On a summer day 1,930 years ago, Italy’s Mount Vesuvius erupted, over­whelming the town of Pompeii and its inhabitants within minutes in a flood of superheated gas and volcanic ash. Since the 1700s, when the town’s excavation began, generations of archaeologists and historians have regarded the site as an invaluable snapshot of life in a typical Roman city: Pompeii, in the popular imagination, is a city “frozen in time.”

But is it really? The truth, as University of Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard emphasizes in 

, is quite different. Pompeii, near modern-day Naples, was apparently a ­mid­size port and popular vacation destination for wealthy Romans. Yet far from a snapshot of daily Roman life, what archaeologists unearthed was a town under extreme duress. The numbers tell the tale: Only 1,100 bodies have been found in the ruins, while estimates for the town’s popu­la­tion range from 6,400 up to 30,000. In Pompeii’s final hours, its populace fled, carrying their valuables. The ghoulish plaster casts of the dead for which the site is famous capture not unsuspecting townspeople, but the final moments of an unlucky few who waited too long to clear out. And some of the ruins we see today may have been ruins back then too: At the time of the eruption, Pompeii was still rebuilding after a severe earthquake that had devastated the area 17 years ­earlier.

In a survey that encompasses Pompeians’ religion, diet, and even traffic patterns, Beard sets out to correct many of the misimpres­sions that countless guidebooks—and guides—have foisted on tourists. The town’s ruins became a mandatory stop on the Grand Tour of 18th- and ­19th-­century Europeans. Visitors were captivated by the idea of witnessing a moment in ­time—­and by the twisted forms of ancient Romans. Writers from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Edward ­Bulwer-­Lytton penned ­Pompeii-­inspired reflections on the fragility of life and love. The town’s residences were given romantic names such as the House of the Tragic Poet, the House of the Golden Bracelet, and the House of the Prince of Naples by excavators, visitors, and spon­sors. More than two centuries of tourism and excavation have left a legacy of assump­tions that cloud our understanding of the ­site—­and, since Pompeii contains some of the best evi­dence about daily life in the Roman world, about Rome itself.

 lays out decades of specialist debate in clear, reader-friendly prose. To present the scholarship as smoothly as possible, Beard has gathered her sources in an appendix, often alluding to them in the main text with frustratingly vague phrases such as “some historians have suspected” and “fascinating details continue to be discov­ered.” But the various scholarly debates she describes are themselves fascinating, even if she stops short of providing many new interpretations or conclusions of her ­own.

Take the Pompeian Brothel Problem, a de­bate among scholars as to which of the hundreds of buildings in town can plausibly be called houses of ill repute. The estimates range from a lusty 35 bordellos to just one, a somewhat de­pressing five-cell affair whose erotic murals and more than 150 (unprintable) graffiti make it one of the most popular sights in town today. Or what about the proliferation of penises, which pop up everywhere you ­look—­over bread ovens, carved into paving stones, painted on frescoes, and scrawled on walls. “Phallus birds” adorned with little bells even hung over the entrance to many of the town’s inns and bars. Were the Romans wildly ­oversexed—­or was the phallus simply a symbol of good luck, a little like our ­four-­leaf clover today? For all we think we know about Pompeii and the Romans, there are some questions that continue to ­tease.

Andrew Curry, a freelance writer living in Berlin, is a contributing editor to Archaeology.

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and ­Found

 by Mary Beard, Harvard University Press, 304 pp, 2008.

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Preserved in Time

We remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 because it was such a perfect metaphor—­joyful Germans running into each other’s arms as an entire system crumbled, lighting the night with relief and exhilaration. On November 9, the world celebrates the end of communism and the liberation of millions from decades of ­oppression.

Today, few remember the years of patient effort by dissidents and activists from Warsaw to Budapest that set the stage for that momentous night. Even in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—commonly known as East ­Germany—­the beginning of the end happened not in the divided capital of Berlin but in lesser-known cities such as Leipzig, Dresden, and Plauen. In the tumultuous 20 years since the end of communism in Germany and Eastern Europe, the focus on the images of that single night has made it hard to recognize just how much work is necessary for a democracy movement to ­succeed.

In East Germany, more than in almost any other country in the communist bloc, the events that became synonymous with the end of communism were the fruit of a protest movement that began years before with no hope of toppling the regime. There was no great symbolism or strategy. The movement’s greatest ambition was to force East ­Germany—­which became one of the communist bloc’s most ­hard­core regimes after its founding in the ­Soviet-­occupied zone of Germany in 1949—to live up to its own ideals. No one imagined bringing down the Communist Party, much less reunifying ­Germany.

If you had to put your finger on one thing that opened the first cracks in the wall, it might be the American Pershing II missile. When in 1978 NATO announced plans to deploy ­mid­range nuclear missiles in Europe in response to the Soviet nuclear ­build­up, activists on both sides of the divided country protested the idea of nuclear weapons on German soil. While hundreds of thousands signed petitions and rallied in the West, in the East the protests were used for propaganda purposes by the communist regime, which was happy to see people spontaneously protesting against the United ­States.

But as the peace movement in the GDR grew, it began asking hard questions about the situation at home. Protestant churches were officially tolerated, though cut off from their counterparts in the West and under constant scrutiny by the authorities. Nonetheless, the church became a safe space for the peace movement, and many ministers organized prayers for peace and rallies against militarization, military classes in grade schools, and mandatory army ­service.

