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This book is a political history of democratic elections in Poland from the first fully competitive parliamentary elections in 1991 to the unexpected, most recent election in 2007. Until now, there has been no equivalent study covering similar developments in this, or any other, post-communist country; this book fills the gap and provides a detailed electoral perspective on the trajectory of political development in the context of post-authoritarian change. It also provides an invaluable account of the evolution of electoral processes and institution-building in the context of democratic regime development. The major themes of the book centre on the complex, problematic development of Poland’s political parties and the parties’ failure to gain public support and win the confidence of the electorate. Frances Millard examines the failure of Polish elites; the lack of a stable party system and how elections have had a destabilizing effect, and she argues that the interaction of leadership volatility, party volatility, and electoral volatility have created uncertainty and undermined political parties as effective vehicles of representation. Poland is a large and important country, worthy of study in its own right, but equally many of the problems experienced are not unique to Poland; so this book also constitutes a comparative benchmark for analysis of democratic developments elsewhere.

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This book is a case study that investigates the social origins, the confessional and ethnic backgrounds, and the culture of work and leisure that constituted the lives of the provincial officials of Russian Poland from the 1870s through the 1900s. Preface By Dr. Robert E. Blobaum (University of West Virginia) In her new monograph, Katya Vladimirov gives us a rare, revealing and detailed glimpse into the world of the provincial bureaucracy in the western most corner of the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland. Vladimirov locates her study of the provincial bureaucracy in a relatively tranquil time in Russian Poland, following the January Insurrection of 1863 but before the Revolution of 1905, a period that offers both a fair consistency of demographic data about its members and a continuity of both personnel and attitudes for analysis. While most historians have portrayed the Russian imperial bureaucracy in Poland according to unchallenged stereotypes, which do more to support a mythical national Polish narrative than historical scholarship, Vladimirov sees its members in terms of their actual individual and corporate identities, interests, aspirations, and prejudices.And while her findings in the end may not be any more flattering to that bureaucracy, they are nonetheless far more intriguing in their very nuance and significance. Vladimirov's work is in part a quantitative social history, in part a cultural history of the provincial bureaucracy in late nineteenth-century Russian Poland. Based on an in-depth analysis of the Pamiatnye Knizhki (registers of the bureaucracy) for each of the ten provinces of Russian Poland as well as other primary sources, Vladimirov is able to retrieve and quantify valuable demographic and service information from the personnel files of approximately three thousand state officials. From this data, she draws two particularly important and interrelated conclusions. First, the absolute number of bureaucratic officials and the resources available to them remained stagnant over these decades, a time in which the Polish kingdom experienced both a veritable explosion of population and fundamental demographic transformation, placing escalating strains on an unchanging provincial administration.As officials lived longer, vacancies were accordingly fewer and promotions and salary increases became increasingly difficult to obtain, thus frustrating the expectations of younger and better-educated bureaucrats who managed to enter the system. Moreover, Vladimirov shows that the majority of officials serving in Poland, especially in the middle and lower ranks were Roman Catholics and ethnic Poles drawn primarily from the educated classes, a discovery that forces us to rethink not only the notion of "Russian" bureaucratic rule, but also the nature of eventual "Polish" opposition to that rule led by a job-hungry intelligentsia in the first years of the twentieth century. In the second part of her monograph, Vladimirov shifts her focus to a provincial bureaucratic culture, which we now understand as Polish-influenced. Of course, bureaucratic positions came with their perks, which partially compensated for the ever slowing rate of promotion and salary increases - subsidies for housing, education of offspring, vacations and leisure activities, and health care, not to mention ever-present opportunities for corruption.Equally important was the sense of privileged corporate identity reinforced by uniforms, decorations, rituals, titles, and shared participation in official holidays, anniversaries and ceremonies. And, as Vladimirov argues, it was the bureaucracy's corporate identity, rather than the religious and ethnic identities of its individual members, that shaped its mainly negative and stereotypical perceptions of the diverse population over which it ruled. In the end, Vladimirov sees a great deal of continuity in her analysis of the Russian imperial bureaucracy and its personnel, not only during the decades under examination, but from one regime to another. Although such a perspective extends beyond the scope of her study, Vladimirov effectively argues that what often passes as the public interest supposedly served by modern bureaucracies is in reality an imperfect marriage of personal and corporate interests. Sustained by defining and then monopolizing certain forms of expertise, bureaucracy thus makes possible its own regeneration, at most discarding one uniform for another, while continuing to serve itself. ... Read more

