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1946-1989 - Polish People's Republic

Following the Yalta Conference in February 1945, a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in June 1945; the US recognized it the next month. The deciding factor was the dominant position gained by the victorious Red Army at the end of the war. The Yalta accords sanctioned the formation of a provisional Polish coalition government composed of communists and proponents of Western democracy. From its outset, the Yalta formula favored the communists, who enjoyed the advantages of Soviet support, superior morale, control over crucial ministries, and Moscow's determination to bring Eastern Europe securely under its thumb as a strategic asset in the emerging Cold War.

The new regime in Warsaw subdued a guerrilla resistance in the countryside and gained political advantage by gradually whittling away the rights of their democratic foes. By 1946 the coalition regime held a carefully controlled national referendum that approved nationalization of the economy, land reform, and a unicameral rather than bicameral Sejm. Rightist parties had been outlawed by that time, and a progovernment Democratic Bloc formed in 1947 included the forerunner of the communist Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza—PZPR) and its leftist allies.

Although the Yalta agreement called for free elections, those held in 1947 were controlled by the Communist Party. The Communist Party-dominated "Democratic Bloc" prevailed in the January 1947 parliamentary elections, which featured falsified results and persecution of the opposition. The communists then established a regime entirely under their domination.

Between 1945 and 1989, Poland lay at the center of Soviet-dominated economic and military alliances, Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, respectively. Socially, Poles suffered totalitarian repression of independent groups of all kinds, state-prescribed monolithic education doctrine, strict censorship, and repeated attempts to stifle their religious selfexpression. Economically, Poland's subjugation resulted in a Soviet-style centralized planning system that produced early industrial growth but then stagnated in spite of repeated government restructuring programs. Comecon also isolated Poland's foreign trade from market competition throughout the communist era.

In October 1956, after the 20th ("de-Stalinization") Soviet Party Congress in Moscow and riots by workers in Poznan, there was a shakeup in the communist regime. While retaining most traditional communist economic and social aims, the regime of First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka liberalized Polish internal life.

The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw was completed in 1955 as a ‘gift from the Soviet people’. The Palace of Culture and Scince of Józef Stalin name was delivered to the Polish society on 21 July. On this occasion the Soviet and Polish builders of the Palace were decorated with numerous orders. The Presidium of the Government undertook the Resolution no. 731/56 on the 17 November 1956 concerning the transmission of the Palace of Culture and Science of Józef Stalin name from the “protection” of the Minister’s Council Office to the supervision of the Presidium of the National Council of Warsaw. Since that moment the name of Józef Stalin as a patron of the Palace disappeared from the official documents.

The architect was Lew Rudniew. The building is the embodiment of Socialist Realist architecture. It is still the tallest building in Poland, standing at 237 m (which is 42 floors), and fulfils the role of a cultural center accommodating theaters, museums, a cinema and a concert hall. The highest viewing platform in Warsaw, on the 30th foor, offers an excellent panoramic view of the city.

The Palace has an area of 817,000 m2 and has over 3,000 rooms, including offices, institution headquarters, two private universities and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Moreover, the Palace has a post office, swimming pool, libraries and theaters. The palace is one of the largest conference facilities in Warsaw, comfortably accommodating more than 4,500 participants at a time, at dozens of meetings and training conferences annually.

In 1968, the trend reversed when student demonstrations were suppressed and an "anti-Zionist" campaign initially directed against Gomulka supporters within the party eventually led to the emigration of much of Poland's remaining Jewish population. In December 1970, disturbances and strikes in the port cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin, triggered by a price increase for essential consumer goods, reflected deep dissatisfaction with living and working conditions in the country. Edward Gierek replaced Gomulka as First Secretary.

Fueled by large infusions of Western credit, Poland's economic growth rate was one of the world's highest during the first half of the 1970s. But much of the borrowed capital was misspent, and the centrally planned economy was unable to use the new resources effectively. The growing debt burden became insupportable in the late 1970s, and economic growth had become negative by 1979.