In 1982, Rainer Eppelmann—a pastor ­well ­known for organizing blues festivals for disaffected youth at his church in a working-class East Berlin neighborhood—co-­wrote a call for disarmament that was distributed illegally in East Germany and passed to Western reporters. The “Berlin Appeal” earned him the enmity of the feared East German secret police, known as the Stasi. (After the wall fell, Eppelmann’s Stasi file revealed that for years he had been the target of bugging, surveillance, and a rumor campaign designed to destroy his marriage and his ministry. A plan was even hatched to “eliminate” him in a staged traffic accident.)

“The government told us Pershings and cruise missiles were the tools of the devil, but [Soviet] SS-13s were doves of peace,” Eppelmann says. “It was a chance for us, as people in the GDR, to stand up and say something about the course of GDR politics and the nuclear arms race.” Peace protesters turned propaganda on its head. “Swords into plowshares”—the subject of a sculpture given as a gift to the United Nations by the Soviet ­Union—­became a slogan. Teenagers sewed patches bearing a stylized image of the sculpture onto their jackets, only to be threatened by teachers and ­police.

In the tumultuous 20 years since the end of communism in Germany and Eastern Europe, the focus on the images of that single night has made it hard to recognize just how much work is necessary for a democracy movement to ­succeed.

Once the peace movement turned critical of the GDR, it had outlived its welcome, and activists found themselves watched and persecuted. The one safe haven was the church. Around the same time Eppelmann was writing his Berlin Appeal, Christian Führer and Christoph ­Wonneberger—­two young pastors in Leipzig, East Germany’s ­second-­largest ­city—­began holding regular Monday evening prayers for peace at the St. Nicholas ­Church.

Sheltered by the church, the Monday meetings were a forum for those who felt that East Germany had betrayed its own ideals. “The church was the one space someone could express themselves,” Führer says. “We had a monopoly on freedom, physically and spiritually.”

Looking back, activists remember a mixture of exhilaration and fear. Sitting in his office at the Forum of Contemporary History in Leipzig, museum historian Uwe Schwabe—a friendly, garrulous man with a long ponytail—remembers feeling transformed when he started attending Monday meetings at St. Nicholas in 1984. He was just out of compulsory service in the East German army. “At 22, I experienced young people talking freely about politics for the first time,” he recalls.

That freedom could be costly: Attending church, let alone prayer meetings, could mean the end of careers or blackballing by universities. Under pressure from the authorities, attendance at the Monday peace prayers shrank to fewer than 10 regulars by the mid-1980s. Gathered in the chilly, centuries-­old church in the city’s center, under constant surveillance, they could hardly have been called a movement, much less a ­threat.

“It wasn't always easy,” says Führer, a stocky man who still wears the denim vest that became his trademark in the 1980s, when the Monday meetings made him one of the most prominent figures in the East German dissident movement. “Once a participant said to me, ‘We shouldn't give up, because if we do there won’t be any hope at all.’ ”

Slowly, word got around. “It was known throughout Germany, and everyone in Leipzig knew about it,” Schwabe says. “The advantage over Berlin or Dresden was that there was this fixed point over years.” The Monday meetings grew. One of the largest constituencies was East Germans who had applied to leave the country. Hopeful emigrants were trapped in a cruel limbo, sometimes waiting years to hear if they’d be allowed to leave. In the meantime, they lost their jobs and were ostracized by friends and neighbors. (Many in the dissident movement, committed to staying and changing the system, saw them as traitors of a different sort and were reluctant to embrace them; St. Nicholas Church was one of the few places in East Germany where the two groups mixed.)

Others started coming too: environmentalists, conscientious objectors, democracy activists. Each week a different group organized the meeting, connecting people whose only common cause was a desire for change. By February 1988, attendance had swelled to 600. “There was a critical mass,” Führer says. “Activists, émigré applicants, and curious people from all over—everything came together at the peace prayers.”

Leipzig’s Monday meetings were a sort of North Star in a rapidly growing constellation of ­reform-­minded citizens’ groups. The thaw was accelerated by events beyond the borders of East Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, and soon began to implement reforms that gave hope and energy to people all over the Soviet ­bloc—­and exposed the inflexibility of their own leadership. After all, if the Soviet Union, long heralded as the model society by communist parties around the world, was loosening up, why couldn't East ­Germany?

At the same time, warming relations with the West gave East German activists more breathing room. (GDR head of state Erich Honecker made his first official visit to West Germany in 1987, and was intent on securing an invitation to Washington.) Jailing prominent dissidents brought quick condemnation from the West, for example. By 1989, Stasi agents were monitoring nearly 200 separate citizens’ groups pressing for reform on issues ranging from the environment to travel ­restrictions.

The thaw was accelerated by events beyond the borders of East Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, and soon began to implement reforms that gave hope and energy to people all over the Soviet ­bloc—­and exposed the inflexibility of their own leadership.

Much of the unrest was apolitical, but any challenge to the status quo was implicitly a challenge to the ruling party. Still, the popular mood was changing fast. “Normal people were fed up,” says Berlin historian Jens Schöne. “They didn't want to wait 15 years for a car, they didn't want to work in a factory; they wanted to be able to travel and buy things.” The fact that the regime never managed to block West German television broadcasts meant that an entire generation of young people born after the 1968 Soviet crackdown in Prague wanted the lives they saw beamed into their living rooms every ­night.

