In 1981, American journalist David Ost attended an extraordinary meeting in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz. Just decades earlier, it had been a majority German city, in the German empire and had a German name: Bromberg. Two world wars, the Holocaust, mass movement of people and two border realignments had seen it end up behind the proverbial iron curtain in 1945.

The meeting was organized by a group named Solidarity which became the first legally sanctioned trade union in the Warsaw pact. It was a remarkable concession by a communist regime whose authority was based on the fact the country was controlled by the workers, to acknowledge there was even a need for such a group.

This minor freedom had been hard fought but it was short lived. Within months, Solidarity had been banned and the whole of Poland was subjected to martial law. In this episode I talk to David Ost, Hobart and William Smith professor of politics about Solidarity and Poland’s arduous journey from communism to today.

David Ost Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1986 B.A., SUNY Stony Brook, 1976.

David Ost: The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe

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