Poland - History

The land now known as Poland was sparsely populated in prehistoric times. Slavic tribes are believed to have begun settling Poland more than 2,000 years ago, but by AD 800, the population was probably no more than one million. Rulers of the Piast dynasty united the Polish tribes of the Vistula and Oder basins about the middle of the 10th century. In 966, Mieszko I, a member of this dynasty, was baptized, and consequently Poland became a Christian nation. Thirty-three years later, his eldest son and successor, Boleslaw I ("the Brave"; r.992–1025), secured recognition of Polish sovereignty from Holy Roman Emperor Otto III.

During the next three centuries, Poland was continually embroiled in conflicts with the Germans to the west and with the Eastern Slavs and the Mongol invaders to the east, while developing cultural relations with the Western civilizations. Foreign penetration and internal difficulties led to the division of Poland among members of the Piast dynasty. Under Casimir III ("the Great"; r.1333–70), the last of the Piast rulers, Poland was restored to unity and greatness. Casimir made peace with the Teutonic Knights, added Galicia to the realm, and welcomed Jewish refugees from the west; internally, law was codified, administration centralized, and a university was established at Cracow in 1364. In 1386, a Polish-Lithuanian federal union was created through a dynastic marriage, which also gave birth to the Jagellonian dynasty, named for Jagello, grand duke of Lithuania, who ruled Poland as Ladislas II (1386–1434). The union extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea and held control over other territories in Central Europe, notably West Prussia and Pomerania. The combined forces of the union annihilated the Teutonic Knights in 1410, in the Battle of Grunewald. In order to preserve the union during the reign of Sigismund II (1548–72), the last of the Jagellonians, provisions were made for an elective monarch to be chosen by a single parliament (Sejm) for Poland and Lithuania.

Although the 16th century marked the golden age of Polish literature and scholarship, its political reforms contributed to the nation's subsequent decline. The Polish gentry ( szlachta ) had progressively gained influence and power at the expense of the king. Meeting in the Sejm, the gentry adopted the legislative practice whereby a single dissenting voice was sufficient to prevent passage. The nobility imposed such far-reaching limitations upon the monarchy that national unity and integrity could not be maintained. Internal disorders, including the Cossack and peasant uprising (1648–49) led by Bogdan Chmielnicki against Polish domination of the Ukraine—a revolt that struck with particular ferocity against Polish Jews, many of whom had served as agents of the nobility in administering Ukrainian lands—further weakened the nation. In 1683, Polish and German troops led by John III Sobieski (r.1674–96) rescued Vienna from a Turkish siege, but in wars with Sweden, Russia, and other states, Poland fared poorly. A Russian, Prussian, and Austrian agreement led to the first partitioning of Poland in 1772; the second (1793) and third (1795) partitions led to the demise of Poland as a sovereign state. Galicia was ruled by Austria-Hungary, northwestern Poland by Prussia, and the Ukraine and eastern and central Poland by Russia, which extended its domains to include the Duchy of Warsaw, reconstituted as the Kingdom of Poland (under Russian imperial rule) at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Poles rebelled in 1830 and 1863 against the tsarist rulers, but each insurrection was suppressed. However, the peasants were emancipated by Prussia in 1823, by Austria in 1849, and by Russia in 1864. Galicia, which won partial autonomy from Austria following the Habsburg monarchy's constitutional reforms, became the cultural center of the Poles.

With the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, Poland regained its independence. On 18 November 1918, Józef Pilsudski, leader of the prewar anti-Russian independence movement, formed a civilian government. The Soviet army, meanwhile, began a westward advance that was met by a Polish counteroffensive. The conflict, in which Poland, seeking a return to its 1772 eastern border, was aided by France, ended with the Treaty of Riga in 1921, under which Galicia was restored to Poland.