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The Polish-Government-in-Exile and the Unfolding Holocaust
This book is a sequel to In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942. Some Jewish reviewers had accused it of being soft on the Poles. (p. 190). Engel makes it clear that his books are intended to present the facts, not to make value judgments about one side or the other, nor to imply moral equivalency between them. He also repudiates as unfounded the insinuation that the Germans built the death camps in German-occupied Poland because of (presumed) Polish attitudes towards the Jews. (pp. 97-98). He sees the circumstances under which Menachem Begin left the Polish Army as one that is shrouded in uncertainty. (p. 249). He admits that there is no direct evidence (p. 73) for his claim that the Polish Government-in-Exile came out strongly against the Nazi persecution of Jews only when its geopolitical status was fading as a result of western non-support in the wake of the Katyn revelation.

Engel notes that: "Indeed, the Allies on the whole proved no more amenable to Polish than to Jewish demands for action on behalf of those in mortal danger from the Nazi occupiers, and they specifically rejected the concept of retaliatory bombing." (p. 43). This tends to further undermine Engel's argument, in his earlier book, which he now partly admits was speculative (p. 191), which had suggested that the Polish Government-in-Exile downplayed Jewish deaths out of fear that they would eclipse Polish ones. Obviously, this was not happening.

A common theme of this book is the complaint that the Polish Government-in-Exile didn't express itself in a manner commensurate with the gravity of the situation facing Polish Jews, and that it invariably mixed Polish and Jewish deaths. All this is based on hindsight reasoning--one which confuses knowledge of Nazi murders of Jews with knowledge of the scale and final outcome of the same. To begin with, one Palestinian Jewish source estimated that as many as 1 million of the 3.3 million Polish Jews were out of reach of the Nazis--safely in the Soviet Union. (p. 220). The fact that some Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland had been liquidated was not then taken as a foregone conclusion that all would meet the same fate.And, among those Jews actually deported, no one knew how many had been murdered and how many had been resettled. Estimates of the number of Jews killed varied widely. (For example, even after the war, initial Polish and Jewish estimates had suggested a death toll at Treblinka and Auschwitz that was each 2-4 times the presently-accepted figure.)

The Polish victimization was better known because, unlike the case with most Jews, the murder of Poles by Germans was mostly overt (e. g., public shootings). When the German "Operation Zamosc" began against the Poles, no one then knew how far, and how quickly, it would advance towards the extermination of the entire Polish people. Finally, the notion that Jewish deaths were entitled to special recognition was not to develop for another 20 years.

In the chapter which Engel titled Zydokomuna [Bolshevized Judaism], he is partly candid about the Jewish support for Communism and how repulsive this was to Poles. He notes that 9 of the 10 editors of the pro-Soviet newspaper WOLNA POLSKA (creatively misnamed: Free Poland) were of Jewish origin. (p. 79, 81). The Soviet executions of Wiktor Alter and Henryk Erlich provoked a largely tepid, whitewashing response from many western Jewish newspapers. (pp. 59-61). The perceptive reader can clearly see that many opinion-forming Jews were more excited about alleged harassment of Jews in Anders' Army than they were about the killings of two prominent Jews by the Soviets! [Besides this, how could the Soviet claim of being a champion of ethnic minorities be taken seriously in view of the elementary fact that the USSR consisted of many non-Russian peoples subjugated and ruled by Russia?]

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A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945-1960 examines the long-term impact of ethnic cleansing on postwar Poland, focusing on the western Polish provinces of Poznan and Zielona Góra. Employing archival materials from multiple sources, including newly available Secret Police archives, it demonstrates how ethnic cleansing solidified Communist rule in the short term while reshaping and "nationalizing" that rule. The Poles of Poznan played a crucial role in the postwar national revolution in which Poland was ethnically cleansed by a joint effort of the people and state. A resulting national solidarity provided the Communist-dominated regime with an underlying stability, while it transformed what had been a militantly internationalist Polish Communism. This book addresses the legacy of Polish-German conflict that led to ethnic cleansing in East Central Europe, the ramifications within the context of Polish Stalinism's social and cultural revolutions, and the subsequent anti-national counterrevolutionary effort to break the bonds of national solidarity. Finally, it examines how the Poznan milieu undermined and then reversed Stalinist efforts at socioeconomic and cultural revolution. In the aftermath of the Poznan revolt of June 1956, the regime's leadership re-embraced hyper-nationalist politics and activists, and by 1960 Polish authorities had succeeded in stabilizing their rule at the cost of becoming an increasingly national socialist polity.T. David Curp is assistant professor in the Department of History at Ohio University. ... Read more

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A most disgraceful publication.
This book is absolutely unbelievable. The author is actually trying to justify ethnic cleansing. It does not matter whom are the victims as in wartime we All become victims no matter whom we are or from where we come from. The so called 'collective guilt' accusation held against the throats of German speaking people is never any validated reason to write such a biased and even racist book.

