History of Poland (1945–1989)
| History of Poland |
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The History of Poland from 1945 to 1989 was shaped primarily by the influence of Soviet communism. In the aftermath of the Second World War, forces of Nazi Germany were driven from Poland by the advancing Red Army of the Soviet Union. With little opposition from the Western Allies, who had accepted the fait accompli at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet-backed Polish Communists, soon forced the opposition (the delegates of the Polish government in exile, the members of the Armia Krajowa resistance movement and any non-communist political parties) to either join them or face being exiled, imprisoned or even executed. Under the leadership of Bolesław Bierut, the People's Republic of Poland became a part of the Eastern bloc and a satellite state of the Soviet Union by the late 1940s.
Following Stalin's death in 1953 and the ensuing destalinisation process, Communist Parties throughout the Eastern Bloc began loosening their totalitarian grip, sparking the desire for further reform among intellectuals, workers and even Party members. In June 1956, workers in the city of Poznań went on strike. At first, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz tried repression, but then the hard-liners realised they had lost the support of the Soviet Union, and the regime turned to conciliation by announcing wage increases and other reforms. Władysław Gomułka became the head of the reform movement and soon thereafter assumed both the top party and government offices. However, after the first wave of reform, Gomułka's regime lost its will to reform. Poland enjoyed a period of relative stability over the next decade, but the idealism of the "Polish October" faded away. By the mid-1960s Poland was experiencing increasing economic as well as political difficulties. Gomułka chose to ignore them, and his increasingly autocratic style meant that no-one else had the authority to fix anything. In December 1970 the regime suddenly announced massive increases in the prices of basic foodstuffs. The rises were a fatal miscalculation, for they turned the urban population against the regime. Demonstrations against the price hikes broke out in the coastal cities of the Gdańsk region. Gomułka, whose power base had been diminishing for many years, retired, and Edward Gierek was drafted as the new head of the Communist Party. The price increases were reversed, wage rises announced, and sweeping economic and political changes were again promised. Gierek introduced a new economic program, one based on importing some of the prosperity of the booming Western economies to Poland—without, of course, importing the capitalist system. He did this by massive borrowing (estimated at ten billion dollars), which did create an illusion of wealth and prosperity (the 'Gierek decade')—however, it was unsustainable in the long term. In late the 1970s Gierek was forced to finally raise prices, and this led to another wave of public protests.
This vicious cycle was thrown off balance by the election of a Polish Pope—John Paul II in 1978. This unexpected event had an electrifying effect on the anti-communist opposition and, in retrospect, was the communist regime's death knell. In early August 1980, the wave of strikes had reached the politically sensitive Baltic coast. Among the strike leaders was an electrician named Lech Wałęsa from the Gdańsk Shipyards, who soon became a figure of international fame, together with his independent trade union, "Solidarity" (Polish Solidarność). By the end of 1981, Solidarity had nine million members, a quarter of Poland's population and three times the membership of the Polish Communist Party. On December 13, 1981, government leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, who became the party's national secretary and prime minister that year, fearful of Soviet intervention, started a crack-down on Solidarity, declaring martial law in Poland and imprisoning most of the opposition leaders. However, change was inevitable and in 1988 the talks which became known as the "Roundtable Talks" radically altered the shape of Polish government and society. In April 1989, Solidarity was again legalized and allowed to participate in the upcoming elections; their candidates' striking victory in those limited elections sparked off a succession of peaceful anti-communist counter-revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1990 Jaruzelski resigned as Poland's leader and was succeeded by Wałęsa in December. By the end of August, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed, and in December Wałęsa was elected president; the communist People's Republic of Poland became the Republic of Poland.
History
The establishment of the People's Republic of Poland and the Stalinist era (1945–56)
Stalin was determined that Poland's new government would be Communist, and therefore ultimately under his control. He had severed relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943, but to appease Roosevelt and Churchill, he agreed at the Yalta conference that a coalition government would be formed. The Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, resigned his post in 1944 and, along with several other Polish exile leaders, went to Poland, where the provisional government, Provisional Government of Republic of Poland (Rząd Tymczasowy Republiki Polskiej - RTTP), had been created, based on the earlier communist-dominated Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego - PKWN) in Lublin. This government was headed by a Socialist, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, but the Communists held a majority of key posts.
In April 1945, the provisional government signed an alliance with the Soviet Union. The new Polish Government of National Unity (Rzad Jedności Narodowej - RJN) was finally constituted on June 28, with Mikołajczyk as Deputy Prime Minister. The Communists' principal rivals were Mikołajczyk's Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe - PSL), veterans of the World War II and members of the resistance movement Home Army (Armia Krajowa - AK), and the veterans Polish armies which had fought in the west. But at the same time, Soviet-oriented parties, backed by Soviet Red Army, held the balance of power, especially the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza - PPR), under Władysław Gomułka and Bolesław Bierut.
