ABSTRACT
T here was but a faint glimmer of Mieczyslaw Rakowski's renowned chicanery in evidence when I met him in March 1992. A fright-
ened man, Poland's last communist prime minister seemed more concerned with the contemplation of his own mortality than with the certified death of the system for which he'd long laboured. Out of misplaced politeness I didn't point out the irony of his impending trip to Berlin for a by-pass operation. On second thoughts, however, I remembered that the Party elite had never really hidden their enjoyment of privileges, not available to the masses, in the so-called classless socialist order. Was this a tacit admission that Big Brother's medical facilities weren't up to scratch in Poland?
