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Thank you very much for this introduction, and thank you very much for inviting me to this conference.

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And first, I would like to apologise. Please excuse my coughing.

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And if you start coughing yourself tomorrow playing promise of smoke.

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My you have seen some film footage, some pictures of this least spectacular revolution of all times,

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which we had 25 years ago, and indeed the death of the maybe innocent.

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And despite the lack of expected quality, I still love it.

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Not only because it made me a free man. If I had not been before 1999, I couldn't leave the country I wanted.

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But also, I like it as a historian. I like it. I love it because it's so messy.

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It's being so circumstantial, so contented.

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Messy, indeed. It's very difficult to put it into a coherent, highly curated narrative.

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But I will try nevertheless, how I have heard the differing interpretations of 1989 in Poland mostly result from attempts

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to reinterpret today to change legitimacy or to delegitimize some aspects of the present.

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But I would like to stay in my historians hat and think about the revolution.

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It was 1989 as a tool to understand.

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They use it for not to shed light on the price of the president of Ukraine, but to understand a little bit more the communist regime.

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For me, what happened between the summer of 1988 and the summer of 1989.

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Of course, it was a longer process which ended sometime in the summer.

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Was not the beginning of a new free market, democratic Poland's future member of the EU and NATO's unexpectedly high.

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As would be strongly a historical thing in steps that no one fought.

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In the steps. No other plan. No unexpected surprise.

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Even the victors. The victors. We are actually more surprised than most.

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But as a stage in a history of the People's Republic of Poland, the president, the final stage as we know it today.

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But nobody knew it at the time. So a stage is something is a part of a process.

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And I would like to have this process full perspective on this history.

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And we have a process between the summer of 1988 when the Communist Party leaders decided to negotiate.

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But these decided to make a radical turn in their policies because for the past seven years,

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beginning with the martial law in December 1981, they did the opposite.

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They kept arresting opposition leaders.

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And after 1986, 1987, when a policeman noticed and could recognise a member of the opposition, he had a very simple answer what to do arrested.

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And in the late 1980s, with those first timid steps towards inventing a way outside of the chop,

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which then to by the policies of the martial law and then radical decisions to recognise

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the Opposition as such important as the term opposition that he had at that time,

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a different meaning than in this country. Because in this country you have Her Majesty opposition in Poland, opposition party illegal,

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which is which cannot be present in the public space of its present is just temporary before the police arrives.

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So the party leaders decision in the summer of 1988 to start talking to the

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symmetric was it was a radical choice and that was a step in a longer process,

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which I would try to now offer you just to put some order into this massive story, this contingent circumstantial story of the Polish revolution.

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So what was my framework of what happened between the summer of 1988 and the summer of 1989 with the final decomposition?

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Well, we know that it was fired at that time. Just the composition of a future of the communist regimes.

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Whatever we were on are the model centric system, a system where every organisation, the final result reports to the Politburo.

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Or to put it on the other end, I have to research the finances of the Communist Party.

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The Communist Party was the only organisation in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary's Soviet Union, which approved its own budget.

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Every organisation be the state owned company association or trade union had its budget approved by the party.

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So that was the only one that was the Senate. And what happened between the moment when the parties decide to talk to the people,

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like got to make our muscle or some other deputies of the opposition, that means they recognise there is a place for them outside of prison.

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The second vessel was a private, ostensibly a private person citizen.

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The vote was no ex cermak of the ex trade union, which had existed a long time ago.

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But the matter of the past.

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So this is for me the key feature of the process from the point of view of the history of Communist Poland in the couple's path,

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how the compose as the centre of the regime,

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what regime is much more than the political system is a social order, is the set of institutions, practices,

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how things happen, how do you buy bread, whether you work, what you can watch on TV, what you can write and read in public?

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And here I am very glad to use a framework provided by one links who revise the

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old totalitarian regime theory and to produce just three elements in the central.

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One was number one was monastery system.

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He calls the monastic centre of power.

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Second was, and I call it an exclusive ideology, kind of a north northeast, which offers salivation that explains and modulates in God.

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And the third component was a tendency, a desire and capacity for mass political mobilisation.

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And the combination of the three was, well, something that distinguishes communist dictatorships from other dictatorships.

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Franco, Spain, in the 1960s and seventies, didn't want to have an ideology for everyone or to mobilise the population.

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Usually dictators want the citizens or subjects to stay away from politics.

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The communists, like the fascists, wanted to mobilise them.

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So when you take into account the spread of features, what you see that the communist regime,

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Poland gradually lost them and the final stage was losing the moral centric order of the society, economy, the political system.

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And this happened sometime between summer of 1980.

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So small are mentioned when an alternative, separate, independent force emerged.

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But that was suppressed. Solidarity was effectively suppressed with the martial law in 1981, 1982.

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The two other components. The ideology that ignores this political analysis and the capacity and the world to mobilise the regime.

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In lost ILIR, the first victim of the revolution, the regime was the ideology which in Poland was effectively dead after 1968.

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I spent 25 years of my life in communist Poland, but the first company that I met was in New York at the New School,

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and I was really very glad to meet such person.