Mikołajczyk and his colleagues in the Polish Government-in-Exile insisted on making a stand in defence of Poland's pre-1939 eastern border (Curzon line) as a basis for the future Polish-Soviet border, a position which could not be defended in practice because Stalin was in occupation of the territory in question, and he had already been promised those areas by Churchill and Roosevelt back in 1943. The Government-in-Exile's refusal to accept the proposed new Polish borders infuriated the Allies, particularly Churchill, making them less inclined to oppose Stalin on the question of the composition of the postwar government. In the end the exiles lost on both issues: Stalin annexed the eastern territories, and controlled the new Polish government. However, Poland preserved its status as an independent state: some influential communists such as Wanda Wasilewska were in favour of Poland becoming a republic of the Soviet Union.
Stalin had promised at Yalta conference that free elections would be held in Poland. But the Polish Communists, led by Gomułka and Bierut, knew that they could never win a free election. They imposed themselves on the country through a reign of terror against the main non-Communist party, Mikołajczyk's Polish Peasant Party, and also against other opposition groups including the veterans of the wartime Home Army and army veterans who had fought in the west. In some cases, their opponents were sentenced to death — among them Witold Pilecki, the organiser of Auschwitz resistance. The Communists admitted in the last year of their rule that they had also resorted to systematic vote-rigging, both in a referendum in June 1946 which legitimised the provisional government, and in the January 1947 legislative elections, which returned a massive majority for the Communist-controlled "Democratic Bloc". Mikołajczyk was forced to leave the country and Poland became a de facto one-party state. Two small façade parties, one for farmers and one for the intelligentsia, were allowed to exist, subordinate to the Communists.
Another force in Polish politics, Józef Piłsudski's old party, the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - PPS), suffered a fatal split. One faction, which included Osóbka-Morawski, wanted to join forces with the Peasant Party and form a united front against the Communists. Another faction led by Józef Cyrankiewicz argued that the Socialists should support the Communists in carrying through a socialist program, while opposing the imposition of one-party rule. Pre-war political hostilities continued to influence events, and Mikołajczyk would not agree to a united front with the Socialists. The Communists played on these divisions by dismissing Osóbka-Morawski and making Cyrankiewicz Prime Minister. In 1948 the Communists and Cyrankiewicz's faction of Socialists merged to form the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza - PZPR).
The government, headed by Cyrankiewicz and the economic boss Hilary Minc, carried through a program of sweeping economic reform and national reconstruction. Private industry was nationalised, the land seized from the prewar landowners and redistributed to the peasants, and millions of Poles transferred from the eastern territories annexed by Soviet Union into the western territories which Soviets transferred from Germany to Poland. By 1950 5 million Poles had been settled in what the government called the Regained Territories. Warsaw and other ruined cities were cleared of rubble — mainly by hand — and rebuilt with remarkable speed. Many of the reforms were overdue and were in themselves welcomed, although most Poles continued to detest the Communist regime. They adopted an attitude which might be called resigned co-operation, although some veterans of the Armia Krajowa and Narodowe Sily Zbrojne waged a civil war against communists and continued to fight well into 1950s.
Before the war Poland had about 3.5 million Jews. By the end of the war, only about 100,000 Polish Jews survived Hitler's Holocaust and remained in Poland. Another 300,000 survived the war through having been deported to the Soviet Union. Their position in postwar Poland was precarious. Although all parties officially condemned anti-Semitism, there were a substantial number of Jews in the Communist Party's leadership, such as Minc and the Party security and ideological chief Jakub Berman, who were held responsible by many Poles for the regime's repression. This inflamed anti-Semitic feeling and resulted in the incident at Kielce in July 1946; a crowd attacked a building housing Jews preparing to emigrate to Palestine, killing 40. The Communists, the anti-Communists and the Catholic Church all blamed each other for this outbreak. The consequence was to hasten the emigration of Poland's remaining non-Communist Jews, another chapter in the long history of Polish-Jewish relations.
The new Polish government was controlled by Polish Communists who had spent the war in the Soviet Union. They were "assisted" — in some cases controlled — by Soviet "advisers," who were placed in every part of the government. The most important of these advisers was Konstantin Rokossovsky (Rokossowski in Polish), the Defence Minister from 1949 to 1956. Although of Polish parentage, he had spent his adult life in the Soviet Union and had attained the rank of Marshal in the Soviet Armed Forces.
