Historic Anniversaries

A-level history students in both Lower and Upper Sixth will this year be writing about the events of eastern Europe and China in their exams almost twenty years to the day from when they occurred. It was on June 4th. 1989 that the Solidarity movement in Poland won the first free elections held in that country, a victory which eventually catapulted the whole of eastern Europe towards freedom from communism. Yet in China, on that same day, troops bloodily cleared Tiananmen Square of its pro-democracy demonstrators. Two communist systems, but with very different approaches to the 'year of democracy'.