History of Poland (1945–1989)
| History of Poland |
|---|
 |
The History of Poland from 1945 to 1989 was shaped by the influence of Soviet communism and opposition to it from Roman Catholic Church, trade unions and other groups. 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. The Yalta accords sanctioned the formation of a provisional Polish coalition government composed of the Communist Polish Workers' Party, members of the pro-Western Polish government in exile, and members of the Armia Krajowa resistance movement. From its outset, the Yalta formula favored the Communists, who enjoyed the advantages of Soviet support, high morale, control over crucial ministries, and Moscow's determination to bring Eastern Europe securely under its influence as a strategic ally in postwar Europe. The new government in Warsaw subdued a guerrilla resistance in the countryside and gained political advantage by gradually whittling away the influence of their noncommunist foes. Within the next two years, the Communists, under the leadership of Bolesław Bierut, ensured their consolidation of power by claiming a monopoly of power for the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), created through a fusion of the Polish Workers' Party and their leftist allies, in the newly formed People's Republic of Poland, which became a part postwar Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
A liberalizing "thaw" in Eastern Europe followed the death of Stalin in early 1953, sparking the desire for further reform among intellectuals, workers and even party members. The de-Stalinization of Soviet policy, however, left Poland's Communist Party in a difficult position. 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 government 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. Reforms gradually slowed, and Poland enjoyed a period of relative stability over the next decade, but with the idealism of the "Polish October" fading away.
By the mid-1960s Poland was experiencing increasing economic as well as political difficulties. In December 1970 the government suddenly announced massive increases in the prices of basic foodstuffs. Many city-dwellers were unhappy with this price hike, which created antipathetic feelings towards the government. 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 large-scale borrowing from the West to buy technology that would upgrade Poland's production of export goods—without, of course, importing the capitalist system. The program came with an immediate rise in living standards and expectations, but it faltered unexpectedly in the early 1970s because of worldwide recession and increased oil prices following the 1973 world oil crisis. In late the 1970s Gierek was forced to finally raise prices, and this led to another wave of public protests.
.png)
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. 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.
Creation of the People's Republic of Poland (1945-1956)
Consolidation of Communist power (1945-1948)
Poland suffered enormous loses during World War II. While in 1939 Poland had 35,1 million inhabitants, the census of 14 February 1946 showed only 23,9 million inhabitants. The losses in national resources and infrastructure amounted to 38% percent. Compared to Western nations, including Germany, Poland was still mostly an agricultural country. It's capital, Warsaw, was destroyed in over 90% in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. The implementation of the immense tasks involved with the reconstruction of the country was interwined with the struggle of the new government for the stabilisation of power, made even more difficult by the fact that a considerable part of society was mistrustful of the communist goverment. In addition, by mid-1945 the issue of Polish post-war borders was still unresolved. The liberation of Poland by the Red Army and the support Soviet Union shown for the Polish communists was desicive for the left gaining the upper hand in the new Polish government.
Soviet Union was pursuing an intentional strategy to eliminate the noncommunist resistance forces (Armia Krajowa), thus ensuring that Poland would fall under its sphere of influence, even before the liberation of Poland. Stalin had severed relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943, but to appease the United States and the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union agreed at the Yalta conference in [1944]] that a coalition government would be formed. However since the begining of liberation of Polish territiries and failure of Armia Krajowa Operation Tempest in 1944, control over Polish territories passed from occupying forces of Nazi Germany to Red Army, and from Red Army to the Polish communists, who exerted primary influence on decisions under the provisional government.
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 a Provisional Government (Rząd Tymczasowy Republiki Polskiej - RTTP), had been created from the 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. Both of those governments were responsible to unelected communist-controlled parliamant, the State National Committee (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN) and were not recongized by the Polish government-in-exile, which had formed its own quasi-parliament, the Council of National Unity (Rada Jedności Narodowej, RJN).
In April 1945, the Provisional Government signed an alliance with the Soviet Union. The new Polish Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej - TRJN) which was the name of Polish government until the elections of 1947 - 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 resistance movement Home Army (Armia Krajowa - AK), and the veterans of noncommunist Polish armies which had fought in the west. But at the same time, Soviet-oriented parties, backed by Soviet Red Army and in control of the security forces, 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 the defence of Poland's pre-1939 eastern border (Curzon line and Kresy region) as a basis for the future Polish-Soviet border. However, this was 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 the Yalta conference that free elections would be held in Poland. However, the Polish Communists, led by Gomułka and Bierut, were supported by less then a third of Polish population. Only vote rigging gave them majority in the carefully controlled national referenda (3xTAK) in 1946 that allowed for the Polish enconmy to become nationalized. They consolidated power by gradually whittling away the rights of their noncommunist foes, particularly by suppressing the leading opposition party, Mikołajczyk's Polish Peasant Party. Other groups targeted by the Communists were 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 and many leaders of Armia Krajowa and Rada Jedności Narodowej (in the Trial of the Sixteen).
