Squaring the Circle

Tom Stoppard's acclaimed television play about the Polish Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. Between August 1980 and December 1981 an attempt was made in Poland to put together two ideas which would not fit, the idea of freedom as it is understood in the West and the idea of Socialism as it is understood in the Soviet empire. The attempt failed because it was impossible, in the same sense as it is impossible in geometry to turn a circle into a square with the same area.