The Polish Communists were divided into two informal factions, named "Natolin" and "Pulawy" after places where they held meetings (the Palace of Natolin near Warsaw and Pulawska Street in Warsaw). Natolin consisted largely of ethnic Poles of peasant origin and had a peculiar nationalist-communistic ideology. Pulawy included Jewish Communists as well as members of the old Communist intelligentsia.
The repercussions of Yugoslavia's break with Stalin reached Warsaw in 1948. As in the other eastern European satellite states, there was a purge of Communists suspected of nationalist or other "deviationist" tendencies in Poland. In September Gomułka, who had always been an opponent of Stalin's control of the Polish party, was dismissed from his posts and imprisoned, accused of "nationalistic tendency". But there was no equivalent of the show trials that took place in the other Eastern European states, and Gomułka escaped with his life. Bierut replaced him as party leader.
This Stalinist turn meant that instead of the façade of democracy and a market economy which the regime preserved until 1948, Poland was now to be brought into line with the Soviet model of a "people's democracy" and a centrally planned socialist economy. The regime also embarked on the collectivisation of agriculture, although the pace was slower than in other satellites: Poland remained the only Soviet bloc country where individual peasants dominated agriculture. The Communists further alienated many Poles by persecuting the Catholic Church. In 1953 the Primate of Poland, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński was placed under house arrest, although he had been willing to go a long way to reach agreement with the government.
Despite the fact that Polish historians estimate that 200,000 to 400,000 people died during the postwar period, Polish Stalinism was not quite as severe as it was in the other satellite states. Many Poles believed that the real reason was that Poland, unlike other Eastern European countries, did not need an additional phase of terror, because Polish society had already been brought to the edge of disintegration by the Nazi occupation. Warsaw and other cities lay in ruins. Many smaller towns, before the war populated largely by Jews, were empty. Half the pre-war Polish intelligentsia, mainly of Jewish or middle-class origins, were dead or in emigration. Many children had gone six years without school. In these circumstances most people were willing to accept even Communist rule in exchange for the restoration of normal life. Even the Catholic Church considered any open resistance suicidal.
In 1948 the United States announced the Marshall plan, its initiative to help rebuild Europe. The Polish government initially welcomed Polish participation, but under pressure from Moscow, Poland eventually declined to participate. In 1953, following anti-Communist riots in the German Democratic Republic, Poland was forced by the Soviet Union to give up its compensation claims on Germany, which as a result paid no significant compensation for war damages, either to the Polish state or to Polish citizens. The only compensation Poland got was in the form of the property left behind by the German population of the annexed western territories. This marked the beginning of the wealth gap, which would increase in years to come, as the Western market economies proved much more successful than the centrally planned socialist economies of Eastern Europe.
The new Polish Constitution of 1952 officially constituted the creation of Poland as a People's Republic, ruled by the Polish United Workers' Party, which since the absorption of the left-wing of the Socialist Party in 1948 had been the communist party's official name. The post of President of Poland was abolished and Bierut, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, became the effective leader of Poland.
When Bierut died in March 1956, he was succeeded by Edward Ochab as First Secretary of PZPR and by Cyrankiewicz as Prime Minister. Stalin had died in 1953 and by this time Nikita Khrushchev had come to power in the Soviet Union, denouncing Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Destalinisation loosened the totalitarian grip of Communist Parties, and unrest and desire for reform and change among both intellectuals and workers was beginning to be felt throughout the Eastern Bloc. However, the Soviet Union had no intention of loosening its influence on Eastern Europe the Warsaw Pact was signed in Polish capital of Warsaw on 14 May 1955, forming a counterweight to the Western NATO.
The Communist regime also carried out major changes to the education system. The Nazis' massacre of the prewar Polish intelligentsia, and the emigration of many other intellectuals and skilled people, left Poland with a severe educational deficit. The Communist program of free and compulsory school education for all, and the establishment of new free universities, therefore had a lot of support. Universities from the lost eastern territories were evacuated to the new western territories: from Wilno to Toruń (Thorn) and from Lwów to Wrocław (Breslau). Many new universities were founded, including the famous Film University of Łódź. The Communists thus took the opportunity to create a new Polish educated class, taught in an educational system which they controlled.
The failure of reform Communism (1956–70)
In June 1956, workers in the industrial city of Poznań went on strike. Demonstrations by striking workers turned into huge riots in which 80 people were killed. Cyrankiewicz at first tried repression, threatening that "any provocateur or lunatic who raises his hand against the people's government may be sure that this hand will be chopped off." But then the hard-liners realised they had lost the support of the Soviet Union, and the regime turned to conciliation: it announced wage rises and other reforms. Voices began to be raised in the Party and among the intellectuals calling for wider reforms of the Stalinist system. The disgraced "national Communist" Wladyslaw Gomułka re-emerged and placed himself at the head of the movement.
