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POLSKA LUDOWA:
The Polish 'People's Republic' (since 1944)
In its essentials, the political history of post-war Poland is extremely simple. It
tells how the USSR handed power to its chosen proteges, and how it has kept
them in place ever since. In detail, however, it is extremely complicated, and
largely hidden from public view. The relationship between Moscow and
Moscow's men in Warsaw, both communist and non-communist, has seen sev-
eral abrupt changes of fortune. What is more, the degree of leeway of the Polish
regime, though always subject to ultimate Soviet sanctions, has usually been
underrated by outside observers. There are three distinct phases. The first, from
1944 to 1948, witnessed the gradual construction of the communist 'People's
Democracy'; the second, from 1948 to 1956, saw the imposition of Stalinism; the
third, since 1956, has seen Poland ruled by a native, 'national Communist'
regime.
Yet politics are not the whole story. Any sympathetic description must surely
match Poland's atrophied political development against the advances in social
and cultural life and the real achievements of reconstruction from the ruins of
the War.^1
According to the official mythology of the resultant Communist regime, the ori-
gins of the post-war political order in Poland were to be traced to 2.2 July 1944. On
that day - whose anniversary subsequeltly replaced 3 May as Poland's official
'National Day' - the first post-war administration, the Polish Committee of
National Liberation (PKWN), was formed under Soviet auspices in Lublin. (In
reality, Lublin on zz July 1944 was still run by the Home Army (AK), who had
recently taken it from the retreating Germans; part of the Committee had just
landed in Chelm from Moscow; and the Committee's Manifesto had not been
properly endorsed by all of its supposed signatories.) At all events, 'the Lublin
Committee', as it came to be known abroad, crystallized in late July to assist its
Soviet masters in administering the lands liberated from German Occupation, and
in due course formed the core both of the Provisional Government of the Polish
Republic (RTRP) from January to June 1945, and of the Provisional Government
of National Unity (TRJN) from June 1945 onwards. In this way, its activities
spanned the transitional period which separated the collapse of the German
Occupation from the full emergence of the communist-led regime in 1947.