Poland struggled through the next two decades plagued by economic deterioration and political instability, and by increasingly menacing pressures from its Soviet and German neighbors. Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, overrunning the country in eight days. Meanwhile, the USSR occupied the Lithuanian region on 17 September, although Poland had nonaggression treaties with both the USSR and Germany. By 1941, Nazi forces were brutally oppressing large segments of the Polish population while looting Poland's industrial sector and major resources—timber, coal, and wheat. Ghettos were set up in Warsaw and other cities for Jews, and numerous concentration camps were established on Polish territory, including the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where at least one million people perished between 1940 and 1944. Poland as a whole suffered tremendous losses in life and property during World War II. An estimated six million Poles were killed, half of them Jews; 2.5 million were deported for compulsory labor in Germany; more than 500,000 were permanently crippled; and the remaining population suffered virtual starvation throughout the Nazi occupation. Losses in property were evaluated at z258 billion (more than US $50 billion).

The seeds of Poland's postwar political history were sown long before the war ended. A Polish government-in-exile was set up in France and later in the United Kingdom. Units of the Polish army fought with the Allies while in Poland underground groups, organized along political lines, maintained resistance activities. The Armia Krajowa (home army) was the major non-Communist resistance group. In July 1944, the Polish National Council, a Soviet-backed resistance group, set up the Polish Committee of National Liberation as a provisional government in liberated Lublin, declaring the émigré Polish government illegal. On 17 January 1945, Warsaw was liberated by the Soviet and Polish armies, and the provisional government moved to the capital. At Yalta, the Allies agreed to accept the Curzon line, thereby awarding the USSR nearly half of former Polish territory (including Galicia) in return for a Soviet agreement to broaden the political base of the provisional government with the addition of non-Communist Polish leaders. After subsequent negotiations, the Provisional Government of National Unity was formally recognized by the United States and United Kingdom in July 1945.

A bloc of four parties dominated by the Communists won the elections of January 1947. The Communists and the Socialists merged in December 1948 to form the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). The PZPR consistently followed a pro-Soviet policy. Domestically, the party pursued a reconstruction program stressing agriculture and industrial development. It shunned the Marshall Plan and, in its first two decades, renounced all dealings with the Western powers.

The first decade of Communist rule was dominated by tensions with the Roman Catholic Church and the question of Soviet influence, as symbolized by Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Soviet general of Polish birth who became Poland's defense minister in 1949 and served as deputy prime minister from 1952 until his resignation four years later. Rising nationalist sentiment, heightened by stagnating economic conditions, led to worker riots in Poznán on 28–29 July 1956. In response to the unrest, a new Polish Politburo, headed by Wladyslaw Gomulka (who had been purged from the PZPR in 1949 and subsequently imprisoned because of his nationalist leanings), introduced liberalizations, including the abolition of farm collectivization, and improved relations with the Church. By the late 1950s, however, the reform movement had been halted, and the government took a harder line against dissent. In 1968 there were student demonstrations against the government in the university centers; the Gomulka regime countered with a political offensive in which many government officials and party members accused of anti-Socialist or pro-Zionist sentiments were removed from office, and an estimated 12,000 Polish Jews left Poland.

Two years later, following a drought in 1969 and an exceptionally severe winter, demonstrations by shipyard workers in Gdánsk broke out on 16 December 1970 protesting economic conditions, including the planned implementation of a new incentive system (threatening the existing system of bonuses and overtime pay) and an announced rise in food prices. After widespread violence, in which at least 44 people were killed, Edward Gierek, a member of the Politburo, succeeded Gomulka as first secretary on 20 December. Another strike began in Szczecin on 23 January 1971. The government then postponed the controversial incentive system and froze prices at their new levels. After receiving a substantial long-term Soviet grant (estimated at $100 million), the Polish government rolled back prices to their pre-December 1970 levels, and labor peace was restored. In a move to bolster his support, Gierek reinstated Church control over thousands of religious properties in northwestern Poland to which the government had held title since 1945.

During the 1970s, Gierek's government vigorously pursued a policy of détente with the West. Three US presidents visited Poland and Gierek himself traveled to the United States and to several West European countries. Peace agreements governing the Oder-Neisse line and formally recognizing Polish sovereignty in former German territories were concluded with the FRG, and trade pacts were signed with the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Austria, and other nations.

