Padraic Kenney is the former director of the Polish Studies Center. He writes about social and political change in Poland and Eastern Europe. His most recent books are Wroclawskie zadymy and The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe Since 1989. He is also the author of A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989 and Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950. Currently, he is researching a book on political prisoners in the twentieth-century world.