ABSTRACT
In August 1980, after a summer of strikes and unrest, the Communist government of Poland signed its Magna Charta with Solidarity, the first independent trade union in a Communist country, and granted it the right to exist. Poland was attacked and divided, in three separate partitions, among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The Stalinist model of economic development became the curse of the Polish people as well as of the Communist government. It was based on Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country," by which he subjected the Soviet Union to an inhuman pace of forced industrialization. The Polish "model of peaceful revolution from communism provided the inspiration to other people living under Communist domination, especially in central Europe and parts of the Soviet Union. "Roundtable" talks in the spring of 1989 involved all political forces in Poland and led to legalization of Solidarity in April and to the elections in June.