In 1987, Schöne remembers, the Stasi scrambled to clear the streets of East Berlin when a David Bowie concert in West Berlin prompted hundreds of teens, angry that they couldn't attend, to gather and chant, “The wall must go.” A year later, the Stasi deployed agents to monitor Michael Jackson while the singer was in West Berlin for a ­concert. Local groups heading out to plant trees or clean up riverbanks found themselves blocked by police and scrutinized by the Stasi.

The last straw came on May 7, 1989, when regular elections for local party officials across East Germany were exposed as fraudulent by a loose network of volunteers who observed the vote count at local ­precincts—­a right enshrined in the East German constitution but never before exercised in an organized way—and then gathered in churches to compare results. The discrepancies were reported in samizdat pamphlets and passed to Western reporters. “We could prove the people who were ruling our country were criminal,” Eppelmann says now, his voice still rising with outrage and amazement. “They weren’t satisfied with 70 or 80 percent [of the vote]. They needed almost 100. It was ­sick—­sick, and criminal.”

After a restless spring, summer brought a grim warning of where things could head. In early June, Chinese tanks and soldiers moved in on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square; hundreds were killed.

For older East Germans, the events in Beijing were no surprise. Those who had lived through World War II remembered the cruelties of the Soviet occupation. And there were more direct parallels. In 1953, workers in 700 East German cities declared their opposition to the Unified Socialist Party of Germany, or SED, the party that was synonymous with the East German state, and demanded the reunification of the country. Soviet soldiers fired on demonstrators, and more than 100 were killed. In the years since, all opposition movements in the Soviet bloc had met the same fate: “’53 in Germany, ’56 in Hungary, ’68 in Prague, ’89 in ­China—­that’s how communism dealt with critics,” ­Führer says.

In Leipzig, an unofficial street music festival later in the month ended with cellists from the Leipzig orchestra being loaded into police vans. “It was like the Nazis all over again, and people had tears in their eyes,” says Tobias Hollitzer, a former environmental activist who now runs a museum in Leipzig devoted to exposing the truth about the Stasi. “It finally touched people who had doubts about what was going on at the St. Nicholas Church.”

There was no precedent for a peaceful transition of power. Throughout Germany’s history, revolutions had been ­blood ­soaked. Even for an ardent peace activist such as Führer, who had spent eight months in jail as a youth rather than serve in the army, political change without violence was practically inconceivable: “It wasn’t imaginable that the GDR would end. That they would willingly give up their scepter was unimaginable, and [an opposition movement] taking it by force was equally unimaginable.”

In the wake of Tiananmen, a different kind of fear pervaded the Monday peace prayers. Egon Krenz, who soon would succeed Honecker as SED party leader, visited Beijing days afterward and praised the way the Chinese government had rescued communism from “counterrevolutionary elements.” In Leipzig, fear of a “Chinese solution” grew. “People had seen the pictures from ­Beijing—­it wasn't at all clear this would be peaceful,” says ­Schöne.

But behind the scenes, the Soviet Union’s dynamic party secretary made it clear to party leaders throughout the bloc that the Soviets were no longer interested in intervening in the domestic politics of their neighbors and client states. Despite the presence of nearly a million Soviet soldiers in East Germany, Gorbachev’s message was clear: You’re on your own. Poland held free elections in June that resulted in a landslide for the Solidarity opposition. Hungary had relaxed border restrictions with Austria and begun its own process of peaceful democratization in the ­spring.

For the first time, East Germans who wanted to emigrate could make an end run around the Berlin Wall. All summer, thousands of them voted with their feet, fleeing west via Hungary to Austria. Thousands more abandoned their cars on the streets of Prague and climbed over the fence around the West German Embassy, seeking ­asylum—­a feat previously attempted by only a trickle of East Germans over the years. By the end of September, 4,500 were camping on the embassy grounds despite temperatures in the ­90s.

The situation was a huge embarrassment for the leadership in East ­Berlin—­on the eve of the GDR’s 40th-anniversary celebrations, thousands of people preferred living as refugees to returning. But for those who had been trying to change the system from within, the crisis was almost as great. “People lost friends suddenly. Overnight, your doctor was gone, or the baker on the corner disappeared,” Schwabe remembers. “Everyone had to come to grips with the future and ask themselves, ‘Do I want to stay and change things, or leave?’ ”

For the first time, East Germans who wanted to emigrate could make an end run around the Berlin Wall. All summer, thousands of them voted with their feet, fleeing west via Hungary to Austria. Thousands more abandoned their cars on the streets of Prague and climbed over the fence around the West German Embassy, seeking asylum

The official reaction from East Berlin toward those who fled was contemptuous. “With their behavior, they've trampled on our values and cut themselves off from our society. One shouldn't shed any tears for them,” read an editorial in Neues Deutschland, the party’s official newspaper. The reaction incensed average citizens, who were realizing that their leaders were completely out of touch. “What an affront,” Schwabe says. “These were our brothers, our sisters, people we might not see for 30 years.”

After a summer break (some things in Germany are sacred, no matter the political situation), thousands of people showed up at the St. Nicholas Church on Monday, September 4. In view of Western television cameras in town for a biannual trade show, young protesters in front of the church unfurled a banner demanding freedom of travel. “The Stasi ripped it down and tackled the kids,” Führer remembers; millions of East Germans saw the scene broadcast on the news the next ­day.

A new slogan entered the East German vocabulary: “We’re staying here.” A week later, the numbers at the church doubled. This time, almost 100 people were arrested and the city center was nearly shut down by the secret police. Too late: Fanned by West German television, the flames had begun to spread. The same day, “Monday Demonstrations” inspired by Leipzig’s peace prayers were held at Lutheran churches all over East Germany. A movement eight years in the making was growing ­exponentially.

