WARSAW: Ten years ago in September I was charged with forming the first non-communist government in what was still the communist world. The Soviet Union still existed, as did the Warsaw Pact, the Red Army retained bases across Poland, Solidarity had only recently come up from underground and many of its leaders were only just out of prison. Restoring Solidarity's public role was essential in all that was to follow.

After martial law was imposed in 1981, Poland's authorities, led by General Jaruzelski, argued that they were willing to reach agreement with "society". It was "only" Solidarity to which they objected. For me, however, legalization of Solidarity was fundamental; I firmly believed that the sphere of freedom that we could wrest from the government would be real only if it was protected not by small groups, but by a powerful social movement.

When the authorities indicated that they were serious about legalizing Solidarity, I concluded that political negotiations – known as the Roundtable talks – were desirable. Still, until nearly the very end, I feared that the authorities would "trick" us in some way, and I was not personally eager to participate in the new political structures.

For I believed that the sphere of liberty offered at the Roundtable negotiations would have to coexist for a long time with "their" sphere – i.e. the sphere of Communism. Entry into the political structures of the regime posed the risk that, in time, the process would "suck us in." Only when it became clear that Solidarity was going to enter the government and take the reigns of power, did I come to accept our historic new role.

Someone once compared my position in forming the first Solidarity government to that of a soldier disarming a minefield. But I was not only disarming a minefield, I was trying to construct something on top of that disarmed minefield. Moreover, we did not want to merely patch things up, but to change virtually the whole political and economic landscape of our country. Half-measures would not work; the regime had to be fundamentally reformed.

We also had to explain to the Russians that we wanted to be friendly, but that decisions now would be taken by us. I sent a clear message to this effect, through an emissary of the Soviet Politburo, two days after I was nominated as prime minister, and I amplified it later, during my first visit to Moscow.

But even if Moscow's reaction to the Polish reforms was very much on everyone's mind, Moscow was not the first destination on my travels, as the ritual of all previous governments demanded. My first official visit was to the Vatican.

Indeed, in extraordinary times like those, symbols matter, and many of my early actions as prime minister were wholly or in part symbolic. The first one had taken place even before I formed my government, barely upon my arriving in my office at the Council of Ministers, then still staffed exclusively with officials from the old regime. As I entered that intimidating building, I felt as if it, together with my new responsibilities, rested on my shoulders. I sat at my desk and I said to those around me: "Let's try to call the Pope." I did not seek to receive instructions; I said only: "Holy Father, I would like you to pray for me."

My second official act was the following: Next to my desk was a table with many telephones. Among them was a hotline to the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party. I asked to have that line disconnected. "If the first secretary of the Communist Party wants to talk to me," I said, "he can call me on the normal phone." It was important to make the new outlines of power clear: the State is independent from the Party. The bureaucrats around me had to learn that. Indeed, it took a while until they understood that they could have their party organization, but only outside the office, and that there would be no official Party "cell" in the Council of Ministers.

Those symbolic gestures spoke to the core of our entire political program. In my inaugural speech, I said that we needed to "draw a thick line between us and the past, that we were not responsible for what we inherited but only for what we will do ourselves."

My words were later twisted in the most bizarre ways by my critics. But the spirit of my speech was simple. We intended fundamental changes, but we sought to introduce them in an evolutionary, peaceful way. Change without vengeance – which did not mean without considering the past, just without retribution. This was what I meant by drawing a "thick line" between the past and the present.

There were then over two million members of the Communist Party in Poland. I had to tell them whether democratic Poland was also going to be their country, or whether they would be second-class citizens. Besides, the whole administrative apparatus of the State, which could not be changed in a month, had to serve the new Poland. Communists controlled the security forces, the army, all the organs of the state. They could provoke confrontations, directed not only against me, but also against their own leaders who had signed the Roundtable agreements.

After many years of conflicts, with the memories of the martial law of 1981 still fresh in the minds of most Poles, a policy of national reconciliation was a crucial element of our program. Decommunization meant for me, above all, the decommunization of the regime, of the system itself. Insofar as guilty individuals were concerned, on the other hand, we believed that people responsible for crimes should be judged by the courts, and the government, which stood for the independence of the judiciary, could not interfere with this. Similarly, the moral evaluation of the past – which was certainly needed – was, in my mind, primarily a matter of a broad public debate, not one of government decree or other acts of the state.

The government's responsibility was to put into effect political and economic reforms, far-reaching reforms – and these required social peace. We stood before a stark alternative: either destroy that social peace by anticommunist witch-hunts or reform the old regime and move ahead to a new era of national peace and economic prosperity. We chose reform.