Polish People's Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Polish People's Republic was born out of the ruins of a country that had lost nearly a third of its population in six years of war. By the census of the 14th of February 1946, Poland counted only 23.9 million inhabitants, down from 35.1 million in 1939. The difference was not simply a matter of redrawn borders. Millions had been killed. Millions more had been moved. What emerged from that devastation was a state shaped not by the wishes of those who remained, but by the army that had arrived to "liberate" them.

  For over four decades, from 1944 to 1989, Poland lived under a government it had not chosen. The Polish United Workers' Party ruled as the sole political force, backed by Soviet power and enforced by a secret police that, by one political scientist's count, killed or disappeared an estimated 22,000 people during the regime's existence. And yet Poland was, in a paradoxical way, the most stubbornly independent country in the Eastern Bloc. It was the only communist nation whose flag bore no hammer, no sickle, no red star. Its farmers refused to surrender their land. Its church refused to be silenced. And in the end, a trade union with nine million members brought the whole system down.

  How did a state built on fraud and foreign backing survive for over forty years? What made Poland different from every other country under Soviet domination? And what finally broke the machine?

• 2. A State Built on Fraud

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  Władysław Gomułka and provisional president Bolesław Bierut oversaw one of the most thoroughly rigged political transitions in modern European history. In June 1946, the communist-controlled Interior Ministry announced that all three questions in the so-called "Three Times Yes" referendum had passed overwhelmingly. Years later, evidence showed that only one of the three questions had actually won majority support.

  The January 1947 parliamentary election was no more honest. The Democratic Bloc was officially credited with 80.1 percent of the vote and awarded 394 seats; the opposition Polish People's Party received just 28. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of that party, called the result "implausible" and fled to the United Kingdom in April rather than face arrest. Later historians established that in many areas, officials had never counted the real votes at all. Ballot boxes were destroyed or swapped for pre-filled ones.

  The ground had been prepared at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where Stalin presented Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill with a situation already decided by force. Soviet armed forces occupied Poland; communists ran its administration. Stalin agreed to allow a coalition government while ensuring communists held the key posts. The Provisional Government of National Unity, formed in June 1946, was designed to look like compromise while functioning as control.

  By 1948, the communists had merged their party with one faction of the Polish Socialist Party to form the Polish United Workers' Party, known simply inside Poland as "the Party." It would hold a monopoly on political power until 1989. Gomułka himself, who had never fully accepted Stalin's authority over Polish communists, was pushed out in favour of the more compliant Bierut.

• 3. The Iron Grip and Its Limits

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  The Ministry of Public Security, later succeeded by the Security Service, ran Poland's apparatus of repression. The official police force, renamed Milicja Obywatelska, along with its elite ZOMO squads, conducted mass surveillance and violently suppressed protests. At least 22,000 people were killed by the regime across its existence, according to political scientist R. J. Rummel.

  Poland nonetheless remained, by the standards of the Eastern Bloc, its most liberal member. It was the only communist country in the world with no communist symbols on its flag or coat of arms. The White Eagle, a symbol established by Polish monarchs in the Middle Ages, stayed as the national emblem. Only the crown was removed, deemed monarchist by the new rulers.

  Agriculture told a similar story of limits. The land reform issued by the Polish Committee of National Liberation on the 6th of September 1944 nationalised all estates over 0.5 km2 in pre-war Polish territories without compensation. Yet the collectivisation of farming never advanced as far in Poland as it did in the Soviet Union or other Eastern Bloc countries. Poland remained the only Eastern Bloc state where individual farmers dominated agriculture.

  Cardinal Primate Stefan Wyszyński found a narrow path through these contradictions. By signing an agreement of coexistence with the communist government, he managed to maintain and even strengthen the Polish church through a series of failed government leaders. When the communists placed him under house arrest from 1953 to 1956 for refusing to discipline priests who participated in anti-government activity, they made a miscalculation: the arrest only deepened public attachment to the church rather than weakening it.

• 4. The Golden Age That Collapsed

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  Edward Gierek came to power in December 1970 after widespread violent protests forced out Gomułka, whose government had abruptly raised prices on basic goods including food. Gierek's replacement strategy centred on massive borrowing, primarily from the United States and West Germany, to modernise Polish industry and import consumer goods.

  For a time it worked. The period is still remembered in Poland as the "Golden Age" of socialist rule. Warszawa Centralna railway station, completed in the 1970s under Gierek's personal patronage, was the most modern station in that part of Europe when finished, equipped with automatic glass doors and escalators that were genuinely unusual in communist countries.

