The Haunted Land

he Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg, Vintage Books (Random House), 1996. 

Poland

The leader of Poland, during the time that Lech Wajensa and Solidarity were trying to free it, was Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski. Jaruzelski grew up as part of a Polish land-owning aristocracy. He was an ambiguous figure who made compromises with the Soviet Union to prevent it from invading Poland. Perhaps he was unnecessarily worried about invasion, because the Soviets were reluctant to invade Poland, because they knew that if they invaded Poland, they would face far fiercer resistance than they did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Czechoslovakia

In Czechoslovakia in the 1950s there were show trials were innocent people were persecuted, including, most notably, Rudolf Slánsky. After the end of the Cold War, members of the Communist Party, or the security police, the Statni Bezpečnost, or their informers, were excluded from government in a procedure called lustrace.