EDITORS: Media are invited to attend the opening session

ANN ARBOR—President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland will be among the more than two dozen Polish politicians, scholars, religious leaders and journalists who will gather at the University of Michigan’s Rackham Building April 7-10 to re-create the atmosphere of the Polish Round Table talks, the historic negotiations that brought an end to communism in Poland a decade ago.

“Communism’s Negotiated Collapse: The Polish Round Table of 1989, Ten Years Later,” organized by the U-M Center for Russian and East European Studies, will feature a series of panel discussions that will include many of the Round Table’s original participants. Most of the conference will be conducted in Polish with simultaneous interpretation into English.

In addition to Kwasniewski, other participants include former Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Catholic bishops Alojzy Orszulik and Bronislaw Dembowski, former ambassadors Stanislaw Ciosek and John R. Davis, several Solidarity activists, members of Parliament, and prominent Polish intellectuals and journalists.

The opening session, “The Significance of the Polish Round Table,” will begin at 8 p.m. April 7 at Rackham Auditorium. The sessions on April 8 (9:30 a.m.-6 p.m.) and April 9 (9 a.m.-5 p.m.) will be held in the Rackham Amphitheater and will focus on the conditions, contingencies and consequences of the Round Table. The closing session, “The Polish Round Table Revisited: The Art of Negotiation,” will take place 2-5 p.m. April 10 at Rackham Auditorium.

The conference also will feature an exhibit of figural sculpture by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz and a lecture, “Polish Art in Search of Freedom,” by Anda Rottenberg of Warsaw’s Zacheta Gallery at 10:30 a.m. April 10 at the U-M Museum of Art.

For more information or to register for the conference, consult the conference Web page at http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/PolishRoundTable/. Although the April 8 and 9 sessions are already full, space remains available in the April 7 and 10 sessions. There is no registration fee for U-M students, faculty and staff. For all others, the fee is $35.