Grasping at straws, government officials gave permission for the embassy refugees in Prague and Warsaw to take special, closed trains through East Germany to the West—­and slammed the borders with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland shut. East Germans were now truly prisoners in their own country. On October 3, word got out that trains full of embassy refugees would be stopping in Dresden on their way west. Thousands de­scended on the city’s train station in an attempt to board what they saw as the last train out of the GDR. “Closing the borders was like putting the lid on a boiling pot,” Hol­lit­zer says. ­Full-­fledged street battles broke out between police with clubs and water cannon and ­stone-­throwing rioters trying to reach the trains; dozens were ­injured.

Long-­planned 40th-anniversary celebrations in East Berlin occurred just four days later, on a Saturday. A ­counter-­rally swelled to thousands, who marched spontaneously through the middle of the city during the official parade. As they entered a residential area a mile or so north, police and the Stasi swept in, beating and arresting hundreds of people. In Plauen, a bleak industrial town near the Czech border, police used water cannon to break up a crowd of 10,000 gathered peacefully in the main ­square.

In the space of five autumn days, the GDR’s leaders had shown what they were capable of. After the events of that chaotic week, the St. Nicholas Church Monday peace protests were on a collision course with an increasingly desperate regime. “[Monday] was the decisive day,” Führer says. “Either the ‘Chinese solution’ ­or—­we didn't know what ‘or’ might be.”

Hollitzer, the Stasi museum director in Leipzig, says the archival evidence is damning. In the first week of October, nearly 3,500 East Germans were arrested as the police tried to jail anyone they thought capable of organizing protests. Hospitals in Leipzig were told to prepare extra beds, detention centers were set up on the outskirts of the city to handle arrestees, and 8,000 police were brought in, enough to handle roughly 20,000 protesters. A few days before, the cofounders of the Monday rallies, Führer and Wonneberger, had been arrested and warned by a livid Stasi officer to call everything off, then quickly released. “It’s clear what was supposed to happen on October 9,” Hollitzer says. “They were going to clean up.”

Because of the way we remember the fall of the wall, we’ve assumed ever since that the sudden end of an unpopular ­regime—­in Serbia, in Iraq, in Ukraine, in ­Georgia—­is enough to replicate the successes of 1989, and that the institutions and attitudes that form the basis for civil society can be created overnight.For the same reason, opposition movements that don’t succeed immediately tend not to garner much lasting ­interest.

At 3 pm on Monday, Schwabe made his way to the church through an eerily empty city. “It was like the calm before a storm,” he says. At five, nearly 8,000 people crammed into St. Nicholas. Three other downtown churches opened their doors to accommodate the ­overflow.

“When I came out, the square in front of the church was full,” Schwabe recalls. Police had blocked the road that led to the city’s historic marketplace, so the crowd flowed in the other direction. “The next stop was the Augustusplatz”—downtown Leipzig’s largest open space, sandwiched between the philharmonic and the opera house—“and it was full too, just black with people.”

In the end, nearly 70,000 Leipzigers, a sixth of the city, poured into the streets in peaceful protest that night. Chanting “Keine Gewalt” (No violence) and what would become the iconic slogan of the opposition movement, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), the crowd carried their candles onto the ring road around the city center, marching past the Stasi headquarters and the hundreds of police gathered in front of the train station. “It was a great sign of hope. To hold a candle, you need both ­hands—­one to hold the candle, and the other to keep it from being blown out,” Führer says. “You can’t hold a rock in your other hand.”

The entire city was swept up. Trams ground to a halt, and drivers left their cars in the middle of the road to join the march. After frantic requests for instructions from East Berlin went unanswered, the police packed up and left. “They were ready for everything except candles and prayers,” Führer says. “That night, the GDR was a different place than it had been that morning.”

A 10-minute tape of the march, filmed in secret by a TV crew hidden in a church steeple, was smuggled back to East Berlin and across the wall, then broadcast on West German television. (Not until after the Stasi archives were opened did more pictures of the ­protests—­from the secret police ­perspective—­come to light.) The sheer number of people who peacefully took to Leipzig’s streets had disarmed the East German regime. “The decisive day was in Leipzig,” Eppelmann says. “They were all ready to crack down on 30,000, but 30,000 didn’t show up, 70,000 did. Seventy thousand people who didn’t know if they’d come home intact or see their families again. It was a heroic and enormous act of moral courage.”

In the weeks that followed, there was chaos behind the scenes in East Berlin as the party tried desperately to save itself. Many of the SED’s ­hard-­liners were pushed out of their leadership positions in the hopes that a compromise with the opposition might be made. But the dam had broken. On October 16, a procession of 150,000 people marched around Leipzig’s ring road; the week after it was 300,000, the crowds of Leipzigers joined by people from all over East Germany. On November 4, more than 500,000 people flooded Alexanderplatz in East Berlin.

After the drama of the Monday Demonstrations, the fall of the wall was an anticlimax. On November 9, the day after a party congress designed to get the SED back on its feet and reclaim control, a routine press conference was called to announce the party’s latest decisions. As the conference drew to a close, an Italian journalist asked Politburo member Günter Schabowski if there would be any changes to the repressive East German travel restrictions. Flummoxed, Schabowski said that as far as he knew all restrictions were being lifted immediately. His casual announcement on live television sent thousands to Berlin’s border crossings on the night of November 9, where confused, overwhelmed guards stood back and let people ­through.

