Contemporary Polish historiography tends to focus predominantly on the main actors of the political transformation of 1989 and there are communist and opposition elites considered as such. In that perspective, Polish society remains a community on which the views of the elites are projected, and the myth about the birth of ci-vil society on the ruins of communism as early as 1989 may serve as a perfect example of such process. In reality, however, the Polish society was overwhelmingly apolitical, uninterested in political par-ticipation and to a large extent socially inactive. There are many reasons which caused this situation: starting from the martial law, which in December 1981 broke the backbone of the mass social movement that was the legal ‘Solidarity’, as well as the very 45 years of communism themselves, during which a social initiative was na-tionalized, and citizens were in fact deprived of it. As a result, the interpretations of the events of 1989 should be demythologized, al-so in order to understand the popularity of the slogans about “end-ing the 1989 revolution”, which still tend to appear in the public discourse in Poland.

This essay addresses the question of the ties between various social levels, particularly in connection with research on Polish society at various stages of its post-war history. In reference to the theoretical reflections and research presented by Mikołaj Pawlak in the book Tying Micro and Macro: What Fills Up the Sociological Vacuum in 2018, the author of the article argues for the necessity of careful consideration in formulating research generalities, especially when they refer to terms or metaphors coined earlier, such as the idea of a sociological vacuum proposed in the 1970s by Stefan Nowak.

Hanna Krall is an acclaimed journalist and author, whose books were translated into multiple languages. However, relatively little critical attention has been given since her rise to world fame to her early work as a journalist. This article revisits this unjustly neglected part of her biography, when she made her name by reportages portraying the realities of life in Poland in the 1970s (the Edward Gierek's decade) and registering the tensions that led to the political earthquake of 1980 and culminated in the collapse of the communist system in 1989.