Andrzej Friszke is a historian who specializes in the political uprisings in Soviet states between 1945 and 1989.

This book offers no background information - neither social, political nor psychological. To understand its raison d'être, it's important to look at the circumstances surrounding its publication.

Certain files were made available to the book's authors when Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the conservative and anti-communist former prime minister, was in power. But they should never have been given out - they were archives from 1993, which is too recent. It's not surprising. Jaroslaw Kaczyński had already tried to bring down other politicians by accusing them of having collaborated with communists after 1989, but he never succeeded. Current attempts to pick on Walesa are somehow linked to another case that concerned spying by secret services on right wing politicians in 1993, when serious accusations were made but proven to be false. At the time part of Internal Security Agency documents were also declassified. In any case, this is not the first attack on the Solidarity legend; Walesa had already been charged with espionage in 2000, but won the case.

The important question is: what was the political gain behind dragging the whole thing back up? The fact that these are the first post-1990 Internal Security Agency files to have been released makes me very sceptical about the whole thing. I can't say if it's legally possible to reopen the case against Walesa, but there are definitely political forces who want to see it happen."

Andrzej Zybertowicz is a sociologist and national security adviser for President Lech Kaczynski.

This book is the result of many years of research. It not only explores the shady parts of Lech Walesa's history, but also looks into the problems of the post-1989 Polish state, which is why it has caused such a reaction of hysteria. Assaults against it are driven in the hope of discrediting its scholarly legitimacy and discouraging others from looking into the subject of post-1989 communist informants.

There are only a few people in the public debate who approach the book rationally. Offensive outbursts, for example, that "the authors should be given a slap" do not provide the rational arguments necessary for serious intellectual debate.

The second part of the book concerns Walesa's abuse of power as the president of Poland in the first half of the nineteen nineties, revealing unseen documents which prove that Walesa himself, along with other important official figures, didn't "pay attention to the way that classified documents were handled", basically resulting in Walesa stealing some of them.

We also know that the prosecutor who examined the case about Walesa's 1970s activities was under certain pressure and was limited in her capacity to investigate, so the conclusion met was probably not correct. This new book clearly shows that court proceedings were not as thorough or reliable as they should have been. And as there is new, rational evidence now, there are grounds to re-begin the lustration of Lech Walesa from scratch."

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