After the heady days of opposition, the sudden collapse came as a shock. Even then, reunification was unimaginable. For the dissidents who had been filled with hope at the sight of East Germans rallying to their cause, the fall of the wall was initially seen as a huge setback. “We were disappointed,” Schwabe admits. “We thought everyone who would help us change the country would leave, and there would be no reason to come out on the street.” A friend of Eppelmann’s made it a few hundred yards across the border that night before panicking and running back to East Berlin, afraid the entire scene had been a Stasi trick to get rid of troublemakers so the door could be closed firmly behind ­them.

Of course, we know now that November 9 was merely the end of the end. Within a year, the two ­Germanies—­divided for almost half a ­century—­were united again, and communism was a relic. But because of the way we remember the fall of the wall, we’ve assumed ever since that the sudden end of an unpopular ­regime—­in Serbia, in Iraq, in Ukraine, in ­Georgia—­is enough to replicate the successes of 1989, and that the institutions and attitudes that form the basis for civil society can be created overnight. For the same reason, opposition movements that don’t succeed immediately tend not to garner much lasting ­interest.

But talk to the people who risked everything to show up at St. Nicholas Monday after Monday, never dreaming of a night when there would be no need, and one thing be­comes clear: In the places where it ­mat­tered—­in Warsaw, in Budapest, in East ­Berlin—­change took time. After the wall came down, Rainer Eppelmann spent 15 years as a member of parliament and now runs the government-funded Foundation for the Study of the SED Dictatorship. Looking back, he says revolutions ­can’t—­and ­shouldn't—­be rushed. “No chancellor, no U.S. president, no British prime minister, could send in troops to Central Europe and liberate the people. It would have meant war,” he says. “What happened was a ­self-­liberation. Soft water breaks the hardest stone.”

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The fall of the Berlin Wall was a dramatic moment in time. In the minds of many East Germans, it was years in the making. 

Before the Fall

In 1980, a group of shipyard workers made a daring stand in the Polish city of Gdansk, establishing an independent workers’ union in a so- called workers’ state run by a tiny elite. Fervor for the union spread rapidly. Within a year, more than 10 million Poles—80 percent of the work force—joined Solidarity or one of its branches. The trade union evolved into a political movement, using strikes and protests to force concessions—on freedom of speech, the right to strike, and the right to travel—from the country’s communist regime. Poland became an island of unrest in the heart of the Soviet bloc. In December 1981, under heavy Soviet pressure, the Polish government, led by Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared a state of martial law. Soldiers and tanks claimed the streets, and thousands of Solidarity leaders were jailed. Strikes were brutally crushed by riot police, and the trade union was banned.

Janina Ochojska—then a 26-year-old astrophysicist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in Torun—was active in the Solidarity movement. She remembers listening to the radio when martial law was imposed: “When friends were arrested, Radio Free Europe mentioned the names of these people and we felt secure. The world knew about the arrests. We felt that we are not alone.” Over the next decade, support from abroad would take on an outsize importance in Poland. Sources as diverse as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Catholic Church covertly funded Solidarity’s underground activities. Electrician-cum-Solidarity leader Lech Walesa received worldwide recognition when he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, though he didn't travel to Norway to accept it, fearing he would not be allowed back into Poland. Broadcasters including Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC provided an alternative to state-controlled media.

Ochojska, who had suffered from polio as a child, traveled to France for medical treatment in 1984. There, she volunteered with French organizations putting together convoys of donated medicine and food bound for Poland. She returned in 1989 to a changed country. After months of negotiations between Solidarity leaders and the communist regime, the trade union, now a full-fledged political party, had handily won the nation’s first free elections in decades. But Poland faced a harsh reality. While the Solidarity movement had been a tour de force of self-help and organization, Poland’s economy was in tatters after a decade of repression and international sanctions. In 1990, the inflation rate was 686 percent.

“When friends were arrested, Radio Free Europe mentioned the names of these people and we felt secure. The world knew about the arrests. We felt that we are not alone.”

Cities choked on pollution from huge, inefficient factories; the countryside, where fields were still plowed with horses, was mired in poverty. Poland became a charity case. Between 1990 and 1994, it received nearly $36 billion in aid, $5.5 billion from the United States alone. The Marriott in downtown Warsaw was booked solid for years with experts from the United States, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (derisively dubbed the “Marriott Brigades”). The “shock therapy” prescribed by Western economists, including Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, led to the shuttering or privatization of dozens of state companies.

Ochojska and other Poles refused to accept that their country was helpless, even in its weakened state. When war broke out in the Balkans in 1992, Ochojska recalls, “it was very hard to know near us was a terrible war, and Poland did nothing. In this moment, Poles were ready to help but needed someone to tell them how.” That December, she organized an aid convoy to Sarajevo, just as she had seen French donors do to help her own country. A mention on Polish radio resulted in an outpouring of donations, enough to fill a dozen trucks. Over the next decade, Ochojska organized convoys to Serbia, Chechnya, and Kosovo; her ad hoc missions eventually turned into the Polish Humanitarian Organization (PAH), the country’s largest independent aid agency, with projects in dozens of countries.

As Poland’s economy righted itself, the number of activists and aid programs in the country grew. In morphing from protest movement to political party, Solidarity faltered. But its independent spirit and dedication to democracy remained a strong current in Polish politics. Post communist elections have gone to parties on the right and the left, but a commitment to engagement with Poland’s eastern neighbors and integration with Europe has been a constant. Though Polish zloty are spent on humanitarian projects such as Ochojska’s, the country has created an identity for itself by invoking the legacy of Solidarity in its approach to foreign aid. Poland is not the only country in Europe to fund democracy promotion, but it is the only one to explicitly place such efforts at the top of the government’s list of foreign assistance priorities.