By 1946, rightist parties had been outlawed. A pro-government "Democratic Bloc" formed in 1947 that included the forerunner of the communist Polish United Workers' Party and its leftist allies. By January 1947, the first parliamentary election allowed only opposition candidates of the Polish Peasant Party, which was nearly powerless by government controls. Results were adjusted to suit the communists, and under these conditions, the regime's candidates gained 417 of 434 seats in parliament (Sejm), effectively ending the role of genuine opposition parties. Many members of opposition, including Mikołajczyk, left the country. Western governments could do little but protest, which led many anticommunist Poles to speak of postwar "Western betrayal." Same year the new Sejm Ustawodawczy created the Small Constitution of 1947 and within the next two years, the Communists would ensure their rise to power by reconstituting the PZPR as holders of a monopoly of power in Poland. The Communists admitted in the last year of their rule that they had resorted to systematic vote-rigging, both in a referendum in June 1946 which legitimised the provisional government, and in the 1947 parliamentary elections, which returned a massive majority for the Communist-controlled "Democratic Bloc".
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). Mikołajczyk was forced to leave the country and Poland became a de facto one-party state and a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Two small façade parties, one for farmers and one for the intelligentsia, were allowed to exist, both subordinate to the Communists.
The Bierut era (1948-1956)
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 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 greated with relief by much of the population, though popular discontent remained latent and popular opinion varied. Some Poles adopted an attitude that might be called "resigned co-operation." Others, including the tens of thousands of Poles joined the Communist Party, and some Social Democratic, Communist and Trade Unionist Poles celebrated the opportunity to create, what they saw, as the society of the future. Others, particularly the remnants the Armia Krajowa, led by Narodowe Sily Zbrojne and Wolność i Niepodległość, waged a civil war against communists. Although most of them had surrendered or been destroyed by 1948, few continued to fight well into 1950s.
The Polish Communists themselves 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.
The Stalinist turn that led to the ascention of Bierut 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 between 200,000 and 400,000 people died during the postwar period, Stalinism in Poland was not quite as severe as it was in the other satellite states. Many Poles believed that the reason for this 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 that any open resistance would be suicidal.
Meanwhile, 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.
In 1948 the United States announced the Marshall plan, its initiative to help rebuild Europe. After initially welcoming the idea of Polish involvement, the Polish government declined to participate under pressure from Moscow. In 1953, following anti-Communist riots in the German Democratic Republic, Poland was forced by the Soviet Union to give up its claims to compensation from 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 received 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 grew much more quickly 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.
Minorities in Poland after the War
Before the war, a third of Poland's population was composed of ethnic minorities. After the war, however, Poland's minorities were all but gone, due to the revision of borders, and the Holocaust that resulted in the extermination in the vast majority of Poland's Jews. Under the National Repatriation Office (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny), millions of Poles were forced to leave their homes at eastern Kresy region and settled in the western recovered territories. At the same time, according to the provisions of the Potsdam Agreement, approximately 5 million Germans were resettled from those territories into Germany proper. Ukrainian and Belarusian minorites found themselves now mostly in borders of the Soviet Union, those that opposed this new policy (like the Ukrainian Insurrection Army in the Bieszczady region) were suppressed by the end of 1947.
The population of Polish Jews of about 3.5 million, which formed the largest community in pre-war Europe, was all but destroyed by 1945. About 3 million Jews (all but about 300,000-500,000 of the Jewish population) died of starvation in ghettos and labor camps, were killed at the Nazi extermination camps, or slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland, and another 50,000-170,000 were repatriated from the Soviet Union and 20,000-40,000 from Germany and other countries. At its post-war peak, there were 180,000-240,000 Jews in Poland settled mostly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, and Wrocław.