Gomułka returned to the Party leadership in October 1956, after some tough bargaining with Khrushchev, who came to Warsaw to oversee the transfer of power. Hard-line Stalinists such as Berman were removed from power and many Soviet officers serving in the Polish Army were dismissed, but almost no-one was put on trial for the repressions of the Bierut period. The Puławy faction argued that mass trials of Stalin era officials, many of them of Jewish origins, would incite animosity against Jews. Konstanty Rokossowski and other Soviet advisors were sent home, and Polish Communism took on a more independent orientation. But Gomułka knew that the Soviets would never allow Poland to leave the Soviet orbit, because of its strategic position between the Soviet Union and Germany. He agreed that Soviet troops could remain in Poland, and that no overt anti-Soviet outbursts would be allowed. In this way Poland avoided the risk of the kind of Soviet armed intervention that crushed the revolution in Hungary in the same month.
Poland welcomed Gomułka's return to power with relief and even euphoria, despite his background as a lifelong Communist. Most Poles still rejected Communism, but they knew that the realities of Soviet power dictated that Poland could not escape from Communist rule. Gomułka, however, promised an end to police terror, greater intellectual and religious freedom, higher wages and the reversal of collectivisation. These promises he carried out. But he also promised free elections, a promise he knew he could not keep without seeing his party defeated. At the January 1957 elections no opposition candidates were permitted. Voters were given the right to vote against official candidates, but Gomułka persuaded the Catholic Church to urge a vote of confidence in the government. By agreement, the PZPR won 237 seats out of 459: the rest went to satellite parties and a few independents.
After the first wave of reform, Gomułka's regime settled into a phase of "consolidation" in which the power of the Party, and Party control of the media and the universities, were gradually restored, and many of the younger and more reformist members of the Party were expelled. The reforming Gomułka of 1956 was replaced by the old authoritarian Gomułka. Poland enjoyed a period of relative stability over the next decade, but the idealism of the "Polish October" faded away. What replaced it was a cynical form of Polish nationalism, fueled by a propaganda campaign against West Germany over its non-recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier.
By the mid-1960s Poland was starting to experience economic as well as political difficulties. Like all the Communist regimes, the Polish regime spent too much on heavy industry, armaments and prestige projects, and too little on consumer production. Since the common people had nothing to spend their wages on, productivity declined. The end of collectivisation returned the land to the peasants, but their farms were mostly too small to be efficient, so productivity in agriculture remained low. Economic relations with Poland's natural market, West Germany, were frozen because of the impasse over the Oder-Neisse Line. Gomułka chose to ignore these problems, and his increasingly autocratic style meant that no-one else had the authority to do anything.
Gomułka's Poland was generally described as one of the more "liberal" Communist regimes. Compared to East Germany, Czechoslovakia or Romania in this period, this is correct. Nevertheless, under Gomułka Poles could still go to prison for writing political satire about the Party leader, as did Janusz Szpotański, or for publishing a book abroad. Jacek Kuroń, later to become a prominent dissident, was imprisoned for writing an "open letter" to other party members. As Gomułka's popularity declined and his "reform Communism" lost its impetus, the regime became steadily less liberal and more repressive.
By the 1960s others in the leadership had begun to plot against Gomułka. His security chief, Mieczysław Moczar, a wartime communist partisan commander, formed a new faction, "the Partisans", built on communist nationalism and anti-Jewish sentiment. The Party boss in Upper Silesia, Edward Gierek, who unlike most of the Communist leaders was a genuine son of the working-class, also emerged as a possible alternative leader. The crisis came in June 1967 with the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states. Since the Arabs were seen as Soviet satellites, Poles cheered the Israelis.
In March 1968 student demonstrations at Warsaw University broke out when the government banned the performance of a play by Adam Mickiewicz (Dziady, written in 1824) at the Polish Theatre in Warsaw, on the grounds that it contained "anti-Soviet references." Moczar used this affair as a pretext to launch an anti-Semitic press campaign (although the expression "anti-Zionist" was officially used). By 1968 most of Poland's 40,000 remaining Jews were assimilated into Polish society, but over the next year they became the centre of a centrally organised campaign, equating Jewish origins with Zionist sympathies and thus disloyalty to Poland. Approximately 20,000 of them lost their jobs and were forced to emigrate. The campaign, despite being ostensibly directed at Jews who had held office during the Stalin era and their families, affected most of the remaining Polish Jews whatever their backgrounds. Gomułka could have resisted this campaign, but instead allowed it to run, hoping it would burn itself out. The campaign damaged Poland's reputation abroad, particularly in the United States. Many Polish intellectuals, however, opposed the campaign, some openly, and Moczar's security apparatus became as hated as Berman's had been.
