In the calculus of self-interest the balance of advantage to most Communist bureaucrats and party apparatchiks was rapidly swinging the other way—better to swim with the current than be washed away in a tidal wave of change. That calculation might have looked different had the crowds been angry or their leaders belligerently determined to wreak revenge upon the old order. But for many reasons—including the example of Tiananmen itself, unfolding on television the very day of the Polish elections—the men and women of 1989 consciously eschewed violence.
مهم
