Adam Michnik

Adam Michnik (1946) is a Polish journalist and writer based in Warsaw, and visiting professor at Princeton University. He is the founder and editor of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. His publications in English include Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives,); Church and the Left, and Letters from Prison and Other Essays.

After the Velvet, an Existential Revolution?

Adam Michnik: I would like to begin by looking back 40 years, when the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Do you think the invasion could have been prevented if Czechoslovakia had pursued different policies? Václav Havel:  I believed then, as I believe today, that there was a way of preventing this threat but the country’’s leadership was not even aware of the threat. Of course I do not mean military resistance but some sort of moral mobilization. Our country had experienced something similar once before, following the [1938] Munich Agreement. At that time Czechoslovakia made it clear that […]

A miracle

  Viewed from Poland, Czechoslovakia has always been a kind of miracle.Between the two world wars it was the only democratic country in our part of Europe. I am familiar with the critical views on the part of Polish historians and writers as well as with some of the works by Slovak and Czech historians. The Poles were upset that arms shipments were not allowed to pass through Czechoslovak territory during the Polish-Russian war and that the Zaolsze/Zaolší border region was annexed by Czechoslovakia. The Slovaks complained of Prague’’s centralism and discrimination against their nation by the Czechoslovak government, as […]