There were several outcomes of the March 1968 events. One was an official approval for showing Polish national feelings, including the scaling down official criticism of the prewar Polish regime and of Poles who had fought in the non-Communists wartime partisan movement, the Armia Krajowa. The second was the complete alienation of the regime from the leftist intelligentsia, who were disgusted at the promotion of official anti-Semitism. The third was that some of the people who emigrated to the West at this time founded organisations which encouraged opposition inside Poland.
Two things saved Gomułka's regime at this point. The Soviet Union, now led by Leonid Brezhnev, made it clear it would not tolerate political upheaval in Poland at a time when it was trying to deal with the crisis in Czechoslovakia (the "Prague Spring"). In particular, the Soviets made it clear they would not have Moczar, whom they suspected of anti-Soviet nationalism, as leader. Secondly, the workers refused to rise up against the regime: partly because they distrusted the intellectual leadership of the protest movement and partly because Gomułka bribed them with higher wages. The Catholic Church, although it protested against police violence against demonstrating students, was also not willing to support a confrontation with the regime.
In August 1968 the Polish army took part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Some Polish intellectuals protested, and Ryszard Siwiec burned himself alive during the official national holiday celebrations. Polish participation in crushing Czech liberal Communism (or socialism with a human face, as it was called at that time) further alienated Gomułka from his former liberal supporters. But in 1970 Gomułka won a political victory when he gained West German recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line. The German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, asked on his knees for forgiveness for the crimes of the Nazis: the gesture was understood in Poland as being addressed to Poles, although it was actually at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and was thus directed more to the Jews.
Gomułka's temporary political success could not mask the economic crisis into which Poland was drifting. Although the system of fixed, artificially low food prices kept urban discontent under control, it caused stagnation in agriculture and made more expensive food imports necessary. This was unsustainable, and in December 1970 the regime suddenly announced massive increases in the prices of basic foodstuffs. It is possible that the price rises were imposed on Gomułka by his enemies in the Party leadership who planned to manoeuvre him out of power. The rises were a fatal miscalculation, for they turned the urban workers against the regime. Gomułka believed that the agreement with West Germany had made him more popular, but in fact most Poles appear to have felt that since the Germans were no longer a threat to Poland, they no longer needed tolerate the Communist regime as a guarantee of Soviet support for the defence of the Oder-Neisse border.
Demonstrations against the price rises broke out in the northern coastal cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, Elbląg and Szczecin. Gomułka's right-hand man, Zenon Kliszko, made matters worse by ordering the army to fire on the workers as they tried to return to their factories. Another leader, Stanisław Kociołek, appealed to the workers to return to work. But in Gdynia the soldiers had orders to stop workers returning to work, and they fired into the crowd of workers emerging from their trains: hundreds of workers were killed. The protest movement then spread to other cities, leading to strikes and occupation of many factories by the angry workers.
The Party leadership met in Warsaw and decided that a full-scale working-class revolt was inevitable unless drastic steps were taken. With the consent of Brezhnev in Moscow, Gomułka, Kliszko and other leaders were forced to resign: if the price rises had been a plot against Gomułka, it succeeded. Since Moscow would not accept Moczar, Edward Gierek was drafted as the new First Secretary of the PZPR. The price rises were reversed, wage rises announced, and sweeping economic and political changes were promised. Gierek went to Gdańsk and met the workers, apologised for the mistakes of the past, and said that as a worker himself he would now govern for the people.
From crisis to crisis (1970-80)
Gierek, like Gomułka in 1956, came to power with a raft of promises that now everything would be different: wages would rise, prices would remain stable, there would be freedom of speech, and that those responsible for the violence at Gdynia and elsewhere would be punished. Although Poles were much more cynical than they had been in 1956, Gierek was believed to be an honest and well-intentioned man, and his promises bought him some time. He used this time for a new economic program, one based on importing some of the prosperity of the booming Western economies to Poland—without, of course, importing the capitalist system that made that prosperity possible. He did this by massive borrowing, mainly from the United States and West Germany, to re-equip and modernise Polish industry, and to import consumer goods to give the workers some incentive to work.
