Ten years ago the first partially free elections in any communist country were held in Poland: a crucial step on the road that began with the rise of Solidarity in 1980 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet system.
Those Polish elections were the result of a compromise hammered out during weeks of round-table negotiations between communist leaders and representatives of the Solidarity trade union. Paradoxically, however, the elections that ultimately ushered in the first non-communist government were not originally favoured by the Solidarity team.
Later, the negotiations became an object of heated debate among politicians and commentators in Poland. Two myths came to the fore. The first concerned the benevolence of the communist leaders who had supposedly ceded their power at the moment democracy became possible.
The second was about a conspiracy between Reds and Pinkos that supposedly saved the communists from total disgrace and allowed them to stage a comeback as a new party of the left. Both myths are just that: myths. A compromise is usually a result of some weakness on both sides.
In 1989, the communists had managed to make illegal and contain Solidarity. A wave of strikes in May and August of 1988 brought home to Poland's politburo that the repression they had pursued since martial law in 1981 was a failure. Solidarity, though weakened, proved to be a permanent fixture. To achieve social peace, the communists had to talk to Solidarity.
But Solidarity was weak, too. True, it had tremendous trumps in its hand: its great international visibility, widespread public support and a Polish Pope. Solidarity could count on the logic of Gorbachev's recent reforms, the perennial inefficiency of the communist economic system and the unwillingness of the government, under Gen. Jaruzelski, to go back to the martial law regime.
Despite all of this, Solidarity was weak and we were pretending to be much stronger than we knew we were. Of the millions who joined in 1980, only some 10,000 to 20,000 were active throughout the country. Solidarity urgently needed to become legal again, to substitute a lasting institutional reality for its still-enduring existence as a national myth.
The communists at first hoped to co-opt some Solidarity activists, without legalising the movement. They offered to talk about a political compromise that would bring some new people into the parliament, provided real radicals, like Jacek Kuron or myself, were kept out.
But for us the legalisation of Solidarity and its right to choose its own representatives were nonnegotiable demands, and Lech Walesa held firm on this until the communists relented.
After heated debates, we were prepared to pay what we saw as a very high price for the legalisation of Solidarity. We saw participation in parliamentary elections not as a victory, but as a legitimation of the regime. The communists wanted a political system that would allow them to stay in power, with us as a fig leaf, and we were willing to give them some of that for the chance of having Solidarity legal and of starting a process of legal change.
What nobody anticipated was that the crushing defeat of the communists at the polls for all but one of the seats we were allowed to contest made it impossible for the communists to form a new government, even if the numerical majorities were still on their side.
I remember well the inaugural session of the round-table talks. Bronislaw Geremek browbeat me into putting on a suit and a tie. Embarrassed and furious - my attire made me a butt of Walesa's mocking remarks - I walked up the stairs of the palace where the talks were to be held. At the top of the steps stood Gen Kiszczak, who as minister of internal affairs had held me in jail only a little more than two years earlier, and against whom I had written articles smuggled to the West.
I tried to hide but eventually I had to publicly shake hands on TV with the head of the political police. He behaved with great class and easily dismissed all the insults I had heaped on him only a short time before.
Still, I had a keen appreciation of the strangeness of my position. Next to me stood my friends and long-time comrades in jail and Solidarity underground: Jacek Kuron, Zbigniew Bujak, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. I was conscious of a historical transition, which I could not quite define. But I understood one thing: the democratic opposition was stepping over the threshold of legality.
I could see that the historical chance for my country was beginning in an act of compromise. Adam Michnik is editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, originally the newspaper of Solidarity and today the independent daily with the highest circulation in Poland