Sarah Paine

They got that one right.

The Polish Communist Party thought they had this one covered by the way they jiggered the election rules.

Not quite.

The day they held elections is exactly the same day that Deng Xiaoping turned the tanks on demonstrators in Beijing, and you have the Tiananmen massacre.

Two solutions for the problem.

So the way the elections worked out in Poland...

is Solidarity won every single seat for which it could compete but won.

And then only three people in the communist designated seats actually won.

So who won all the rest of them?

The box on the ballot called none of the above.

Yes, the Roman Catholic Church had helped instruct people that that's the box you want.

And with that, the legitimacy of the Communist Party to rule had just been wrecked.

And we're on to democracy in Poland.

And this democratic contagion spread into East Germany four months later.

This is about the 40th anniversary of the founding of East Germany.

And 70,000 people demonstrate at Leipzig.

And within the week, around 1.4 million Germans are demonstrating and over 200 demonstrators.

Typically, the East Germans would have sent tanks.

That was what they would have done in the past.

But would we tank men?