alt Hacker NewsPoland's first partly free election was on 4 June 1989, preceded by the roundtable negotiations.
The protests in Czechoslovakia came later, called the Velvet Revolution, from 17 to 28 November 1989. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections, a year after Poland.
Poland paved the way for the whole of central and eastern Europe. The Round Table produced the negotiated-exit template that Hungary built on in its own talks that summer, and that Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Baltics drew on as their regimes fell within months.
And it did so from the deepest macroeconomic crisis of any of the satellite states: hyperinflation running into the hundreds of percent by late 1989, an unresolved sovereign default from 1981, and chronic shortages.
Since then Poland has converged fastest of any of them. From a low base it has climbed to the upper-middle of central and eastern Europe by GDP per capita PPP, overtaken Hungary, and is now closing on Czechia and Slovenia.
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The protests in Czechoslovakia came earlier, in 1968! The Soviets rolled in the tanks in response.
Poland had a mass solidarity movement rise up in 1980. The USSR didn't decide to send in the military then; they were lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_reaction_to_the_Polish_...
There was a lot of unrest in Poland, and general strikes. Martial law was imposed.
If you were an immigrant from Czechslovakia in a refugee camp in Austria at around that time, you'd be learning to speak Polish.
I'm curious what this means in real terms from the perspective of a Pole.
GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times. For instance Ireland has one of the highest GDP/capitas in the world -- around 50% higher than the US. But that's because of economic games with their working as a tax haven to enable corporations to avoid paying taxes to their home countries. It doesn't translate to anything for the average Irishman.