Timothy Garton Ash (The Guardian): Europe for revolution

Europe for revolution
Solidarnosc pioneered a new model of regime change to be proud of
By Timothy Garton Ash in Gdansk

Exactly a quarter of a century ago, here in Gdansk, the first velvet revolution began. When, on a boiling summer's day in August 1980 I arrived at the blue-grey gate of the Lenin shipyard, festooned with flowers and photographs of the Polish pope, with loudspeakers blaring out patriotic hymns and farmers bringing baskets of food, my colleagues and I were greeted at the gate by a young worker - naked to the waist but carefully identified as a picket by a red-and-white armband - who led us into the shipyard through two lines of strikers in dusty blue overalls, cheering as if we had personally brought the solidarity of the world; then I knew that something new and unique was happening here. A workers' revolution against a so-called workers' state!

Yet even as this solidarity strike mushroomed into Solidarnosc, a 10-million-strong mass movement of national and civic liberation, we could not imagine the consequences. It's not just that 25 years later Poland is a free country playing a significant role in the European Union and Nato - albeit a country with a weak state and an alarmingly high level of unemployment, corruption and popular dissatisfaction. With hindsight, we can see that this Polish revolution was the beginning of the end of communism in Europe, of the cold war, and thus of the unnatural east-west division of our continent symbolised by the Berlin wall. And not just of our continent, for that cold war divided the world. In this sense, we might even say that what they came to call "the Polish August" was the beginning of the end of the short 20th century.

Of course, we knew none of that at the time. We didn't even know what would happen today, let alone tomorrow. Would Poland's communist rulers send in their troops, as they had to crush a workers' protest in this very place less than 10 years earlier? Or would Leonid Brezhnev summon up his Red Army tanks, as he had to trample the Prague Spring in neighbouring Czechoslovakia?

Now I stand again in front of those shipyard gates, still decorated with flowers and a photograph of the Polish pope, but looking strangely artificial, like the museum piece they have become. As Lech Walesa and his foreign guests, including Vaclav Havel, the hero of Prague's velvet revolution in 1989, join in celebrations of the anniversary, I reflect on the sheer impossibility of conveying to a 15-year-old today what it felt like to be there. The smells and sounds, the fear, the hope, the excitement - and the sheer exhaustion.