Their position in postwar Poland was precarious. Many of the Holocaust survivors shared the common fate of other people in post-war communist Poland and were not able to reclaim their property upon return. There were incidents of Jews who were returning to their old homes being attacked by people who moved there during the war. Jews were also sometimes associated with the Communists, as some Jews who returned from the Soviet Union, including Hilary Minc and the Party security and ideological chief Jakub Berman assumed prominent positions in communist leadership and were as a result held responsible for the regime's repressions by many Poles. These issues fed into existing anti-Semitism, culminating in the Kielce pogrom of July 1946. Sparked by a falsified rumours of Jewish blood libel, a crowd attacked a building housing Jews preparing to emigrate to Palestine, while the police stood by (or even assisted in some cases), killing over 40 and wounding approximately 50. Afterward, the Communists, the anti-Communists and the Catholic Church all blamed each other for this outbreak of violence. Kielce became a turning point for the Jews in post-war Poland. Until the pogrom, large numbers of Polish Jews intended to stay in the country, despite the general Zionist feeling after the war. After the pogrom, the majority of Jews wanted to leave -- the number of Jews crossing the border illegally skyrocketed, going from an average of 1,000 a month prior to July 1946 to over 20,000 a month for the three months afterwards. In total 100,000-120,000 Jews left Poland between 1945-1948. Their departure was largely organized by the Zionist activists in Poland such as Adolf Berman and Yitzhak Zuckerman under the umbrella of a semi-clandestine organization Berihah ("Flight"). A second wave of Jewish emigration (50,000) took place during the liberalization of the Communist regime between (1957-1959).
Reform Communism (1956-70)
De-Stalinization
Stalin had died in 1953 and by this time Nikita Khrushchev had come to power in the Soviet Union, denouncing Stalin's cult of personality at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1956. The de-Stalinization of official Soviet ideology left Poland's Stalinist hard-liners in a difficult position, especially following Nikita Khrushchev's attack on Stalin at the 20th Congress. In the same month as Khrushchev's speech, as unrest and desire for reform and change among both intellectuals and workers was beginning to be felt throughout the Eastern Bloc, the death of the hard-line Bierut in March 1956 exacerbated an existing split in the PZPR. Bierut was succeeded by Edward Ochab as First Secretary of PZPR and by Cyrankiewicz as Prime Minister.
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" Władysław Gomułka re-emerged and placed himself at the head of the movement.
Realizing the need for new leadership, the PZPR chose Gomułka, a moderate who had been purged after losing his battle with Bierut, as first secretary in October 1956. This decision was made despite Moscow's threats against Poland if the PZPR picked Gomułka. The Soviet Union, however, had no intention of allowing its influence on Eastern Europe to diminish. After some tough bargaining with Khrushchev, who came to Warsaw to oversee the transfer of power, the Soviets grudgingly decided not to resist Gomułka's rise to power. Even so, relations with the Soviet Union were not nearly as strained as Yugoslavia's. As a further sign that the end of Soviet influence in Poland was nowhere in sight, Warsaw Pact was signed in Polish capital of Warsaw on 14 May 1955, forming a counterweight to the Western NATO.
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 Warsaw Pact, 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.
There were also repeated attempts by some Polish academics and philosphers, like Leszek Kołakowski, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Stanisław Ossowski to develop a specific form of Polish Marxism. While their attempts to create a bridge between Poland's history and Soviet Marxism ideology were midly succesful, especially in comparisson to similar efforts in most other countries of the Eastern Bloc, they have been to much extent stiffled by the regime's unwillingness to step too far and risk the wrath of Soviets for going to far from the Soviet party line.
Gomułka's period
Poland welcomed Gomułka's return to power with relief and even euphoria, despite his background as a lifelong Communist. Many 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, which these promises he carried out. Gomułka 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 to run. 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, while 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. 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 West Germany were frozen because of the impasse over the Oder-Neisse Line. Gomułka chose to ignore the economic crisis, and his autocratic methods prevented the major changes required
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.
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 placated 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 unpopular among many urban workers. 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.
The Gierek era (1970-1980)
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 large-scale borrowing from the West to buy technology that would upgrade Poland's production of export goods. He did this by massive borrowing (estimated at 10 billion dollars), 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.
"Consumer Communism", based on present global economic conditions, raised Polish living standards and expectations, but the program faltered suddenly in the early 1970s because of worldwide recession and increased oil prices. The effects of the world oil shock following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War produced an inflationary surge followed by a recession in the West, which resulted in a sharp increase in the price of imported consumer goods, 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 Communist rule (1980-1990)
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. Polish police (Milicja Obywatelska) and paramilitary riot police (ZOMO) violently supressed the demonstrators. 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 completely 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.
After the first years following the imposition of martial law, during which the communist government tried unsuccessfully various expedients to improve the performance of the economy (at one point resorting to placing military commisars to direct work in the factories), it grudgingly realised that the only solution to the crisis was to introduce liberalizing changes in the economy. Accordingly, while still on the whole pursuing failed economic policies, it introduced a series of small-scale reforms, for example allowing more small-scale private enterprises to function. However, the government also realised that it had no legitimacy to carry out truly deep reforms, which would inevitably cause large-scale social dislocation and economic difficulties for most the population, accustomed to the limited social safety net that the communist system provided. For example, when the government proposed to close the Gdansk Shipyard, a decision in some ways justifiable from the economic point of view but also clearly political to a large extent, there was a wave of outrage in public opinion and the government had to back down. The only way to carry out such changes without social upheaval would be to acquire at least some support from the opposition side. In the course of the decade the government accepted the idea that some kind of a deal with the opposition would be necessary. However, at this point the communists generally still believed that they should retain the reins of power for the foreseeable future, and only allow the opposition limited, advisory participation in the running of the country. They thought this would be essential to pacifying the Soviet Union, which they felt was not yet ready to accept a non-communist Poland.