As Polish trade with the West increased, so did Poland's indebtedness to Western creditors. In 1976, the government announced food price increases but had to rescind them after the workers responded by striking. During the next several years, the economic situation kept deteriorating, and Polish nationalism— buoyed in 1978 by the election of the archbishop of Cracow to the papacy as John Paul II—continued to rise. In July 1980, new meat price increases were announced, and within a few weeks, well-organized workers all over Poland demanded a series of economic and political concessions. The center of labor activity was the Lenin Shipyard in Gdánsk, where, in an historic public ceremony on 31 August, government officials agreed to allow workers the right to form independent trade unions and the right to strike. The independent labor movement Solidarity, headed by Lech Walesa, the leader of the Gdánsk workers, emerged in early September and soon claimed a membership of about 10 million. That month, Stanislaw Kania replaced Gierek as party first secretary.

For more than a year, the government and Solidarity leaders negotiated, with Catholic Church officials often acting as mediators. As Solidarity became more and more overtly political—demanding, for example, free parliamentary elections—Poland's Communist leaders came under increasing pressure from the USSR to stop the "anti-Socialist" and "anti-Soviet" forces. On 18 October 1981, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, prime minister since February, replaced Kania as PZPR first secretary. On 13 December, after union leaders in Gdánsk called for a national referendum on forming a non-Communist government in Poland, Jaruzelski set up the Military Council for National Salvation and declared martial law. Almost the whole leadership of Solidarity, including Walesa, was arrested, and the union was suspended. Despite further strikes and rioting, which resulted in several deaths, the military had soon gained complete control. More than 10,000 people were arrested and detained for up to 12 months, and all rights and freedoms gained in the preceding year and a half were abolished. In January 1982, the United States imposed sanctions against Poland, including withdrawal of most-favored-nation status, veto of Poland's entry into the IMF, and suspension of fishing rights in US waters and of LOT flights to the United States. Protests and rioting continued sporadically into 1983, and some Solidarity leaders remained active underground, but these disturbances did not seriously threaten the military regime. On 22 July 1983, the government formally ended martial law and proclaimed an amnesty, but a series of legislative measures had meanwhile institutionalized many of the powers the government had exercised during the emergency, including the power to dissolve organizations, forbid public meetings, and run the universities.

The internal political situation stabilized to such a degree that in July 1984 the government proclaimed a general amnesty, and the United States began to lift its sanctions the following month (the last sanctions were lifted in early 1987). In October, however, an outspoken priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by two secret police officers. In an unprecedented step, the government, in February 1985, permitted a trial to take place; four security officers charged with complicity in the killing were convicted and sentenced (two to 25 years each, one to 15, and one to 14). Another amnesty was proclaimed in September 1986, leading to the release of all remaining political prisoners.

The efforts of the Jaruzelski government to restore order were largely successful on the political level, for Poland remained a comparatively tolerant and progressive Eastern Bloc nation. Economically, however, the country proved impervious to incremental change. Continued declines in standards of living led to waves of strikes throughout Poland in spring and fall 1988, essentially paralyzing the nation. Significantly, the demands of strikers, most led by Solidarity, began to become political as well as economic.

By November 1987 public antipathy had so grown that, hoping to avoid repetition of strikes caused by the necessity to raise prices, the government called for the first public referendum to be held in Poland for more than 40 years, which also was the first open election to be held within the Warsaw Pact. Although the ballot itself asked only for public support of an accelerated economic reform package, the people of Poland understood the referendum to be a vote of confidence in the government itself. The final tally was approximately two-thirds in support of the government, but because of a Solidarity-inspired voter boycott, just 67% of the eligible voters cast their ballots. By the rules of the election, this meant that the referendum had failed to pass, making this a first-ever defeat for the government.