If this book is to be even half believed then as an example this gives full justification to the Government of the Republic of Ireland to carry out the ethnic cleansing of all Protestants from the north east of the island and by use of guns and rape and pillage force them all to go to the isle of Britain as expelled refugees. The Government in Dublin of course knows that such a dispicable action is completely against International law and a crime against humanity. -but perhaps you can see my point?

The ethnic cleansing of approx 18 million German civilians from eastern Germany and the Sudetenland and other parts of German speaking Europe at the end of WW2 is one of the greatest crimes of the last century and of which has been played down deliberately by far too many English speaking historians.

2.1 million mostly women and children and old people were murdered directly or indirectly as a result of this mass expulsion. The German women and even children were raped en mass all across eastern Germany, the same women and children then by brute force were evicted from their homes at gunpoint and whose family heritage had been living for hundreds and hundreds of years in these cities, towns, villages and farms that were by force to be made part of new countries by expelling these German people and then moving their borders.

It is my viewpoint that the author of this book needs to take a long look at himself in the mirror and ask himself does truth and justice and human rights mean anything to him.

Does he actually 'understand' the true meaning of such words?

This book proves some people still have a very sad twisted and distorted opinion regarding the history of central Europe as a whole.

John ... Read more

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A comprehensive diplomatic history of a crucial period in the life of Poland when her destiny lay in the hands of France, Great Britain and the United States. Although sovereign in principle, Poland had been not much more than an object of the Great Powers' politics and changing interrelationships. ... Read more

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This authoritative volume assesses how the recently democratised political system in Poland is adapting to the challenges posed by the country's desire to "rejoin Europe". ... Read more

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This book fills a gap in the existing literature on how parties and party systems are developing in the new democracies of post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe. It provides the first detailed, empirically based examination from a structural and organizational perspective of the new parties and political groupings that have emerged in Poland since the collapse of Communism in 1989. The author develops his argument on the basis of an analysis of five key structural and organizational variables: the internal distribution of power and modes of representation within the parties; the role of the party bureaucracy; the relationship between parties and their electorates; the development of parties as membership organizations; and the relationship between parties and the state. As the first in-depth, empirically grounded single-country study of party structure and organization in post-Communist Eastern Europe, the book provides an opportunity to draw broader conclusions about the process of Central and East European party development and will contribute significantly towards the development of a post-Communist political party model.Szczerbiak sheds light on an important aspect of the more general process of post-communist democratization in the region and provides a major contribution to one of the least-explored areas of transition. ... Read more

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The pattern of political dissent in Poland after World War II changed considerably by the early 1980s. In the 1950s and 1960s it had been characterized by spontaneity and lack of strategy; the opposite held true in the 1980s. The people in Poland became highly politicized, and openly acting dissident organizations, hostile toward the communist state, flourished. Zuzowski presents a comprehensive portrait of the unique pattern of dissent, exemplified by the Workers' Defense Committee KOR, which finally triumphed in Poland. ... Read more

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As democracy has swept the globe, the question of why some democracies succeed while others fail has remained a pressing concern. In this theoretically innovative, richly historical study, Michael Bernhard looks at the process by which new democracies choose their political institutions, showing how these fundamental choices shape democracy's survival.

Offering a new analytical framework that maps the process by which basic political institutions emerge, Bernhard investigates four paradigmatic episodes of democracy in two countries: Germany during the Weimar period and after World War II, and Poland between the world wars and after the fall of communism.

