ABSTRACT
In 1968 the New Economic Mechanism, which abolished compulsory plan directives and gave the managers more freedom, was introduced. Abandoning their traditional anti-clericalism, people such as Adam Michnik stressed the common ground between the church and the leftist opposition: concern for freedom and human dignity. The anti-communist movement in Poland acquired a new dimension with an event that took place in Rome in late 1978: the election of Cardinal Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. East Central Europe had to pay a heavy price for the forty-odd years of communist experiments, and the costs included an atomization and demoralization of society that escape quantification. The program of privatization was carried out mainly through vouchers and was not always determined by purely economic reasons. The Czech and Moravian lands were traditionally the most advanced economically and socially in the region. But the current situation is fraught with difficulties.