The 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, though it never approached the levels of membership it enjoyed in the 1980-1981 period. At the same time the dominance of the Communist Party was further eroded, as it lost many of its members who were revolted by the imposition of martial law. Throughout the mid-1980s, Solidarity persisted solely as an underground organization, supported by the Church and by funding from 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 stimulated political reform in Poland. In particular Gorbachev essentially repudiated the Brezhnev doctrine which stipulated that attempts by its Eastern European satellite states to abandon the communist system would be countered by the Soviet Union with force. This change in Soviet policy removed the spectre of a possible Soviet invasion in response to any wide-ranging reforms, and hence took away the key argument employed by the communists as a justification for maintaining the communist system 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 semi-free elections on June 4, 1989. This election was officially rigged to keep the communists in power, since only one third of the seats in the key lower chamber of parliament would be open to Solidarity candidates. The other two thirds were to be reserved for candidates from the communist party and its two allied, completely subservient parties. The communists thought of the election as a way to keep power while gaining some legitimacy to carry out reforms. Many critics from the opposition believed that by accepting the rigged election Solidarity has caved in, guaranteeing the communists domination in Poland into the 1990s. The outcome of the election was to a large extent unpredictable. After all, Poland had not had a truly fair election since the 1920s so there was little precedent to go by. It was clear the communists were unpopular, but there were no hard numbers as to how low support for them would actually fall. The communist government had most of the media on its side and employed sports and television celebrities for candidates, as well as successful local personalities and businessmen. Some members of the opposition were worried that such tactics would gain enough votes from the less educated segment of the population to give the communists the legitimacy they craved.
When the results were released, they caused a political earthquake. The victory of Solidarity surpassed all predictions. Solidarity candidates captured all the seats they were allowed to compete for in the Sejm, while in the Senate they captured 99 out of the 100 available seats. At the same time, many prominent communist candidates failed to gain even the minimum number of votes required to capture the seats that were reserved for them. With the results, the communists lost all remaining legitimacy overnight.
The next few months were spent on political maneuvering. The prestige of the communists fell so low that the two parties allied with them decided to break away and adopt an independent course. The communist candidate for the post of Prime Minister, general Czesław Kiszczak, failed to gain enough support in the Sejm to form a government. Although Jaruzelski tried to persuade Solidarity to join the Communists in a "grand coalition," Wałęsa refused. By August of 1989 it was clear that a Solidarity Prime Minister would have to be chosen. Jaruzelski resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party but found he was forced to come to terms with a government formed by Solidarity. The communists, who still controlled all the levers of state power, were pacified by the compromise in which Solidarity allowed General Jaruzelski to remain head of state. Thus 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, essentially through abstention by a sufficient number of Solidarity MPs. General Jaruzelski became the president of the country, but the Solidarity member Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the Prime Minister. The new non-communist government was sworn into office in September, 1989, the first of its kind in communist Europe. It immediately adopted radical economic policies, proposed by Leszek Balcerowicz, which turned Poland into a functioning market economy in the course of the next year.
The striking electoral victory of the Solidarity candidtates in those limited elections, and then the formation of the first non-communist government, encouraged similar largely peaceful anti-communist counterrevolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of 1989.
In 1990 Jaruzelski resigned as Poland's leader and was succeeded by Wałęsa who won the presidential elections in the fall of 1990. Walesa's inauguration as president in December, 1990 is thought by many to be the formal end of the communist People's Republic of Poland and the beginning of the modern, free Poland. In the course of 1990 the Polish communist party dissolved itself. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved in the summer of 1991. On October 27, 1991 the first fully free parliamentary elections took place. This completed the transition from communist to a fully democratic system.
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,
- Jerzy Topolski, An Outline History of Poland, 1986, Warsaw, Interpress Publishers
- POLSKA. HISTORIA Article in Polish PWN Encyclopedia, online version. Accessed on 11 July 2005. Polish language.
External links
- Articles on 'Poland under communism' at BellaOnline.com
- Communism Now and Then Interview with Father Piotr Krysztofiak
- Photos and films of PRL (in Polish)
- 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)
Countries of Eastern and Central Europe during their Communist period | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |  | ||