Students of democracy will appreciate the broad applicability of Bernhard's findings, while area specialists will welcome the book's accessible and detailed historical accounts. ... Read more

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This book is an enlightening, inspiring, and sobering account of the social and economic transformation of Poland. A multinational and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the historical precursors that gave shape to the Solidarity movement, then focus on the institutional change that today presents challenges even more daunting than those of the earlier drama of resistance. The contributors have uncovered episodes of political domination, debt, and dependency that are not well known or well understood. These have important implications for economic development in general and for the reconstruction of the deindustrializing economies of Eastern Europe in particular. If Poland is to survive the crisis of the early 1990s, a new and authentic program of economic and human development must be adopted by West and East alike. The book concludes with a "new discourse on development." ... Read more

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PolandForeign Policy and Government Guide ... Read more

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In the last year the world has been electrified as one Soviet bloc government after another has collapsed. But ten years before the events of the past year came the first successful challenge to the Leninist state--the shipworker's strike in Gdansk, which led to the first free trade union in the communist world. Here is a fascinating history of the Solidarity movement. ... Read more

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The Way Out for American Workers
As the U.S. Catholic Bishops are reporting 39 MILLION Americans in poverty, American workers continue to watch their jobs outsourced and wages slashed. Our unions are awash in Corporatism and have become the purveyors of economic terrorism. Where do we turn?

To each other!

What's really needed is a sense of confidence in our own abilities to think about what Solidarity really should mean and then trust each other to organize a new Solidarity Movement. That confidence can be had in this book!

Americans know that we need an economy that serves all our families and communities. If they read this book, they will see that Polish workers understood that as well and did something about it. They went about criss-crossing their country, meeting each other and forming a movement so powerful it brought down the Communists.

This book is a road-map to proving to the Common Man and Woman that we can win the Solidarity Society.

Superb analysis of a genuinely democratic mass movement
This is a superb book. It is scholarly yet passionate, courageous yet level-headed. The book argues that the Solidarity labor movement in Poland in 1980-81 was created by workers of the Gdansk shipyards rather than by Warsaw and Krakow intellectuals. However, the intellectuals supplied self-serving interpretations of Solidarity, and these were accepted as fact. Goodwyn shows that ever since the failed bread strikes in 1956, 1970, and 1976, the workers of Poland continued to devise methods by which to oppose the communist regime. In 1980, they succeeded: the so-called "occupational strike" in the shipyards made it impossible for the police to disperse the workers, while a system of human couriers allowed workers from various enterprises (as many as 370 factories, at the end of August 1980) to communicate when telephones were cut off by the communists. Finally, in August 1980, the workers presented to the government the centerpiece of all their demands: the demand for free labor unions. This was a move which the government of Soviet-occupied Poland did not expect. Polish intellectuals in Warsaw advised against it. The workers stood firm--and the government yielded. For a year, there was jubilation in Poland. But at Moscow's bidding, the Soviet-controlled government in Warsaw arrested thousands of Solidarity leaders in December 1981. For seven years, Poles lived under martial law. Under martial law, hundreds of people were tortured or "merely" beaten, thousands lost their lives because elementary medical help was impossible to obtain.
In later chapters, Goodwyn points out that it was "citizens' committees" and not the Solidarity labor union that produced delegates to the Round Table talks. Among the delegates, the intelligentsia members were overrepresented (195 out of some 240 delegates), while the workers who created Solidarity had a few dozen delegates. Since that time, the Warsaw intelligentsia was disproportionately credited with creating and aiding Solidarity, whereas worker activists slid into oblivion. The situation further worsened when factories began to close down because of restructuring, and millions of working men and women lost their jobs. The intelligentsia kept theirs: white collar workers were not much affected by restructuring of steel mills, shipyards, and cotton mills.
A magnificently lucid tome that provides real insights into the workings of democracy. If you are concerned with the erosion of democratic institutions in the United States, read this book.

fantastic & sadly out-of-print
As a student in Larry Goodwyn's social movements class, I have been reading this book to study his philosophy and methodology.It's incredibly interesting and enlightening, and sure to infuriate anyone with a vestedinterest in the convential wisdom about movement building in general andSolidarity in particular.I'd recommend it to anyone who can get theirhands on a copy (& let me know if you can!)... ... Read more

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This is the first English-language history of Poland from the Second World War until the fall of Communism. Using a wide range of Polish archives and unpublished sources in Moscow and Washington, Tony Kemp-Welch integrates the Cold War history of diplomacy and inter-state relations with the study of domestic opposition and social movements. His key themes encompass political, social and economic history; the Communist movement and its relations with the Soviet Union; and the broader East-West context with particular attention to US policies. The book concludes with a first-hand account of how Solidarity formed the world's first post-Communist government in 1989 as the Polish people demonstrated what can be achieved by civic courage against apparently insuperable geo-strategic obstacles. This compelling new account will be essential reading for anyone interested in Polish history, the Communist movement and the course of the Cold War. ... Read more