Today, downtown Warsaw is a thicket of glass- and- steel skyscrapers, lit at night by neon signs and choked with traffic. Kiosks are jammed with hundreds of Polish magazines and newspapers, the products of a thriving media scene. Poland was the only country in the European Union not to suffer a recession last year; its economy, now the EU’s sixth largest, grew by two percent despite the global downturn. Unemployment is below 10 percent, comparable to Germany’s, and exports are close to $200 billion.

A new identity is evident in Poland’s actions on the world stage. Led by activists such as Ochojska and by policymakers informed by Solidarity’s legacy and determined to make the country a regional player, Poland is transforming itself. Polish development assistance abroad grew from $30 million in 2004 to $372 million in 2008. That’s a lot for a country that ranks near the bottom of the EU in terms of per capita income and barely a decade ago was an aid recipient itself.

Most of the money Poland contributes is funneled through international organizations such as the EU and the United Nations. Only a fraction of the rest ($83.8 million in 2008) goes to what most people would consider aid—tents for earthquake victims, food for starving children in Africa, or the clean water projects Ochojska promotes at PAH. Instead, Poland’s priorities are influenced by its recent past, and its ambitions are essentially local. At the top of its aid list are a handful of countries in Russia’s orbit, including Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. According to the Polish Foreign Ministry, promoting democracy and building civil society are the top priorities. “That’s our political competence,” says Marek Ziolkowski, director of development assistance. “It’s key in our foreign policy to take care of our good neighborhood.”

As Poland’s economy righted itself, the number of activists and aid programs in the country grew. In morphing from protest movement to political party, Solidarity faltered. But its independent spirit and dedication to democracy remained a strong current in Polish politics.

Polish funding has flowed to efforts such as local government reform in Ukraine, training for Georgian journalists, and satellite and radio broadcasts in Belarusian. Poles know that successful democracy movements need steady, sustained help. “There’s a common understanding that we got a lot of Western help, especially during the ’80s under martial law,” says Agnieszka Romaszewska-­Guzy, the director of Belsat, a Belarusian-language satellite TV channel run out of Warsaw that is Poland’s latest and largest effort to undermine the Belarusian government’s information monopoly. “It would be difficult to find people more convinced of the effectiveness of this kind of opportunity.”

Poland may be the most assertive of all the new EU countries in using its foreign aid budget to influence its neighbors. Poles look east darkly, as only a country invaded by its eastern neighbor three times in one century can. Other new EU members have been content to go along with the EU consensus on relations with Russia, acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence and overlooking Russia’s authoritarian impulses in the interest of smooth economic relationships. In Warsaw, monuments to the victims of Soviet atrocities during World War II occupy prominent real estate in and around the Old Town. The idea of Poland as Europe’s last frontier goes back centuries. “It’s part of our national consciousness that we have two archetypes of our place in the world—as defenders of the West and as a bridge towards the East,” says Adam Balcer, a political analyst at Warsaw- based think tank demos-EUROPA. “It means we sometimes perceive the world in black and white.”

From “soft-power” democracy promotion efforts to outspoken diplomacy, Poland has pushed hard against Russian influence and emerged as a leading—and sometimes the only—proponent of expanding the EU east to Ukraine and even Georgia. During Ukraine’s 2004–05 Orange Revolution, then–Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski flew to Kyiv to mediate between the old regime and the winners of elections there. Days after Russian tanks entered Georgia in 2008, Polish president Lech Kaczynski traveled to Tbilisi to show his support for the Georgian government; when Russian hackers targeted the Georgian government’s Web presence, Poland’s foreign ministry hosted Georgia’s official Web site on its servers. Polish diplomats in Brussels have pushed the EU to adopt a more hawkish position on Russia and other authoritarian regimes, and enthusiastically support extending EU membership to Ukraine.

Poland has suffered for its trouble. It has been shut out of lucrative energy and pipeline deals and endured Russian economic embargoes—not to mention dramatic threats after it signed a missile- defense deal with the United States hours after Kaczynski’s return from Georgia. (A top Russian general warned at the time that Poland was “exposing itself to a [nuclear] strike—100 percent.”) President Barack Obama canceled that deal in September in favor of a ship- based plan he said would be more effective against Iran. The ill- timed announcement, made on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, was received with dismay in Warsaw.

On a gray day last November I traveled to Bialystok, a city in eastern Poland that is in effect an outpost on the edge of Europe, to see what the country’s democracy promotion looks like in practice. Bialystok is an industrial center of more than a quarter-million residents a few dozen miles from the border with Belarus, a country Kwasniewski calls “the last real dictatorship in Europe.” Since Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko was elected in 1994, he has consolidated his power, pulled Belarus closer to Russia, and, according to Poles, discriminated against the country’s large Polish minority.

Bialystok is not a pretty place. In the last two decades it has embraced capitalism with a vengeance—the façades of downtown buildings are hidden behind colorful signs advertising the dozens of small businesses inside, and the streets around the train station are crowded with kiosks selling everything from cheap clothing to fruit. A huge distillery on the city’s outskirts supplies premium vodka to markets as far- flung as the United States and Japan.