In October 1978, the Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, became Pope John Paul II, head of the Roman Catholic Church. Polish Catholics rejoiced at the elevation of a Pole to the papacy and greeted his June 1979 visit to Poland with an outpouring of emotion.

In July 1980, with the Polish foreign debt at more than $20 billion, the government made another attempt to increase meat prices. A chain reaction of strikes virtually paralyzed the Baltic coast by the end of August and, for the first time, closed most coalmines in Silesia. Poland was entering into an extended crisis that would change the course of its future development.

On August 31, 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, led by an electrician named Lech Walesa, signed a 21-point agreement with the government that ended their strike. Similar agreements were signed at Szczecin and in Silesia. The key provision of these agreements was the guarantee of the workers' right to form independent trade unions and the right to strike. After the Gdansk agreement was signed, a new national union movement--"Solidarity"--swept Poland.

The discontent underlying the strikes was intensified by revelations of widespread corruption and mismanagement within the Polish state and party leadership. In September 1980, Gierek was replaced by Stanislaw Kania as First Secretary.

Alarmed by the rapid deterioration of the Polish United Workers' (Communist) Party's (PZPR) authority following the Gdansk agreement, the Soviet Union proceeded with a massive military buildup along Poland's border in December 1980. In February 1981, Defense Minister Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski assumed the position of Prime Minister as well, and in October 1981, he also was named party First Secretary. At the first Solidarity national congress in September-October 1981, Lech Walesa was elected national chairman of the union.

On December 12-13, the regime declared martial law, under which the army and special riot police were used to crush the union. Virtually all Solidarity leaders and many affiliated intellectuals were arrested or detained. The United States and other Western countries responded to martial law by imposing economic sanctions against the Polish regime and against the Soviet Union. Unrest in Poland continued for several years thereafter.

In a series of slow, uneven steps, the Polish regime rescinded martial law. In December 1982, martial law was suspended, and a small number of political prisoners were released. Although martial law formally ended in July 1983 and a general amnesty was enacted, several hundred political prisoners remained in jail.

In July 1984, another general amnesty was declared, and 2 years later, the government had released nearly all political prisoners. The authorities continued, however, to harass dissidents and Solidarity activists. Solidarity remained proscribed and its publications banned. Independent publications were censored.

The government's inability to forestall Poland's economic decline led to waves of strikes across the country in April, May, and August 1988. In an attempt to take control of the situation, the government gave de facto recognition to Solidarity, and Interior Minister Kiszczak began talks with Lech Walesa on August 31. These talks broke off in October, but a new series, the "roundtable" talks, began in February 1989. These talks produced an agreement in April for partly open National Assembly elections. The June election produced a Sejm (lower house), in which one-third of the seats went to communists and one-third went to the two parties which had hitherto been their coalition partners. The remaining one-third of the seats in the Sejm and all those in the Senate were freely contested; virtually all of these were won by candidates supported by Solidarity.

The failure of the communists at the polls produced a political crisis. The roundtable agreement called for a communist president, and on July 19, the National Assembly, with the support of some Solidarity deputies, elected General Jaruzelski to that office. Two attempts by the communists to form governments failed, however. On August 19, President Jaruzelski asked journalist/Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form a government; on September 12, the Sejm voted approval of Prime Minister Mazowiecki and his cabinet. For the first time in more than 40 years, Poland had a government led by non-communists.

In December 1989, the Sejm approved the "Balcerowicz Plan"--named after Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz--to transform the Polish economy rapidly from centrally planned to free-market, amended the constitution to eliminate references to the "leading role" of the PZPR, and renamed the country the "Republic of Poland." The PZPR dissolved itself in January 1990, creating in its place a new party, Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland. Most of the property of the former Communist Party was turned over to the state.

The last Russian troops, units of which had been stationed in Poland since the end of World War II, were withdrawn in 1993.