The history of Poland from 1945 to 1989 spans the period of Marxist–Leninist regime in Poland after the end of World War II. These years, while featuring general industrialization, urbanization and many improvements in the standard of living,[a1] were marred by early Stalinist repressions, social unrest, political strife and severe economic difficulties. Near the end of World War II, the advancing Soviet Red Army, along with the Polish Armed Forces in the East, pushed out the Nazi German forces from occupied Poland. In February 1945, the Yalta Conference sanctioned the formation of a provisional government of Poland from a compromise coalition, until postwar elections. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, manipulated the implementation of that ruling. A practically communist-controlled Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in Warsaw by ignoring the Polish government-in-exile based in London since 1940.
During the subsequent Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945, the three major Allies ratified a massive westerly shift of Poland's borders and approved its new territory between the Oder–Neisse line and the Curzon Line. The area of Poland was reduced in comparison to its pre-World War II extent and geographically resembled that of the medieval early Piast dynasty era. Following the destruction of the Polish-Jewish population in the Holocaust, the flight and expulsion of Germans in the west, resettlement of Ukrainians in the east, and the expulsion and resettlement of Poles from the Eastern Borderlands (Kresy), Poland became for the first time in its history an ethnically homogeneous nation-state without prominent minorities. The new government solidified its political power, while the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) under Bolesław Bierut gained firm control over the country, which would remain an independent state within the Soviet sphere of influence. The July Constitution was promulgated on 22 July 1952 and the country officially became the Polish People's Republic (PRL).
Following Stalin's death in 1953, a political "thaw" allowed a more liberal faction of the Polish communists, led by Władysław Gomułka, to gain power. By the mid-1960s, Poland began experiencing increasing economic as well as political difficulties. They culminated in the 1968 Polish political crisis and the 1970 Polish protests when a consumer price hike led to a wave of strikes. The government introduced a new economic program based on large-scale loans from western creditors, which resulted in a rise in living standards and expectations, but the program meant growing integration of Poland's economy with the world economy and it faltered after the 1973 oil crisis. In 1976, the government of Edward Gierek was forced to raise prices again which led to the June 1976 protests.
This cycle of repression and reform[b] and the economic-political struggle acquired new characteristics with the 1978 election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II. Wojtyła's unexpected elevation strengthened the opposition to the authoritarian and ineffective system of nomenklatura-run state socialism, especially with the pope's first visit to Poland in 1979. In early August 1980, a new wave of strikes resulted in the founding of the independent trade union "Solidarity" (Solidarność) led by Lech Wałęsa. The growing strength and activity of the opposition caused the government of Wojciech Jaruzelski to declare martial law in December 1981. However, with the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, increasing pressure from the West, and dysfunctional economy, the regime was forced to negotiate with its opponents. The 1989 Round Table Talks led to Solidarity's participation in the 1989 election. Its candidates' striking victory gave rise to the first of the succession of transitions from communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1990, Jaruzelski resigned from the presidency following the presidential election and was succeeded by Wałęsa.
Establishment of communist-ruled Poland (1944–1948)
Border and population shifts
Before World War II, a third of Poland's population was composed of ethnic minorities. Poland had about 35 million inhabitants in 1939, but fewer than 24 million within its borders in 1946. Of the remaining population, over three million were ethnic minorities such as Germans, Ukrainians and Jews, most of whom soon left Poland. Poland suffered the heaviest proportionate human losses in World War II, some 16–17 percent of its population. Estimated deaths of Polish citizens from war-related causes between 1939 and 1945 range up to 6 million. This approximate figure includes 3 million Polish Jews victims. Ethnically Polish victims numbered perhaps 2 million.
Historical minorities in Poland were most significantly affected, and Poland's multiethnic diversity, reflected in prior national censuses was all but gone within a few years after the war. The Polish educated class suffered greatly. Many of the country's pre-war social and political elite perished or were dispersed.
The reconstruction of Poland was accompanied by the struggle of the new government for centralized authority, further complicated by widespread mistrust of the new regime and disputes over Poland's postwar borders, not firmly established until mid-1945. Soviet forces plundered of the former eastern territories of Germany transferred to Poland, stripping them of valuable industrial equipment, infrastructure and factories, assets they set to Russia.
