Following Polish elections and the defeat of Communism, the Citizens’ Parliamentary Club Presidium discusses the candidates for Polish Prime Minister, and debate the feasibility of a coalition government.

The Citizens’ Parliamentary Club formed by Solidarity deputies in June 1989 meets to discuss preparations for the future of Poland’s political system and election of a president.

Chairmen of the fourty-six regional committees discuss the upcoming round of elections in Poland.

In this extraordinary conversation, Solidarity’s leader fears the collapse of the Wall would distract West Germany’s attention - and money - to the GDR, at the time when Poland, the trail-blazer to the post-communist era in Eastern Europe, desperately needed both. "Events are moving too fast," Walesa said, and only hours later, the Wall fell, and Kohl had to cut his Poland visit short to scramble back to Berlin, thus proving Walesa’s fear correct.

President of People’s Republic of Hungary, Rezso Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Karoly Grosz, report on their talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, 24-25 July, 1989. The excerpts contains economic reformer Nyers’ assessment of the political situation in Hungary, and first among the factors that "can defeat the party," he lists "the past, if we let ourselves [be] smeared with it." The memory of the revolution of 1956 and its bloody repression by the Soviets was Banquo’s ghost, destroying the legitimacy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, just as 1968 in Prague and 1981’s martial law in Poland and all the other Communist "blank spots" of history came back in 1989 to crumble Communist ideology. For their part, the Communist reformers (including Gorbachev) did not quite know how to respond as events accelerated in 1989, except not to repeat 1956.

Telephone conversation between President George H. W. Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on the situation in Germany.

Telephone conversation between President George H. W. Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on the situation in Eastern Europe.

On the day after Solidarity had swept Poland’s first open elections, ultimately winning 99 of 100 Senate seats, the Polish Communists vent their shock and dismay ("a bitter lesson," "the party are not connected with the masses," "We trusted the Church and they turned out to be Jesuits" were typical comments). Comrade Kwasniewski (who was later elected President of Poland) remarks that "It’s well known that also party members were crossing out our candidates" (only two out of 35 Party candidates survived the epidemic of X’s). But they see no choice but to negotiate a coalition government, and specifically "[w]arn against attempts at destabilization, pointing at the situation in China" -- since the Tiananmen massacre occurred the same day as the Polish elections, the road not taken.

Report on First Secretary of the Polish People's Republic Wojciech Jaruzelski's 1989 visit to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev and discuss the transformations occurring in the Soviet Union.

Report from Andrzej Stelmachowski to Lech Walesa regarding his meeting with Czyrek and their conversation on Czyrek’s vision of the Roundtable discussions including questions about Solidarity’s position in the political system if it were to be legalized