After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe

Jan Lityński knows the problem of economic transformation from the bottom up. He is a veteran of the long struggles of the Polish democratic opposition. As a student in the late 1960s he was a Marxist of sorts, a Marxist-humanist opponent of the stagnating Gomułka regime. For him, in retrospect, those were times of naïveté and ignorance. He and his friends were labeled Trotskyists both by their supporters in the West and by their enemies at home (the communist authorities), though he actually knew very little about Trotsky or the situation of the "masses" in Poland. He and. his friends knew only, in the international spirit of 1968, that things were fundamentally wrong and needed radical reformation. They used the moral ideals of their political parents to reject the Marxist realities of their lives.

Like many others, such as his lifelong friend Adam Michnik, Lityński paid dearly for his youthful rebellion. He was not able to pur

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