On the matter of show trials.  While trials against loyal Communists forced
 to confess to fictitious crimes ended after Stalin's death, show trials (in
 the Polish People's Republic for instance) against the clergy (such as the
 trial against Bishop Kaczmarek in September 1953), workers involved in
 protests or strikes (such as trials conducted following the Poznan revolt of
 June 1956), as well as the show trials against opposition intellectuals
 (such as the trial against Adam Michnik, et. al. following the March 1968
 student riots) continued.

 As for mass executions?  I'd put it this way:  The Communists stopped
 killing other Communists and, instead, concentrated on the public at large.
 They also shifted that particular habit (mass murder) away from the secret
 security organs and their prosecutors to the military and paramilitary
 organs.  Consider the workers shot in Poznan in 1956 or the many, many other
 workers murdered in Communist Poland while participating in the strikes of
 1970, 1976, not to mention the strikes to protest the introduction of
 Martial Law in 1981.

 Finally, on "the cultural and political spaces of the civil society that
 grew up...from within," I agree that "Western cultural forms such as
 rock'n'roll" played an important part, but what about the more obvious role
 of an independent, self-governing, trade union -- Solidarnosc?  The
 subversive role played by a nationalist, staunchly Roman Catholic,
 unapoligetically anti-Communist trade union that included every segment of
 Polish society and had millions of members deserves, at the very least, a
 little credit.

 Leo Gluchowski

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