With the twenty-fifth anniversary of the peaceful revolution that swept Eastern Europe approaching, Hoover Archives has made available for research the papers of Mieczysław Rakowski (1926–2008), Poland's top communist intellectual, and for many years the editor in chief of the Polish United Worker's Party (PUWP) organ Polityka, perhaps the most open and sophisticated weekly in all the Soviet bloc.  Rakowski was prime minister during 1988–89, the last year of the communist regime in Poland before the takeover of the government by the Solidarity opposition.

The Hoover Institution Library and Archives are the world’s largest private organization dedicated to documenting war, revolution, and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With more than 6,000 archival collections from 171 countries, the breadth and depth of Hoover’s holdings are unmatched. This year was the busiest since our founding in 1919, with more than 11,000 visitors to the Library and Archives.