By the end of 1989, the year also known as the annus mirabilis (the year of miracles), one by one, the communist parties of the Eastern Europe caved to the demands of the reformers in their respective countries, ending the monopoly on power of the Communist Party and paving the way to a more democratically organized polity. In Poland, for example, this transition had already begun in 1980 when a group of Gdansk shipyard workers led by Lech Walesa came together as the Solidarity Movement to protest an increase in food prices. In the face of worsening economic conditions and protests, the authorities cracked down on the movement and jailed its leaders. By early 1989, Poland’s leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski realized that he could not rule the country without the Solidarity Movement, and thus legalized the movement and started a series of round-table talks that led to an elite-led democratic transition in the country. These talks would not only lead to the first competitive elections in the Polish parliament, in which Solidarity would capture the majority of the seats in both houses, but also to the election of the first non-communist prime minister in the Soviet Bloc—Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In Czechoslovakia, the annus mirabilis manifested itself in the form of small-scale protests starting in January 1989. The correct answer is Choice B.