People's Poland: Moved West, Ruled from Moscow
Poland is shifted westward, its population transformed, and a communist regime imposed under Soviet control, shaken by revolts in 1956, 1968, 1970 and 1976.
- The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)
- Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom — Brian Porter-Szűcs, Wiley-Blackwell (2014)
- A Concise History of Poland (3rd edition) — Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, Cambridge University Press (2019)
At Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 the Allies moved Poland bodily westward. The USSR kept the eastern lands it had seized in 1939, including Lviv and Vilnius, and Poland gained former German territories up to the Oder and Neisse rivers, including Wrocław (Breslau) and Szczecin (Stettin). Millions of Germans were expelled; Poles from the east were resettled in their place. With Jews murdered and Ukrainians deported in population exchanges and the 1947 “Operation Vistula”, Poland became one of the most ethnically uniform countries in Europe.
- The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)
- The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 — Timothy Snyder, Yale University Press (2003)
- Od rzezi wołyńskiej do akcji „Wisła”. Konflikt polsko-ukraiński 1943–1947 — Grzegorz Motyka, Wydawnictwo Literackie (2011)
Communists backed by Soviet troops and the secret police won rigged elections in 1947. Home Army veterans were jailed or executed; some fought on in the forests into the 1950s. After Stalin’s death, protests in Poznań in June 1956 were bloodily suppressed, but in October that year Władysław Gomułka took power promising a “Polish road to socialism”: collectivisation was largely abandoned and the Church was left more room than anywhere else in the bloc.
- The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)
- A Concise History of Poland (3rd edition) — Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, Cambridge University Press (2019)
Later crises followed a pattern. In March 1968 students protested against censorship, and the regime answered with an “anti-Zionist” campaign that forced around 13,000 Jews to emigrate. In December 1970 troops shot striking shipyard workers on the Baltic coast, killing dozens. In 1976 strikes over food prices led intellectuals to found the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR), an alliance of intelligentsia and workers that prepared the ground for Solidarity.
- The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)
- The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (3rd edition) — Timothy Garton Ash, Yale University Press (2002)
A foreign-imposed dictatorship after a rigged settlement at Yalta, "the Western betrayal", that killed or jailed thousands of resistance fighters (the "cursed soldiers") and kept Poland captive for 45 years.
- The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)
- Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present — Norman Davies, Oxford University Press (2001)
A repressive regime that nevertheless rebuilt the country, industrialised it and moved millions of peasants into towns, schools and universities; by Soviet-bloc standards it was relatively loose, with private farming and a strong Church.
- Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom — Brian Porter-Szűcs, Wiley-Blackwell (2014)
- The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)
Why it matters today
Many older Poles remember the People's Republic with mixed feelings: rebuilt cities, free education and social advancement alongside queues, censorship and lies. The question of how to judge communism, and those who served it, still divides Polish politics.