Below is an exclusive English translation of an extensive debate transcript featuring the Polish historian Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s foremost intellectuals and hero from the Solidarity movement. We also recently published a translation of another article from his most recent visit to Moscow. PUBLIC LECTURES (Polit.ru) Russia, Poland, Europe A public discussion with Adam Michnik We are publishing the full transcript of a discussion with the famous European intellectual, one of the most famous Polish dissidents and political prisoners, editor-in-chief of “Gazeta Wyborcza” Adam Michnik, which took place on 25 October of the year 2007 in a club — the literary cafe Bilingua within the framework of the project «Public lectures of Polit.ru». The discussion was organized with the aid of the International society «Memorial». Adam Michnik was born in the year 1946. In 1961—1962 he entered into the famous discussion «Club of the crooked wheel», through which passed many representatives of the future political opposition, in 1962 he founded his own informal Club of seekers of contradictions. In 1964 he matriculated at the historical faculty of Warsaw university, he was on many occasions subjected to admonitions, in 1968, in a period of acute political crisis, he was arrested and sentenced to three years of jail confinement, released by amnesty in 1969 (student protest demonstrations against the expulsion of Michnik from Warsaw university gave a start to the March unrests of the year 1968, which were suppressed by the powers, which grew into a campaign of state antisemitism, entailing a mass emigration of Jews from the country). At that same time he began to get published as a journalist (under pseudonyms).