Historia och folkmakt mot korruption och diktatur. En resa från Gdansk 1980 till Kiev 2004.

The “Solidarity period” from August 1980 to December 1981 today stands out as the early beginning of the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe. Maybe the proper name for it, when seen in retrospect, should be “the grand rehearsal”. It started with the sit-in strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980. In retrospect it is obvious that the Solidarity movement not only pre-figured the democratic take-over in Poland in 1989, but also the peaceful revolutions in Belgrad in 2000, in Tbilisi in 2003 and in Kiev in 2004. We are used to analyse all this in terms of political science, as political history. However, it is my intention to suggest that we here may have a case of virtual history becoming real history. The peaceful revolutions had endogenous origins, but each successive one was inspired by television covering and video tapes of the earlier ones.