ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of 1989 when the Round Table negotiations started in Poland, tremendous and rapid revolutionary changes have taken place in the whole region of Central and Eastern Europe. This process of radical social, political, and institutional changes is still under way. The 1989 peaceful, or revolutionary, radical political changes swept away one ideology in Eastern Europe without replacing it with another that is as clearly defined. The Soviet pattern of an economic system was based on a centrally planned economy, the domination of state ownership and the liquidation of private property, and command-administrative management of the national economy with a huge bureaucratic governmental apparatus. The economic and social performance of the system lost its ability to legitimize the authoritarian political regimes. The new political leadership emerged from the younger generation of Communist Party activists. The shocking defeat of the national list and the grievous electoral setbacks of the Polish United Workers’ Party challenged the fragile Round Table agreement.
