WARSAW, POLAND - About ten years ago General Electric ran a splashy TV ad with the theme of the lights coming on within the previously dark and dank nations of Eastern Europe. Of course GE is in the business of touting light bulbs, but a walk through the heart of today’s Warsaw is to see the bright promise of a post-Communist era coming to life.

There are still lots of flat, drab buildings from the Stalinist years, but everywhere this drabness is being transformed with color and light. The city sparkles with action. The downtown streets are packed with well-dressed urbanites, and everywhere is found the signs of civic energy. Unemployment remains more than 10 percent, but the signs of a rising economy are obvious.

Poland was the fulcrum of the century-long war against totalitarianism in its various forms, and set in motion the chain of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. A multitude of factors go into this story, including the Solidarity trade-union movement, the Polish pope, and the senescence of the Soviet Union. But one factor looms especially large in the memory of Poles: Ronald Reagan.

The proximate cause of my visit here is a conference on “Ronald Reagan and his Legacy for Europe,” by which is meant Eastern Europe. Though I was an invited speaker at the conference (a text of my remarks on “Reagan and the Media” can be found here , I figured I’d learn more about the subject from Poles than they would learn from me.

Reagan came to office like a refreshing breeze to the peoples of Eastern Europe, and he is a larger-than-life hero here. Eastern Europeans recognized Reagan’s potential early on. Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity trade union, remarked to American reporters shortly after the election of 1980 that “Reagan was the only good candidate in your presidential campaign, and I knew he would win.”

Over and over again Poles today stress two things about Ronald Reagan. First, it was invigorating to hear for seemingly the first time an American president who was clear-headed about the nature of the Soviet Union. Reagan’s predecessors or both parties, drunk on détente, had demoralized the peoples of Eastern Europe with their philosophical accommodation with the Soviet Union. This ended with Reagan.

Second, while the U.S. under Reagan covertly aided the Polish resistance to the Soviets, Reagan’s words were tantamount to deeds as well. Reagan’s famous “evil empire” speech, bitterly criticized by liberals in the United States, was a huge morale boost behind the Iron Curtain, where inmates of the Gulag reported that their treatment improved following the speech. The guards in the Gulag were apparently seized with fear that they were going to lose the Cold War.

Plans are afoot in Poland to name a town square after Reagan in a major city. Think of it as yet another corner of “Reagan Country.”

Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of
The Age of Reagan--The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. He can be reached via email at
shayward@pacificresearch.org.