In 2006, in response to a government crackdown on democracy activists in Belarus, Poland opened a sort of “Radio Free Belarus” in Bialystok. It was a symbolic gesture, a nod to the international broadcasts from the United States, West Germany, and the United Kingdom that sustained Solidarity in the 1980s. Radio Racja—“Radio Reason” or “Radio Right”—whose studios and offices fill the second floor of a building on a Bialystok side street, began broadcasting music and news over the border in March 2006. Unlike Radio Free Europe’s shortwave broadcast, the FM station’s 35-megawatt transmissions, from towers on the Polish side of the border, only penetrate about 75 miles into Belarus.

Station director Eugeniusz Wappa, 45, was active in the dissident movement when he was a history student at the University of Warsaw in the 1980s. He believes that even in the age of Internet radio, FM makes a statement be cause it is accessible everywhere “We’re real radio, not virtual. You can listen in your home, in your car, at work, 24 hours a day,” he says, pausing to turn up the set on his desk. In the hallway outside, the mint-green walls are lined with photos of the station’s broadcasters in action—and a blown-up photo of helmeted Belarusian riot cops tackling a protester.

In 2006, in response to a government crackdown on democracy activists in Belarus, Poland opened a sort of “Radio Free Belarus” in Bialystok. It was a symbolic gesture, a nod to the international broadcasts from the United States, West Germany, and the United Kingdom that sustained Solidarity in the 1980s.

Belarusian rock bands, most of them banned back home, are in heavy rotation; news shows feature everything from reports on traffic jams along the border and strikes at Belarusian factories to interviews with Belarusian dissidents. According to Wappa, the station’s correspondents in Minsk, Grodno, and Brest are harassed regularly by the authorities. One memorable early story was filed by cell phone from the back of a police van.

Despite the pre-Soviet Belarusian flag hanging on the wall in the station’s conference room, the reporters trickling in to put together the afternoon news programs evinced little revolutionary passion or optimism that change would come to Belarus anytime soon. Sergiusz Skulaviec, a slight, soft-spoken Belarusian journalist who left the country in 2006 to escape constant harassment from Belarus’s KGB, said any meaningful improvement is 15 or 20 years away. That didn't dampen his determination to provide Belarusians with an alternative to state- controlled media. “For me, that’s a long time. For a country, not so much,” he told me in accented Polish. “I don’t know about my future, but in the long term these little steps won’t be turned around.”

Even if Radio Racja broadcasts mostly mundane fare—music, sports, and traffic—it’s an important gesture for Poles, a way of paying forward the moral and diplomatic support Western Europe and the United States provided the country’s dissident movement in the 1980s. Today, Radio Racja is the Polish Foreign Ministry’s second-largest aid program, with almost $400,000 in state funding. More money comes from the Dutch and British embassies, which help pay for the station’s Web site (

). When I visited, Radio Racja’s office was abuzz. Barely 24 hours earlier, the station had added a radio tower near Brest, extending its coverage to nearly the entire Belarusian-Polish border. “It’s a very emotional day for us,” Wappa said.

Poland came through the turbulence of the 1990s with flying colors. But the mentality nurtured by that era of dependency is only now beginning to turn around. Just five years ago, less than two- thirds of Poles thought Poland was in a position to support development in other countries. Today, that proportion has grown to nearly 90 percent. The change may have something to do with the way aid money is spent. The Polish aid that doesn't flow through official EU channels is distributed to Polish nongovernmental organizations, from PAH to Radio Racja, which may be an inefficient process from an economist’s point of view (the average grant is $60,000) but makes it possible for ordinary people to get involved. “The main benefit of Polish aid is in Poland itself,” says Maciej Drozd, a former consultant in Warsaw who now works for the Polish prime minister’s office. “By giving money to these huge numbers of NGOs to go abroad, you raise global awareness and transform Polish society. I think it’s key to name the mentality change that’s going on. Five years ago, it was an absolute oddity for people to attend fundraisers for Africa.”

After the Belarusian government cracked down on democracy activists in 2006, expelling student protesters from universities, Jan Malicki, the director of the University of Warsaw’s Institute for East European Studies, spearheaded an effort to find scholarships and spots at universities in Poland for hundreds of the expellees. Why would students want to come to Poland instead of Germany or the United States? Malicki says it’s a matter of perspective: “For people from the East, Warsaw is a true metropolis. It may be hard to imagine, but to someone from Minsk or Tbilisi, Poland is the West.”

Today, the Institute for East European Studies hosts teachers from across the former Soviet Union, and offers summer courses for young activists from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine. Malicki’s small program, tucked into a few rooms on the University of Warsaw’s downtown campus, is no anomaly: In 2008 Poland provided nearly 5,000 scholarships for foreign students, mostly from Belarus, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. (America’s Fulbright program, by comparison, provides about 2,600 scholarships for foreign professors and students to teach or study at U.S. universities each year.)

Poles are adamant that for students from places such as Georgia and Ukraine that are working through their own transformations, Poland’s experience and know- how are a useful supplement to the cash and cookie-cutter advice American donors and consultants provide. “We are the children of our Central-Eastern European environment. Therefore, we are—by definition—in a slightly better position concerning the knowledge about the needs of our eastern neighbors than the U.S. or even Western Europe,” Kwasniewski wrote in a recent e-mail interview. “We simply better understand and feel their problems and challenges. It is of course a truism, but we were exactly at the same position two decades ago.”

