The difficulty with Kwitny's book is not his emphasis on the centrality of events in Poland, although their importance is no reason to dismissively minimize, as he does, such other critical factors as growing American military budgets, the success of anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas and the emergence of Gorbachev. It is with tone and overstatement. Clearly the selection of a Polish pope inspired much of the nation. Beyond that, this Pope was indeed actively engaged in the struggle against totalitarianism in his homeland. But to assign him this sort of pre-eminence, a monopoly of power, seems ahistorical and tone deaf.
Journalism encourages simple story lines, but history is sloppier.
Other figures and other elements came together to create the upheavals of 1989, including such purely Polish elements as traditions of resistance and uprisings, along with memories of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, the 1968 purges in Czechoslovakia, the emergence of workers who rejected Communism but accepted the clout of the proletariat, and yes, the appearance on the scene of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was as much a departure from the past in Warsaw as Gorbachev was in Moscow. To make his case, the author relies on testimony and anecdotes from a huge pool of sources, but it is significant who is left out. Folded into 49 pages of endnotes are explanations that Lech Walesa, Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron did not agree to see him. One wonders why these founding fathers, who have previously shown no aversion to spotlights or ink, shunned him. Not to have their voices is like producing an oral history of the American Revolution without the utterances of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.