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It was a great experience for me as a historian because I wanted to understand the Communists and I could not compare them coming to me.

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So I really ideology was there as a motivating force and as something which can explain everything.

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I promised salvation in the future, a personal salvation. So it was Greg.

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Of course there was that that language of Marxism.

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Of course, relics remain because people who are trained to perceive the world in some categories capital city work in some categories,

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but there's nothing like it. So there were some Marxist-Leninist rituals, but actually it was no longer the binding force,

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and it was also no longer a language to distinguish between those who are in and those who are out.

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There were no communist. There were just party members as well that mention the capacity for mass political

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mobilisation and the willingness of the party leaders to mobilise and effectively in 1980,

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because they realised that if someone else was much better in political mobilisation, the martial law,

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what the General Jasinski did in the 1980s, since December 13, 1981, was the great exercise in demobilisation.

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He did his best and the party did his best to politically demobilise the poles.

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And in the sense the regime of results in the 1980s is a post-communist authoritarian regime.

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They wanted to mobilise the people because they know Solidarity's much better in mobilisation, and they did it.

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And actually, we think today, one of the causes of civic passivity of poles and the very limited distrust of the government.

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We should look back into that. I dream how the government, using extensive violence, was grooming people into passivity,

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especially refraining from taking a political position in the public.

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And yet the martial law was a very good prototype.

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It was very effective. We must give justice.

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However, it came as a prize yourself to save the party rule, which is the model centric system in Parliament.

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But the party paid the price. Namely, it was no longer the role of the Politburo.

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It was the role of us to capacity.

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The key decisions were made by him and his closest associates, and the Politburo was just rubber stamping the decisions.

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And that was, I would say, maybe not a mortal blow, but it changed the nature of the system.

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It was not the system which Lenin and especially Stalin built eight years before.

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It was something different, which of course, was useful when you have to make fast decisions, suppress and so on in extraordinary circumstances.

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But the fact that the Soviets wanted to proof at general as the head of the party, that was the most unusual president.

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He was not a party member. He didn't he had not made career as an operative.

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He was a man from outside. And actually, initially, party apparatchiks didn't like him very much.

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He brought a number of generals into the state administration, to the party administration.

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And this way the role of the party leader was marginal, but it was no longer the central yakuza, the party of two little girls.

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US was the centre of this monosyllabic system, no longer the Politburo, which made possible the events of the 1988.

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It's not because when.

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Yaroslavsky and his colleagues in the Politburo in late November and December 1988 have reached the point that they may accept solidarity legal again,

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which they had not thought possible just a few weeks before when they started negotiations.

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They had a very clear plan not to accept solidarity as a massive trade union or to accept that in some distant, unspecified future.

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They were ready to open the process, make the opposition into responsibility for the state and for the economy,

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but not to accept and because of some contingency, a silly, overambitious claim by a legal trade union leader,

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Comrade Davis, who thought he's smart enough and he is a good trade union leader,

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and he will all to do so in public, and he would like to have all in support of public debate.

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So only under such circumstances, no one planned it.

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It was an obvious mistake, but partly it is understood it was a mistake of the after months.

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And then he realised if I wasn't socialist, of course, like socialist.

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And they decided yes, to accept the solidarity.

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And they had a very strange way of thinking. I wanted to find out sometime ago what was the mental horizon of that time.

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And I found it. One of the Politburo members said at the time, yes, in 96 we have accepted the Catholic Church,

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which in the early 1950s was to be to disappear, completely controlled by the party of the security.

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We accepted. It was a pain in the ass. But at this moment, it stabilises the country.

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Maybe we can have solidarity. Something to have the opposition, like the Roman Catholic Church in Poland,

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relatively autonomous, but can take and taking blame for the cost of economic reforms.

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That was the matter. They made a decision that it was too late to evolve and we have a whole series of policies.

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But before they declared they accepted, so did that.

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They called the Central Committee plenary session and other the Central Committee plenary session.

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Jaruzelski met with the vocal opposition,

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but all the characters who understood the property much better than him that they are going approaching a disaster with this.

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And then he was asked personal. Fresh with his resignation from the seat and only under pressure.

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He was asking a few friends of him. Did the Central Committee accept the decision?

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Otherwise it was better like so and the party point of view.

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Yaroslavsky saved it during the martial law, but the centre of power relocated into his body from the collective body and a body of yours that

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guaranteed the party approval for this dramatic decision to reverse all the policies of the 1980s.

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Because the party policies since the martial law in 1981 was never acted in solidarity.

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So they made this dramatic turn, maybe not a U-turn, but a dramatic turn.

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And this greatly contributed to what we know was the final collapse, because what was the result?

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That was the most dramatic decision about the role. So many others, such as that Politburo members talk to oppositionists.

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Now, of course, non-person. Just a few months before these decisions made by the party leaders publicly announced and seen on TV created confusion.

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Amongst them, loyal party members, among the party apparatchiks, among the security officers.

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So what is the. What is the future? If something we vote for, we risk our authority.