For the next four years Poland enjoyed rapidly rising living standards and an apparently stable economy. Real wages rose 40% between 1971 and 1975, and for the first time most Poles could afford to buy cars, televisions and other consumer goods. Poles living abroad, veterans of the Home Army and the Anders' armies, were invited to return, and to invest their money in Poland, which many did. The peasants were subsidised to grow more food. Poles were able to travel, mainly to Germany, Sweden and Italy, with little difficultly. There was also some cultural and political relaxation. Provided the "leading role of the Party" and the Soviet "alliance" were not criticised, there was freedom of speech. With the workers and peasants reasonably happy, the regime knew that a few grumbling intellectuals could pose no challenge.
The paradox of this "consumer Communism" was that it was built on the back of the continuing prosperity of the capitalist West. This changed suddenly in 1974, when the effects of the oil shock resulting from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War produced an inflationary surge followed by a recession in the West. This meant a sharp increase in the price of the consumer goods Poland was importing, coupled with a decline in demand for Polish exports, particularly coal. Poland's foreign debt rose from US$100 million in 1971 to US$6,000 million in 1975, and continued to spiral. This made it harder and harder for Poland to go on borrowing. Once again, consumer goods began to disappear from Polish shops. The new factories built by Gierek's regime also proved to be largely ineffective. For instance, one of the major investments was an Italian-built cake and sweets factory in Ryki. It was the largest such factory in the world, and was to produce 17 million cakes a week. However, it soon turned out that most of the ingredients had to be imported from abroad at high prices, and the factory was closed soon after it was completed.
In 1975, Poland, together with almost all European countries, became a signatory of the Helsinki Accords and a member of Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the creation of which marked the high point of the period of "détente" between the Soviet Union and the United States. Despite the regime's claims that the freedoms mentioned in the agreement would be implemented in Poland, there was little change, but Poles became gradually more aware of the rights they were being denied.
With the government increasingly unable to borrow, it had no alternative but to raise prices, particularly for basic foodstuffs. The government was so afraid of a repeat of the 1970 worker rebellion that it had kept prices frozen at the 1970 levels rather than allowing them to rise gradually. Then, in June 1976, under pressure from Western creditors, the government again introduced price increases: butter by 33%, meat by 70%, and sugar by 100%. The result was an immediate nationwide strike wave, with violent demonstrations and looting at Płock and Radom. Gierek backed down at once, dismissing Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz and repealing the price rises. This left the government looking economically foolish and politically weak, a very dangerous combination.
The 1976 disturbances and the subsequent arrests and dismissals of worker militants brought the workers and the intellectual opposition to the regime back into contact. A group of intellectuals led by Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik founded the Committee for the Defence of the Workers (KOR), which published an underground paper, Robotnik ("The Worker"): the same title as Józef Piłsudski's underground paper. The aim of KOR was at first simply to assist the worker victims of the 1976 repression, but it inevitably became a political resistance group. It marked an important development: the intellectual dissidents accepting the leadership of the working class in opposing the regime. These events brought many more Polish intellectuals into active opposition. The complete failure of the Gierek regime, both economically and politically, led many of them to join or rejoin the opposition. During this period new opposition groups were formed, such as the Confederation for an Independent Poland and Movement for the Defence of the Rights of Humans and Citizens (ROPCIO), which tried to resist the regime by forcing it to respect the laws and the Polish constitution.
For the rest of the 1970s the resistance to the regime grew, in the form of trade unions, student groups, clandestine newspapers and publishers, imported books and newspapers, even a "flying university." The situation recalled earlier periods of Polish resistance to foreign occupation, such as partitions of Poland of the 19th century and the German occupation of 1939–44, except that the regime made no serious attempt to suppress the opposition. Gierek was interested only in buying off worker unrest and keeping the Soviet Union convinced that Poland was a loyal ally. But the Soviet alliance was at the heart of Gierek's problems. Because of Poland's strategic position, across the lines of communication between the Soviet Union and Germany, the Soviets would never allow Poland to drift out of its orbit as Yugoslavia and Romania had done. Nor would they allow any fundamental economic reform that would endanger the "socialist system."
In fact, however, Poland was part of the capitalist system, and the fact that the West would no longer give Poland credit meant that living standards began to sharply fall again as the supply of imported goods dried up, and as Poland was forced to export everything it could, particularly food and coal, to service its massive debt, which would reach US$23 billion by 1980. By 1978 it was therefore obvious that sooner or later the regime would again have to raise prices and risk another outbreak of labour unrest.
At this juncture, on 16 October 1978, Poland experienced what many Poles believed to be literally a miracle. The Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, was elected Pope, taking the name John Paul II. The election of a Polish Pope had an electrifying effect on what was by the 1970s the last really devoutly Catholic country in Europe. When John Paul toured Poland in June 1979, half a million people heard him speak in Warsaw, and about a quarter of the entire population of the country attended at least one of his outdoor masses. Overnight, John Paul became the de facto leader of Poland, leaving the regime not so much opposed as ignored. John Paul did not call for rebellion; instead, he encouraged the creation of an "alternative Poland" of social institutions independent of the government, so that when the next crisis came, the nation would present a united front.
