Remembering and forgetting June 4, 1989.

• Author: Levine, Paul

June 4, is the 25th anniversary of two events that changed the postmodern world. In Poland, citizens voted in the first free elections since the establishment of the Polish People's Republic in 1952. After a year of mounting protests and strikes the Communist regime reluctantly agreed to partially free elections for a new parliament. They permitted 161 of the nearly 500 seats to be openly contested. To everyone's surprise, candidates from the independent labor union, Solidarity, won 160 seats in the first round of voting. Timothy Garton-Ash, a British historian who witnessed the election, noted: "Three things happened at once: the communists lost an election; Solidarity won; the communists acknowledged that Solidarity won. That might sound like a syllogism. Yet until almost the day before, anyone who had predicted these events would have been universally considered not a logician but a lunatic. Moreover, the three things, while logically related, were also separate and distinct."

First, as Garton-Ash explains, the communists lost the vote but they did not lose power. "They still had the army, the police, the Party apparatus and the nomenklatura." Second, voters overwhelmingly supported Solidarity candidates who handily defeated better-known independent candidates and Party hacks. "The third thing that happened was, in its way, almost as remarkable. The Party told the truth. On the Monday evening, when the first results were known, the spokesman for the Central Committee, Jan Bisztyga, appeared on the television evening news, sitting side by side with Solidarity's Janusz Onyzszkiewicz, and Mr Bisztyga said: 'The elections had a plebiscitary character and Solidarity won a clear majority.'" After that, the Communist Party imploded and the regime was swept away.

"Sunday, 4 June 1989 was a landmark not only in the post-war history of Poland, not merely in the history of Eastern Europe, but in the history of the communist world," says Garton-Ash. But it is only half the history of June 4, 1989. As Poles celebrated their victory, a very different story was emerging on another continent. Near Tiananmen Square, Chinese soldiers were killing and maiming hundreds, perhaps thousands of students, workers and unarmed demonstrators. Garton-Ash says, "It was an uncanny experience to watch, with a group of Polish opposition journalists, on the very afternoon of the election, the television pictures from Peking. Martial law. The tanks. The tear-gas. Corpses carried shoulder-high."

The now infamous Tiananmen Massacre was the tragic culmination of months of conflict between protesting students and an intransigent Party apparatus. When the students refused to leave the Square, the Party, haunted by the decline of communist control in Poland and the Soviet sphere, decided to act. Led by its unofficial leader Deng Xiaopeng, the regime declared martial law. When the students defied the edict with strong local support, Deng called in the troops. The nominal Party leader, Zhao Ziyang, a liberal reformer, urged restraint and refused to issue the directive calling in the army. Zhao resigned from office and was placed under house arrest. When a colleague cautioned Deng that a military action would cause a severe international reaction, he replied: "They will soon forget."

Forgetting is a fundamental part of Chinese Communist thought.* All the Party- inspired blunders--Mao Tsedong's failed Great Leap Forward, the disastrous Great Famine that followed, the catastrophic Cultural Revolution--have been air-brushed out of...