GDANSK, Poland >> In January 1989, as a college student, I came here to march with Solidarity, the movement that helped bring about the peaceful collapse of Soviet communism. Now, more than three decades later, I have brought my children to Gdansk to learn about communism and meet the man who successfully fought it: Lech Walesa.

Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us. At 79, he still looks as vigorous as the young electrician who led a workers’ uprising against the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” forced Poland’s Marxist regime to recognize the first independent trade union in the communist world, was imprisoned under martial law only to later force his former jailers at the negotiating table to allow free elections and who, as the first president of the newly free Poland, anchored his former Warsaw Pact country in the institutions of the West.

Sitting in his office at the European Solidarity Center, the museum built on the grounds of the old Lenin Shipyard where Solidarity was born, I asked about polls showing that half of young Americans have a positive view of socialism. What is his message for young people who have no living memory of communism?

“Many young people are actually fooled to accept communism as an idea,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “There are beautiful sentences talking about equality, about justice. … But as soon as you start putting that system into practice, all sorts of serious disasters come about. But young people quite often don’t know it. We have experience (with socialism), so we really know something about it. So, I strongly recommend rejecting it.

“You have to understand why (young people) are looking to the past. They’re going to the past because there are no clear answers, ideas for the future.”

As a result, he said, “populist demagogues are leading the world, because it’s easier.

But those who potentially have better solutions than demagogues and populists have to wake up.”

What does he, as the president who forced Russian troops to leave Polish soil, think as he watches Russian troops attack Ukraine?

“I know very well how it might be looking if Poland had not succeeded in joining NATO in time. Then definitely Russia would be invading Poland, not Ukraine,” he said. “I’m doing my best to help Ukraine now because, in a way, they are fighting instead of us.”

Walesa greatly admires Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“Both Zelenskyy and me, we are not politicians; we are practical people and that’s why we tend to succeed,” he said.

But Walesa worries what will come next for the comedian-turned-statesman.

“Up until now, Zelenskyy is doing great,” he said, “but the real problem starts at the moment when you have to turn toward peaceful solutions. Whether he will be able to find that peaceful solution. As a practical man, I see many dangers in that stage of development. But I wish him all the best.”

How does Walesa want to be remembered?

“I don’t care so much about it, I have done the best I could, whatever was possible for me to do,” he said. “I gave all I could, and I was doing it in an honest and simple way without any manipulation.”

Walesa and Solidarity gave my children and their generation the gift of a world growing in freedom, prosperity and peace; now it is in their hands to seize or squander that inheritance.

Marc A. Thiessen is a Washington Post columnist.