly everyone else overlooked. Shana Penn's study begins with a simple question I wish I had thought more about myself: once the leadership of Solidarity had been arrested during the 1981 military coup, who kept the movement alive over the following months and years? The answer will surprise you, as Penn delves into the lives of seven Polish women activists who rose to the call, set about saving an entire political movement, and in time turned themselves into some of the most powerful women in Poland today."
---Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize

Solidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government.

Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement-women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts.

Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.

Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story-unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself-from one of the most important eras in modern history.

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