  But the model depended on conditions that could not last. The 1973 energy crisis ended the spending streak. By 1980, Poland's foreign debt had reached US$23 billion. The country was forced to export food and coal to service that debt, leaving shop shelves increasingly bare. In 1981, Poland formally notified the Club de Paris, a group of Western European central banks, of its insolvency.

  The distortions spread into daily life in ways that corroded the regime's legitimacy. The U.S. dollar became a parallel currency, unobtainable at official rates and essential for buying Western goods. An entire illegal industry of street-corner money changers emerged. These so-called Cinkciarze offered exchange rates far better than the official ones, growing wealthy from the gap, at least until they paid bribes to the Milicja to stay in business. State-run Pewex and Baltona stores in every Polish city accepted only hard currency. The government even printed its own ersatz U.S. currency, the bony PeKaO, to recapture dollars flowing in from emigrant families. Polish cities acquired unfinished buildings as testament to cancelled 1970s projects; the Szkieletor skyscraper in Kraków stood incomplete for decades.

• 5. Nine Million and a Polish Pope

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  On the 16th of October 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Kraków was elected Pope and took the name John Paul II. Gierek is alleged to have said to his cabinet: "O God, what are we going to do now?" or, in another reported version, "Jesus and Mary, this is the end."

  When John Paul II made his first papal tour of Poland in June 1979, half a million people heard him speak in Warsaw alone. He did not call for rebellion. Instead he encouraged the creation of what he called an "alternative Poland" of social institutions independent of the government, so that when the next economic crisis arrived, the nation would present a united front.

  The next crisis was already arriving. Labour strikes undermined Gierek's weakened government, and in September 1980, in part as a consequence of the Pope's visit, the independent trade union Solidarity was formed, initially led by Lech Wałęsa. Solidarity grew beyond a labour organisation into a broad anti-communist social movement, drawing together people associated with the Catholic Church and members of the anti-Stalinist left. By the end of 1981 it had nine million members, a quarter of Poland's entire population and three times as many members as the Polish United Workers' Party itself.

  On the 13th of December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski proclaimed martial law, suspended Solidarity, and temporarily imprisoned most of its leaders, reportedly out of fear that the Soviet Union would intervene directly. The organisation was formally banned on the 8th of October 1982. Martial law was lifted in July 1983, but food rationing, ration cards called Kartki required even for milk and sugar, and heightened controls on civil liberties persisted through the mid-to-late 1980s. Solidarity continued as an underground organisation through the middle of that decade, and by the late 1980s had sufficient strength to frustrate Jaruzelski's reform attempts and help force the nationwide strikes of 1988.

• 6. The Murder of Jerzy Popiełuszko

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  On the night of the 19th of October 1984, Jerzy Popiełuszko, a 37-year-old Roman Catholic priest who served as a chaplain of Solidarity, was kidnapped by three agents of the Security Service. His body was thrown into the Vistula River. Roughly ten days later, it was discovered at a reservoir.

  The assassination sparked outrage among ordinary Poles who attended Mass. Popiełuszko had been a figure of the underground resistance through his religious role, and his murder by agents of the state laid bare the nature of the regime in a way that no abstract argument could. The killing did not silence the opposition. It deepened its reach.

• 7. The Roundtable and the End

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  From the 6th of February to the 15th of April 1989, thirteen working groups met across 94 sessions in what became known as the Roundtable Talks. The Polish United Workers' Party agreed to abandon power and fundamentally alter the country's structure.

  In June 1989, shortly after the Tiananmen Square protests in China, Poland held its first competitive elections in decades. Solidarity took all of the contested 35 percent of seats in the Sejm, the Parliament's lower house, and all but one seat in the newly elected Senate, to the surprise of both the opposition and the government.

  Solidarity then persuaded the communists' longtime subordinate parties, the United People's Party and the Democratic Party, to switch their allegiance. Jaruzelski, named president in July, was effectively forced to appoint a Solidarity member as prime minister. Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist prime minister since 1948.

  On the 10th of December 1989, the statue of Vladimir Lenin was removed in Warsaw. On the 29th of December 1989, Parliament amended the constitution to formally rescind the party's constitutionally guaranteed power and restore democracy and civil liberties. The Polish United Workers' Party was disbanded on the 30th of January 1990. The Warsaw Pact itself was dissolved on the 1st of July 1991. The last post-Soviet troops left Polish soil on the 18th of September 1993. After ten years of democratic consolidation, Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, completing a journey that had begun with nine million people and a trade union on the Baltic coast.