In early December 1989, one of the banners in downtown Prague read: “Poland—10 years, Hungary—10 months, GDR—10 weeks, Czechoslovakia— 10 days.” The author of the sign probably wanted to express his satisfaction that the Czechs (and Slovaks) turned out to be quicker (and thus better) at overthrowing communism than their neighbors, whom they hadn't much liked in general anyway. Regardless of the author's intentions, these words conveyed well the chronology of events. Above all, they implicitly underlined the Poles’ long-running efforts to change the status quo. In essence, it was the Poles who were the most steadfast in undermining communism, which nevertheless does not mean that others elsewhere in the bloc had consented passively to its existence. The heroic efforts undertaken by the Czechs and Slovaks in 1968, the Hungarians in 1956, and the East Germans in 1953 nevertheless turned out to be isolated events. The oppositional activities in those countries never took place on a mass scale, and did not extend beyond intellectual opposition, articulated by just a few. While potentially irritating, this kind of opposition was not actually threatening to those in power.

Poles were not only steadfast, they also proved to be the most innovative in creating the tools that could help change—or even overturn—the communist system. The widespread wave of strikes during the summer of 1980 evolved into Solidarity, a mass social movement of unprecedented dimensions. This union was a Polish “invention” in the fight against an indigenous dictatorship and the outside forces supporting it. Solidarity's creation does not seem to attest to the Polish opposition's intellectual superiority, or exceptional predispositions. Perhaps it was above all the special cultural basis that existed in Poland—one that was both Romantic and insurrectionary—and the Poles’ fresh memory of its traumatic twentieth-century experiences (mentioned in chapter 1), including the dramatic war with Bolshevik Russia in 1920 and the Soviet invasion of September 1939. All this encouraged an unusually large number of people to actively question a regime that had extensive means of repression at its disposal, as well as the support of a superpower.