By 1980 the Communist regime was completely trapped by Poland's economic and political dilemma. The regime had no means of legitimising itself, since it knew that the PZPR would never win a free election. It had no choice but to make another attempt to raise consumer prices to realistic levels, but they knew that to do so would certainly spark another worker rebellion, much better organised than the 1970 or 1976 outbreaks. In July 1980 the government gave in and announced a system of gradual but continuous price rises, particularly for meat. A wave of strikes and factory occupations began at once, co-ordinated from KOR's headquarters in Warsaw.
The regime made little effort to intervene. By this time, the Polish Communists had lost the Stalinist zealotry of the 1940s: they had grown corrupt and cynical during the Gierek years and had no stomach for bloodshed. The country waited to see what would happen. In early August, the strike wave reached the politically sensitive Baltic coast, with a strike at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk. Among the leaders of this strike was an electrician Lech Wałęsa, who soon became a national figure. The strike wave spread along the coast, closing the ports and bringing the economy to a halt. With the assistance of the activists from KOR, the workers occupying the various factories, mines, and shipyards across Poland came together, supported by many intellectuals.
The regime was now faced with a choice between repression on a massive scale and an agreement that would give the workers everything they wanted, while preserving the outward shell of Communist rule. They chose the latter, and on 31 August, Wałęsa signed the Gdańsk Agreement with Mieczysław Jagielski, a member of the PZPR Politburo. The Agreement acknowledged the right of Poles to associate in free trade unions, abolished censorship, abolished weekend work, increased the minimum wage, increased and extended welfare and pensions, and abolished Party supervision of industrial enterprises. Only the façade of Party rule was preserved, which everyone recognised was necessary to prevent Soviet intervention. The fact that all these economic concessions were completely unaffordable escaped attention in the wave of national euphoria which swept the country. The period that started afterwards is often called the "Polish carnival."
The fall of Communism (1980–90)
In September Gierek, who was in poor health, was removed from office and replaced as Party leader by Stanisław Kania. Kania made the same sort of promises that Gomułka and Gierek had made when they came to power. But whatever goodwill the new leader gained by these promises was even shorter-lived than it had been in 1956 and 1971, because there was no way the regime could have kept the promises it made at Gdańsk even if it had wanted to. The regime was still trapped between economic necessity and political reality. It could not revive the economy without abandoning state control of prices, but it could not do this without triggering another general strike. Nor could it gain the support of the population through political reform, because of the veto power of the Soviet Union.
Labour turmoil in 1980 led to the formation of the independent trade union, "Solidarity" (Polish Solidarność), founded in September 1980, originally led by Lech Wałęsa. In the 1980s, it gathered a broad anti-communist social movement ranging from people associated with the Roman Catholic Church down to members of the anti-communist left. The union was backed by a group of intellectual dissidents (KOR), and it was based on the rules of nonviolence. In time became a major Polish political force in opposition to the communists.
The ideas of the Solidarity movement spread like wildfire throughout Poland; more and more new unions were formed and joined the federation. The program, although concerned with trade union matters, was universally regarded as the first step towards dismantling the Party monopoly. "The Rural Solidarity", a union of farmers, was created in May 1981. By the end of 1981, Solidarity had nine million members, a quarter of Poland's population and three times as much as the PUWP had. Using strikes and other industrial action, the union sought to block government initiatives.
On December 13, 1981, the government leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, who became the party's national secretary and prime minister that year, fearful of Soviet intervention, started a crack-down on Solidarity, declaring a martial law in Poland, suspending the union, and temporarily imprisoning most of its leaders. The government then banned Solidarity on October 8, 1982. Martial Law was formally lifted in July 1983, though many heightened controls on civil liberties and political life, as well as food rationing, remained in place through the mid to late 1980s.
