Introduction to the Series, The Crisis of Marxism — Leninism

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 25, Heft 1, S. 30-33

Abstract

In The Spring of 1989, as Poland's Communist Party was hammering out a new political deal with the non-communist opposition, one Communist official was heard to remark to a Solidarity participant that the only thing really dividing the two sides was the agricultural question: who buries whom? Ironically, neither the Communist Party nor Solidarity could have imagined that within a matter of months Poland would have its first noncommunist prime minister in over forty years, and that the Communist Party would find itself fighting for its political survival, pleading for more posts in a new Solidarity-led Cabinet.