In autumn 1988, the entire government resigned, making clear that talks with labor activists were unavoidable. The negotiations leading up to the so-called "round-table talks," which finally opened in February 1989, were delicate and prolonged, as were the negotiations themselves. However, in April 1989 agreement was reached on a number of unprecedented concessions: Solidarity was recognized as a legal entity; the post of president was created, to be filled by legislative appointment; some antigovernment media were permitted legal operation; and the Catholic Church was given full legal status. Perhaps the most far reaching agreement, though, was to establish a senate, complementing the existing Sejm, with the seats to be filled by open election, in June 1989. In addition, 35% of the seats in the Sejm were also made subject to direct election.

The government made it as difficult as it could for opposition candidates to run: only two months were allowed in which candidates could gather the petitions necessary to get on the ballot, and the ballots themselves listed candidates alphabetically, with no indication of party affiliation. However, these attempts only served to make Solidarity's victory more resounding; 99 of the 100 seats in the Senate went to Solidarity members. Even more striking, many government candidates in the Sejm managed to even lose seats because voters crossed out the names of unopposed government candidates, thus denying them the necessary 50% of the total votes cast.

In June 1989, the newly elected parliament named General Wojciech Jaruzelski Poland's president by the slenderest of margins, 270 to 233, with 34 abstentions, making plain how dependent the Communists now were on Solidarity. Even so, the thought of a Solidarity-led government seemed impossible, even to many of the union's members. Thus the first prime minister under the new arrangement was General Czeslaw Kiszczak, named 2 August 1989.

However, impatience with the obviously discredited Communists was growing, feeding support for a formula advanced by senior Solidarity activist Adam Michnik, "Your President, Our Prime Minister." After a mere 15 days in office, General Kiszczak succumbed to this pressure and resigned.

Although it was widely expected that Lech Walesa might lead the first Solidarity government, he demurred, instead putting forward Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who took office on 24 August 1989, the first non-Communist prime minister in the eastern bloc.

The wave of "velvet revolutions" across Eastern Europe that autumn accelerated the de-Sovietization of Polish government. Freely contested local elections were held in May 1990, further weakening the Communists' grip on power.

Although Jaruzelski had been elected to a six-year term as president, Walesa made it known in early 1990 that he was now prepared to stand for president in open elections. Jaruzelski resigned in September 1990, opening the way for new elections.

Although there were six major candidates, across a political spectrum from ultranationalist to ex-communist, the race was widely assumed to be between Walesa and Mazowiecki, each of whom offered variations on a Solidarity presidency. Ironically, the movement's victory over Communism had also exposed dissension, which had lain dormant during the years of struggle, now fracturing the movement into several rival factions.

The results of the 25 November preliminary election were a major political shock. Although the leader, Walesa had managed to get only 40% of the vote, second place was taken by Stanislaw Tyminski, a mysterious expatriate with a shadowy past, who took 23% of the popular vote. Mazowiecki received only 18%, provoking widespread fears of ill-defined but professionally managed conspiracies to stop the advance of Polish democracy.

However, in the runoff with Walesa, held 9 December 1990, Tyminski received just under 25% of the vote. Although the Canadian expatriate made some attempts to consolidate his popularity in a party, by the parliamentary elections of 1993 Tyminski's popularity had so diminished that his Party X received less than 3% of the vote.

After 1990, the success of Poland's "revolution," combined with economic dislocations caused by the country's rapid transition to a market economy, also demonstrated some of the drawbacks of ongoing democratization. The number of political parties ballooned, diluting the impact that any one party or group of parties was able to have, making it difficult to undertake such complex and contentious issues as large-scale privatization, economic rationalization of Soviet-era giant industry, and fundamental constitutional revision. The October 1991 election saw 69 parties competing, with 29 actually winning seats, none of them with more than 14% of the vote. Inevitably this resulted in coalition governments without clear mandates, giving Poland five prime ministers and four governments in 1991–93. Even so, the parliament enacted important legislation in that period, including the "Little Constitution" of 17 October 1992, which in the absence of a complete constitution provides much of the necessary framework for a democratic society.

This proliferation of parties reflected disparities among the electorate that emerged once the communists had been removed as a unifying focus for opposition. In addition to tensions between the clear winners and losers which economic transformation were producing, splits also became more apparent between the 40% of Poland which is rural, and thus desirous of continued protection for small-plot agriculture, and the 60% which is urban, and wishing to open Poland to European imports and influence. Also important were growing tensions between secular intellectuals and the powerful Catholic Church, which moved to assert close control on social issues like abortion, school curriculum, and women's role in society.