After Soviet annexation of the Kresy territories east of the Curzon Line, about 2 million Poles were moved, transferred or expelled into the new western and northern territories east of the Oder–Neisse line, transferred from Germany to Poland under the Potsdam Agreement. Others stayed in what had become the Soviet Union and more went to Poland after 1956. Additional settlement with people from central Poland brought the number of Poles in what the government called the Recovered Territories up to 5 million by 1950. Most of the former German population of 10 million had fled or been expelled to post-war Germany by 1950: about 4.4 million in the final stages of the war and 3.5 million removed by Polish authorities in 1945–1949. The expulsion of the Germans was the result of Allied decisions finalized in Potsdam.[b1]
With the expulsion of Ukrainians and Belarusians from Poland to the Soviet Union and the 1947 Operation Vistula dispersing the remaining Ukrainians in Poland, and with most of the Polish Jews exterminated by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust and many of the survivors emigrating to the West and to newly created Israel, Poland for the first time became an ethnically homogeneous nation-state. Government-imposed and voluntary migrations amounted to one of the greatest demographic upheavals in European history.
Unlike other European countries, Poland continued the extensive prosecution of both Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators into the 1950s. According to Alexander Prusin, Poland was the most consistent in investigating and prosecuting war crimes among the post-war communist nations; between 1944 and 1985 Polish courts tried over 20,000 defendants including 5,450 German nationals.
Rebuilding of infrastructure and economy
Poland suffered catastrophic damage to its infrastructure during the war, which caused it to lag even further behind the West in its industrial output. The losses in national resources and infrastructure amounted to over 30% of the pre-war potential. Poland's capital of Warsaw was among the most devastated cities – over 80 percent destroyed in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Polish state acquired more highly developed western territories and lost the more economically backward eastern regions. Already in 1948 the prewar level of industrial production was exceeded in global and per capita terms during the Three-Year Plan (Plan Trzyletni), implemented first and fueled by the collective desire to rebuild shattered lives. The Three-Year Plan was the work of the Central Planning Office led by Czesław Bobrowski and PPR economist Hilary Minc, who declared the need to preserve elements of market capitalism. Standard of living of the population of Poland markedly improved. Soviet pressure caused the Polish government to reject the American-sponsored Marshall Plan in 1947 and to join the Soviet Union-dominated Comecon in 1949.
Warsaw and other ruined cities were cleared of rubble — mainly by hand — and rebuilt with great speed (one of the successes of the Three-Year Plan) at the expense of former German cities like Wrocław, which often provided the needed construction material.
Historian Norman Davies wrote that the new Polish frontiers, from the Polish interests point of view, entirely advantageous, but realized at the cost of enormous suffering and specious justifications. The radically new Eastern European borders constituted a "colossal feat of political engineering", but could not be derived from immemorial historical determinations, as claimed by the communist propaganda.
Consolidation of communist power
Before the Red Army even entered Poland, the Soviet Union pursued a strategy of eliminating pro-Western resistance there, in order to ensure that Poland would fall under its sphere of influence. In 1943, after the revelation of the Katyn massacre, Stalin suspended relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet Union agreed to allow a coalition government of communists, including the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR), and Polish pro-Western elements in exile and in Poland, and subsequently to arrange for free elections to be held.
The prewar Communist Party of Poland was eliminated in Stalin's purges in 1938; some five thousand Polish communists were sent to Russia and killed), a group of survivors led by Marceli Nowotko, Bolesław Mołojec and Paweł Finder in 1941 convinced the Soviets to reestablish a Polish party. The conspiratorial core of the new Polish Workers' Party assembled in Warsaw in January 1942, and after the deaths or arrests of its leaders there, Władysław Gomułka emerged as the PPR's first secretary by the end of 1943. Gomułka was a dedicated communist in the tradition of the Polish leftist movement. He loathed the Soviet practices he experienced while being trained in Russia and Ukraine in the 1930s, but was convinced of the historic necessity of allying with the Soviet Union. He may have survived the purges because of his imprisonment in Poland for illegal labor-organizing activities in 1938–39.
