Abstract The entire history of Solidarity in the last year can easily be depicted as leading inevitably and logically to failure; its repression, the attempt to destroy it which has been taking place since December 13, 1981, can readily be portrayed as a return to normality, to the equilibrium point. The whole strategy of the “self-limited” revolution was based on a certain confidence placed in the Communist Party. Not to want to change power but to control and reform it was a gamble on the rationality, the political capacity of the apparatus of the Polish United Workers Party, which was expected out of reasonableness, humaneness and patriotism, to play the game without being physically forced to do so, since there was no means to remove it and this was publicly acknowledged.