These issues, exacerbated by continued economic strains and growing uncertainty about the course of post-Communist Russia, contributed to the unexpected return to power of many ex-Communists in the September 1993 parliamentary elections. In that election the number of parties had dropped to 35, of which only five, plus a coalition, received seats. However the two most popular parties, the Polish Peasant Party (15.4%) and the Democratic Left Alliance (20.4%), were made up largely of ex-Communists or other figures from the governments of the past. Their influence was further amplified by voting rules which assigned the cumulative votes for parties which failed to reach the necessary thresholds for gaining seats to winning parties, thus giving the two "ex-Communist" parties a comfortable two-thirds majority.

This apparent rejection of the gains of Solidarity and the democrats was variously interpreted as a rejection of "shock-therapy" economic transformation, as the electorate's nostalgia for the more ordered life of the past, and as a vote against the Catholic Church, or at least its social agenda, the power of which had grown under Solidarity and its progeny. Another factor frequently mentioned was the greater professionalism of the ex-Communists, who ran much more effective campaigns than did most of their opponents. Finally, Walesa and his supporters were also seen to be suffering because they are now the responsible authorities and hence provide the same target for opposition which they once found in the Communists.

However, local elections held 19 June 1994 suggest that fears of some return to Communism under the new government have proven unfounded. Voters demonstrated the ability to select representatives who would serve their own interests, returning about 20% of the incumbents to local office and selecting other officials from across a broad political spectrum. The Democratic Left Alliance and Polish Peasant Party retained their dominance, but centrist and right-of-center parties also did well. This suggests that, although they differ from their predecessors on the pace of Poland's economic transformation, the government of Polish Peasant Party leader Waldemar Pawlak, and his Democratic Left Alliance partner, Aleksander Kwasniewski (also head of the Constitutional Commission), remained generally committed to Poland's course of democratization and economic transition. The Constitution Commission proposed a new constitution that passed the National Assembly in April 1997, and was approved in a national referendum on 23 May 1997.

Aleksander Kwasniewski was elected president to a five-year term on 23 December 1995 with 51.7% of the popular vote, to Lech Walesa's 48.3%. In 1997, NATO invited Poland, along with the Czech Republic and Hungary, to join the alliance; the three countries became members in March 1999.

Presidential elections held on 9 October 2000 returned Kwasniewski to office; he received 53.9% of the vote on the first ballot to non-party candidate Andrzej Olechowski's 17.3% and Solidarity chairman Marian Krzaklewski's 15.6%. Walesa received only 0.8% of the vote. Extreme right-wing candidates did not fare well, including Andrzej Lepper of the farmers' trade union Samoobrona (Self-Defense of the Polish Republic), although the party gained 53 seats in the Sejm in 2001. Parliamentary elections were held on 23 September 2001, and Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek's center-right coalition Solidarity Electoral Action of the Right (AWSP) lost to Leszek Miller's Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) in coalition with the Labor Union (UP), a minor left-wing party. Miller's coalition gained a majority in parliament with the addition of the agrarian Polish People's Party's seats, to hold 258 of 460 seats in the Sejm.

At a summit held in Copenhagen on 12–13 December 2002, the EU formally invited Poland to join the body in 2004. In April 2003, Prime Minister Miller called for early parliamentary elections, to be held simultaneously with elections to the EU parliament in June 2004, or a year ahead of schedule. Poland was to vote on EU accession in June 2003, and surveys show popular resentment against the terms of entry imposed by the EU. In March 2003, the Polish People's Party was ejected from Miller's coalition over its failure to vote with the government on a tax proposal. Miller remained head of a minority government. As of early 2003, high unemployment and low growth in the context of the global economic downturn were a hindrance to governmental economic reform, but Miller's government has focused its efforts on reducing spending, easing conditions for business, reforming labor law, and investing in infrastructure, among other measures.