Gomułka remained in Poland throughout the German occupation, and was not part of the circle Stalin and Wanda Wasilewska organized in the Soviet Union around the Union of Polish Patriots. Gomułka's party was small in comparison to other political groups in the Poland of 1945.
With the liberation of Polish territories and the failure of the Home Army's Operation Tempest in 1944, control over what was to become post-war Poland passed from Nazi Germany to the Red Army, and from the Red Army to Polish communists, who formed the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN), an early government in existence from late July 1944 in Lublin. Polish communists became the most influential Polish factor in the politics of the new Poland, despite tiny support initially. The PKWN recognized the legal continuity of the March Constitution of Poland, as opposed to the April Constitution.
On 6 September 1944, the PKWN issued its momentous land reform decree, which fundamentally altered the antiquated social and economic structure of the country. Over one million peasant families benefited from the parcellation of the larger estates.
The communists, favored by the Yalta decisions, enjoyed the advantages of Soviet support within Soviet plans to bring Eastern Europe firmly under the influence of the Soviet Union; they exercised control over crucial government departments such as the security services. Beginning in late 1944, after the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising and the promotion of PKWN populist, the exiled government delegation from London was increasingly seen by Poles as a failed enterprise, its political-military organizations became isolated, and resistance against Communist political and administrative forces decisively weakened. The population, tired of the years of oppression and conflict, found the ideas of the PKWN Manifesto and their progressive implementation increasingly attractive. Beyond land reform, the PKWN Manifesto called for no further radical changes in ownership, and nationalization of industry was not mentioned. Business property was supposed to return to its owners as economic relations became properly regulated. Responding to promulgated slogans, workers in liberated areas starting in 1944 spontaneously took over existing factories, established workers' councils, and undertook reconstruction, activation and production. Considerable struggle and compulsion were necessary for the PPR to claim the factories and enforce its own rules.
The PKWN was reshaped into the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland (Rząd Tymczasowy Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, RTRP), which functioned from January 1945 on. This government was headed by Edward Osóbka-Morawski, a socialist, but the communists, mostly non-PPR Soviet employees such as Michał Rola-Żymierski, held a majority of key posts. A Polish-Soviet treaty of friendship and cooperation signed in April 1945 severely limited future Western or émigré impact or internal cooperation with non-communist political forces in Poland.
The Yalta agreement stipulated a governmental union in Poland of "all democratic and anti-Nazi elements". Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk of the Polish government-in-exile resigned his post in November 1944 and having accepted the Yalta terms, went to Moscow and negotiated with Bolesław Bierut the shape of a "national unity" government". Mikołajczyk, and several other exiled Polish leaders returned to Poland in July 1945.
The new Polish Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej, TRJN), as the Polish government was called until the elections of 1947, was established on 28 June 1945. Edward Osóbka-Morawski remained as prime minister, Gomułka became first deputy prime minister and Mikołajczyk second deputy and minister of agriculture. The government was "provisional" and the Potsdam Conference soon declared that free elections must be held and a permanent constitutional system established.
The communists' principal rivals were veteran activists of the Polish Underground State, Mikołajczyk's Polish People's Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, PSL), and veterans of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Mikołajczyk's People's Party, originally a peasant formation, was particularly important because it was legally recognized by the communists and thus could function in the Polish political arena. The People's Party wanted to prevent the communists from monopolizing power and also to eventually establish a parliamentary polity with a market economy by winning the promised elections. Mikołajczyk hoped that an independent Polish state, friendly with the Soviet Union, would be allowed to act as a bridge between the East and the West.
Soviet-oriented parties, backed by the Soviet Red Army and in control of the security forces, held most of the power, concentrated especially in the Polish Workers' Party under Gomułka and Bierut. Bierut represented the influx of appointees to the Polish party coming (during and after the war) from the Soviet Union and imposed by the Soviets, a process accelerated at the time of the PPR Congress of December 1945. The party's membership dramatically increased from perhaps a few thousand in early 1945 to over one million in 1948.