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Our neighbours don't like us. Maybe our children will play for something which we are now going to abandon.

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So what's the future? So we started with confusion, followed by demoralisation and eventually demoralisation.

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By the end, a bank run to steal as many moral and material assets from the regime as possible.

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In the summer of 1989. So this is a kind of a short story.

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However, when you look at the mass events by many people in the fall 1988, in summer 1989,

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why they are missing, because they are a growing number of relatively independent actors.

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Comrade Moldova to the head of the legal trade unions that were invented to replace to substitute

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for solidarity in the during the Marshall she was a Politburo member she was a party member,

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but he behaved independent. In fact,

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he was also terrible of the wrong decisions of the Department of Representation because he defended figures he had not consulted with the Politburo.

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At one crucial moment,

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he almost completely destroyed the negotiations because he demanded to speak as the third person in the final meeting of the whole thing.

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And no one could convince. Why? Because he wanted to be independent.

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And in this sense, he was effective because the trade union he was leading at the time survived the party and is now bigger than solidarity.

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So he was effective in saving the trade union and himself, but equally effective in destroying the moral centric system.

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Because if she can oppose the Politburo to some extent much, much greater than anyone could imagine in the past, why not the obvious?

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And we have plenty of reports in spring and especially the summer of 1989 that bureaucrats,

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state administrators, economic operators, trade union leaders,

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the satellites, partly because Poland didn't have a multi-party system in a hegemonic system with two small satellite puppets,

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politics united with the Communist Party. But they are increasingly assertive and they start behaving as if they were independent.

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Well, that was exactly what the article quote on advice to the Poles in the 1970s behave as you were asked if you were free.

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Of course, all of them had been appointed, moved out of the Communist Party.

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But in the period of confusion, they started to behave, at least some of them, as if they had been not.

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And by this fact, they eroded the power to the point when.

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Party leaders fret in opposition of the potential backlash of some hardliners.

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But there are no longer this hard liners culpable of an organised action.

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The now because I think I have just a few minutes left, but let me add another item.

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I have a little bit younger than the other speakers today and I didn't have a hillside the head,

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but I think I got a unique person in this room who in 1989 had the privilege of

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proudly standing on the guard of socialism in the uniform of the Warsaw Pact.

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I was drafted to the Army at the end of 1988.

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So in June, during the elections, I happened to be in the Polish army, the Polish People's Army at the time,

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and I could watch this institution from the third in the two moments which gave me a knowledge which produced least Connecticut.

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One was in February 1989, in a forgotten garrison town in northern Poland.

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Every week on Monday morning, we had a hide hour, a meeting of all the political office.

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There was a battalion police officer and at the beginning of my service to that political indoctrination.

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But I remember this day when he came. He was a graduate of the fighting.

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Risky, political, I can imagine.

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And he came to the room and 200 of us, a company of men, and he said, oh, you know, soldiers, maybe multiparty democracy is not what happens.

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Okay. He was a political officer, a graduate of the Catholic Church, his cousin.

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Could you imagine what things defence people feel at the moment?

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And the second moment is two days before the June the fourth elections, and that was in different garrison.

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And I was assistant to the company commander.

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And we have in Poland the military vote in separate polling stations and polling stations in the barracks.

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So, of course, during the electoral campaign, some party candidates were coming over posters encouraging everyone to vote for the candidates.

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But two days before the elections, on the morning roll call, I was standing with a little of because the company commander in front of this,

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hundred men and boys, most of them didn't have any communication actually was not only through the bookshop.

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And at the end of the roll call, he said, you know, soldiers today, we are about to have elections.

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This is an important moment. And still, I will tell you something about it. He didn't dismiss the roll call.

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And he gave me 5 seconds to invent what I can tell these guys.

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100 of 19 year old. Peasant farmers from eastern Poland who were standing in front of me.

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And I had 5 seconds to invent what to tell them in 5 minutes in this crucial moment.

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And I don't remember what and I don't know how effective it was, but I know that the day after the elections, the first thing I did,

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I run to the polling station and read the photo and realised that solidarity won all the seats it could win in this electoral committee.

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And I realised that most of the soldiers voted for solidarity.

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But I didn't cross the meaning. I was so happy until lunch and only when he gave me a horrible monetary food.

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You can imagine the Communist Army. I realised what was the meaning?

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Their meaning was the military option was no longer because the army revolted and

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the soldiers knew how the revolt and the officers knew how the soldiers voted.

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Get to make the default. Buy me a 25 year old soldier of the Polish People's Army.

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I realised that the general you cannot use the army as we had used in 1981 because something happened in all of this 19 year old peasant salts,

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some green uniforms knew it. I don't know if that was a consequence of my five minute speech,

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but I know that the decision of the multi year officer of the Communist Army who took

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a risk because he knew what I may be talking about in this 5 minutes and he left,

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which was a message for me. Do what you wish. I don't know why.

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For me, this is an example of this. The. If such film could happen in a communist on political offices.

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Considers the positives of the multi-party democracy and the young lt allows me to make anti-party.

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Subversive activity in the gutters of this regime was about to die.

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Thank you very much.