Many in the Polish aid community have criticisms of the government’s approach. They complain that aid distribution, spread over multiple competing ministries, is inefficient and opaque. While officials emphasize that Poland spends $372 million a year on foreign aid, more than any other Eastern European country, more than $20 million of that represents export credits to encourage China to buy Polish goods; another chunk is debt forgiveness for Cold War–era loans to Angola and Nicaragua, money Poland was never going to get back anyway. (Such statistical sleight-of-hand is fairly standard when countries calculate development assistance.)

Poland also isn't the most generous country among the EU’s new members. Although it gives away the most money in absolute terms, it happens to be the largest of the countries that have joined since 2004. As a share of GDP (just 0.8 percent), its contributions actually place it near the bottom among EU donor countries. The Czech Republic and Hungary, for example, have a quarter as many people as Poland but give half as much aid. And less than 1 percent of students in Poland come from abroad, one of the EU’s worst rankings.

What sets Poland apart—and makes it a model worth paying attention to—is its conviction that its past is an asset and a responsibility. Given limited resources, Poles are using foreign aid in a direct, concerted way that benefits themselves and their neighbors. Who better to advise and support democracy movements than people who forged one of the world’s most successful ones just a quarter-century ago? Poland doesn’t have a lot of experience with disaster relief or food aid, and may not be the most generous. But by concentrating on passing along their hard-won lessons to speed democratic change and economic reform in Eastern Europe, Poles may yet prove themselves the most effective.

 is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. He studied at the University of Warsaw's Institute of International Relations in 1997. 

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Two decades after Solidarity's triumph, Poland is leveraging its geography and aid dollars to pay forward the support its struggling democratic movement received from abroad. 

Poland's New Ambitions

Rome has had an influence like that of no other city. Its 2,500 years of unbroken history make Paris and London seem like recent arrivals. In 

, Robert Hughes gives a thorough account of the Eternal City’s history and its influence on two millennia’s worth of artists, architects, and writers. A former art critic for Time and the author of books on subjects as diverse as Barcelona, Australia, and modern art, Hughes was first awed by Bernini’s fountains at the Piazza Navona a half-century ago. He sees traces of Rome just about everywhere, from the works of Goethe to Manhattan’s original Pennsylvania Station.

The ancient Rome of our imagination—and as conjured by the sculptors and painters Rome has attracted for millennia—is a pristine marble sculpture garden populated by orators in clean togas. The reality was more like “Calcutta-on-the-Mediterranean,” Hughes writes, “crowded, chaotic, and filthy.” Flimsy apartment buildings lined streets strewn with human and animal excrement, garbage, and the occasional corpse. Residents commonly hurled full chamber pots out the window, braining anyone unlucky enough to be passing below.

Yet rising among the slums were astounding feats of engineering that still inspire, including the Coliseum, the Pantheon, and the monuments of the Forum. Others, just as spectacular, are lost: The Circus Maximus, now buried under modern Rome, had seats for 250,000 spectators, who crowded in to watch charioteers careen around a mile-long course, of greater length than some NASCAR tracks.

Hughes can be an overeager tour guide. It’s fascinating that the Pantheon’s dome—whose diameter exceeds St. Peter’s by a few feet—was made possible by the pioneering use of concrete, but do we really need to know the precise thickness of its walls at the top and the bottom? As a short course in the stories behind the art and architecture of Rome, though, the book is useful and often entertaining.

Rome survived the fall of the Roman Empire, but just barely. By ad 1000, centuries of plunder and scavenging had rendered the imperial capital nearly unrecognizable. Romans themselves did much of the damage—stealing or selling off ancient statuary, melting down bronzes, and burning marble statues and friezes to make lime for building mortar. In the 15th century, the once glorious Forum was being used mainly as a cow pasture.

Beginning in medieval times, however, the city underwent wave after wave of rediscovery and re-creation. Dozens of Roman churches, St. Peter’s among them, are built with marble recycled from ancient Roman structures. During the Renaissance, Italian artists flocked to the city, accepting commissions from popes and cardinals to give the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church physical form.

The art of the Renaissance, in turn, made Rome an essential stop on the “grand tour” popular with educated Europeans. Like tourists today, they were often disappointed. “The streets are narrow, dirty, and filthy. Even the palaces are a mixture of dirt and finery and intermixed with wretched mean houses,” one English visitor wrote. Even while sniffing at their hosts, travelers took inspiration—and plenty of art, real and forged—home as a souvenir, spreading a taste for classical architecture and enriching museum collections around the world.

Rome endured, and continued to reinvent itself. It became the capital of a reunited Italy in 1871, then the seat of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s power in the 1920s before welcoming American troops as liberators in 1944. Throughout, its power to lure art lovers such as Hughes never diminished.

But in an angry epilogue, Hughes laments the death of high culture in Italy. The combination of mass tourism and Italian apathy, he contends, threatens the city’s heritage. “Most Italians are artistic illiterates,” he writes. “They like to invoke the splendors of their 

, but when it comes to doing anything about them, like turning their considerable energies toward preserving that inheritance in an intelligible way . . . nothing or little happens.”

Yet how much has really changed? Even at the empire’s peak, most Romans were more interested in gladiator bouts and chariot races than in sculpture and poetry. And recent archaeological discoveries reveal that the refined white statuary that inspired Renaissance artists is yet another instance of modern mythologizing: The Romans painted their marble, often in garish colors that would make a clown wince. If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that the Eternal City will survive, somehow, to be creatively remembered by future generations.

is a freelance journalist based in Berlin and a contributing editor to 

"Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History" 

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Ancient Rome in reality: flimsy apartments, streets strewn with human excrement, garbage, and the occasional corpse.