After the chaotic Solidarity years and the imposition of martial law Poland entered a decade of permanent economic crisis, officially acknowledged as such even by the regime. Rationing and queuing became a way of life, with ration cards necessary to buy even such basic consumer staples as milk and sugar. Access to Western high quality goods became even more restricted, as the Western governments applied economic sanctions to express their dissatisfaction with the government repression of the opposition, while at the same time the government had to use most of the foreign currency it could obtain to pay the crushing rates on its foreign debt. As a response to this situation the government, which controlled all official foreign trade, continued to maintain a highly artificial exchange rate versus the Western currencies, which led to pathological distortions in the economy at all levels, resulting in the development of the shortage economy. The only way for an individual to buy most Western goods was to use Western currencies, notably the American dollar, which in effect became a parallel currency. However, it could not simply be exchanged at the official banks for Polish zlotys, since the government exchange rate undervalued the dollar and placed heavy restrictions on the amount that could be exchanged, and so the only practical way to obtain it was from remittances or work outside the country. As money came into the country by these channels, the government in turn attempted to gather it up by various means, most visibly by establishing a chain of state-run Pewex stores in all Polish cities where goods could only be bought with hard currency. It even introduced its own ersatz American currency (bony in Polish). All this led to a highly unhealthy state of affairs where the chief determinant of economic status was access to hard currency. Needless to say, this situation was completely incompatible with any remaining ideals of socialism, which were soon completly abandoned.
In this desperate situation all aspects of the development and growth in the Polish economy slowed to a crawl. Most visibly, work on most of the grandiose investment projects began in the 1970s was stopped. As a result, most Polish cities acquired at least one infamous example of a large unfinished building languishing in a state of limbo. Some of these were eventually finished decades later, most were never finished at all, hence wasting the considerable resources devoted to their construction (like Szkieletor skyscraper in Kraków). More generally, at the time when the capitalist world was growing rapidly, the Polish investment in economic infrastructure and technological development was minimal in comparison, ensuring that the country lost whatever ground it gained relative to Western capitalist economies in the 1970s. In this way the 1980s became a "lost decade" for Poland. To escape the constant economic and political pressures, and the general sense of hopelessness, during these years hundreds of thousands of Poles left the country and settled in the West, few of them returning to Poland even until this day. Tens of thousands more went to work in countries which could offer them salaries in hard currency, notably Libya and Iraq.
This constant state of economic and societal crisis meant that, after the shock of martial law wore off, the society again began to organise on all levels against the regime. "Solidarity" gained more support and power, and it eventually eroded the dominance of the Communist Party, which in 1981 lost ca. 85,000 of its 3 million members. Throughout the mid-1980s, Solidarity persisted solely as an underground organization, supported by the Church and the CIA. But by the late 1980s, Solidarity was sufficiently strong to frustrate Jaruzelski's attempts at reform, and nationwide strikes in 1988 were one of the factors that forced the government to open a dialogue with Solidarity.
The policies of new General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (perestroika and glasnost) as well as those of US President Ronald Reagan were another factor which stipulated political reform in Poland. By the close of the 10th plenary session in December 1988, the Communist Party had decided to approach leaders of Solidarity for talks. From February 6 to April 15, talks of 13 working groups in 94 sessions, which became known as the "Roundtable Talks" (Polish: Rozmowy Okrągłego Stołu) radically altered the shape of the Polish government and society. The talks resulted in an agreement to vest political power in a newly created bicameral legislature and in a president who would be the chief executive.
In April 1989, Solidarity was again legalised and allowed to participate in the upcoming semi-free elections. After the elections, the Communists, who were guaranteed 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm (the parliament), did not win a majority, and Solidarity-backed candidates won 99 out of 100 freely contested seats in the Senate. Jaruzelski, whose name was the only one the Communist Party allowed on the ballot for the presidency, won by just one vote in the National Assembly. General Jaruzelski became the president of the country, but the Solidarity member Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the Prime Minister. The Solidarity candidates striking victory in those limited elections sparked off a succession of peaceful anti-communist counterrevolutions in Central and Eastern Europe starting on June 4.
Although Jaruzelski tried to persuade Solidarity to join the Communists in a "grand coalition," Wałęsa refused. Jaruzelski resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party but found he was forced to come to terms with a government formed by Solidarity. In 1990 Jaruzelski resigned as Poland's leader and was succeeded by Wałęsa in December. By the end of August a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December free elections Wałęsa won the presidency. It was the end of the communist People's Republic of Poland and the beginning of the modern Poland.
See also
References
- Davies, Norman, 1982 and several reprints. God's Playground. 2 vols. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ISBN 0231053533 and ISBN 0231053517
- Zamoyski, Adam, 1993, AdamThe Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture, Hippocrene Books, ISBN 0781802008
- Lukowski, Jerzy, Zawadzki, Hubert, 2001, A Concise History of Poland, ISBN 0521559170, Cambridge University Press,
External links
- Communism Now and Then Interview with Father Piotr Krysztofiak
- Articles on 'Poland under communism' at BellaOnline.com
- Polish Press Agency gallery of photos forbidden until 1989 and Photos of normal life (in Polish)
- posters Muzeum PRL: PRL Poster gallery (in Polish)
- Internet Museum of People's Republic of Poland (in Polish)
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