Solidarity Comes to Power

Annotated Bibliography

  1. J. F. Brown, Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
    Published in 1991, this book remains one of the clearest and most readable accounts of 1989 in each of the countries of Eastern Europe, along with factors affecting the region as a whole.
  2. Timothy Garton Ash, “Revolution in Hungary and Poland,” New York Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 13, August 17, 1989.
    In many ways a primary source itself, this article vividly captures the drama of the period and the ongoing sense of suspense created by the elections and their aftermath.
  3. Timothy Garton Ash, “Ten Years After,” New York Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 18, November 18, 1999.
    Garton Ash revisits the events of 1989 with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight, offering some useful commentary on the initial wave of scholarship analyzing the transformation.
  4. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
    Kenney’s book takes a different perspective on social change in Eastern Europe in 1989. Rather than emphasizing (as this teaching module tends to do) the top-level negotiations between Solidarity leaders and regime officials, he looks at grassroots groups motivated by a range of concerns (peace, the environment) and how they contributed to the fall of state socialism.