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This book draws on public opinion surveys conducted in Poland during the Solidarity era to examine popular attitudes on fundamental issues of political power and on the dramatic political events of 1980-1982. These surveys, unprecedented for a communist regime, offer a unique portrait of the values and attitudes of a population in a society undergoing profound social, economic and political change. The study focuses on the citizens, who are often overlooked in studies of communist systems. As such, it provides a fresh look at the Solidarity experience from the public's point of view. It details the sources of support and opposition for the regime, the Solidarity leadership, and the policies of each. For example, support for Solidarity declined during 1981, but it remained strong, and there was little popular support for the hardline measures employed by the regime. ... Read more

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In Recovering Solidarity, Gerald J. Beyer provides a contextualized theological and ethical treatment of the idea of solidarity. He focuses particularly on the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s and the ways in which that movement originally embodied but, during the country's transformation to a capitalist democratic society, soon abandoned this important aspect of the Catholic social tradition.


Using Poland as a case study, Beyer explores the obstacles to promoting an ethic of solidarity in contemporary capitalist societies and attempts to demonstrate how the moral revolution of the early Solidarity movement can be revived, both in its country of origin and around the world. Recovering Solidarity is widely interdisciplinary, utilizing Catholic social tradition, philosophical ethics, developmental economics, poverty research, gender studies, and sociology. ... Read more

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In this important and accessible study, Rafal Pankowski makes sense of the rapid growth of organized radical nationalism on the political level in Poland by showing its origins, its internal dynamics and the historical, political, social and cultural context that has made it possible.

From political obscurity to the heart of mainstream politics, the recent rise of the extreme right in the Polish context surprised many observers. In the 1990s Poland was usually referred to as a country without significant extremist or populist movements. It was considered to be a stable, even if young, democracy, and ‘extremists’ were perceived as just a little nuisance to the liberal-democratic consensus. By the mid-2000s, the picture changed completely, two populist radical right parties entered into a coalition government with the right-wing conservative Law and Justice Party. All of a sudden, racist extremist affiliations were not a hindrance to a high-level career, but were tolerated or even seemed positively valued. The entrance of extremists into state structures was no longer a matter of isolated individual cases, but took on systemic features.

Presenting a detailed analysis of the Polish national populism, the book will use theories of social movements (in particular the concept of discursive opportunity structure), as well as relevant theories of transition and democratization. In particular, the specific cultural resources of Polish nationalist populism are to be analyzed because they are deemed to be among principal reasons for the relative success of the radical nationalists and their particular brand of identity politics

The book not only provides a detailed analysis of Polish nationalism but will also have a much broader trans-national significance, essential reading for scholars of national populism in the context of post-communism and beyond.

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The disturbing rise of the populist right in Poland
In this excellent and eye-opening book, Professor Rafal Pankowski traces the pre-war origins of the Polish populist radical right, from Roman Dmowski and his National Democratic/Endecja party, with its highly anti-Semitic, catholic-ethno-nationalist ideology, to the defeat of the Kaczynski government in 2007.

Endekian ontology survived the war years and Soviet occupation but played a minor role in Solidarity and the initial years of post-communism. As the abrupt transformation of Poland's economy from demand to market-driven left many Poles behind, the radical right was able to garner increasing support.

In 2006, the unthinkable happened when the extremist League of Polish Families and Self Defence parties entered into a government coalition with the Kaczynski brothers' Law and Justice Party. Poland was being governed by radical right-wing and populist extremists! European governments were alarmed and with good reason. The Kaczynskis were widely believed to be center-right Pilsudskiites but their platform embraced multiple elements of Dmowskian ethno-nationalism including ultra-catholicism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, Germanophobia, anti-European isolationism along with a heavy dose of Russophobia. An atmosphere of witch-hunt hysteria grew in Poland as the Kaczynskis concentrated on settling political scores and vetting alleged former communist secret police informants. The Kaczynskis increasingly turned to Radio Maryja and its audience of elderly, rural, disenfranchised for support. The twins pandered to their have-not constituency blaming the mysterious "elites" for all of Poland's real and imaginary problems. The leadership of the Polish American community, with its roots solidly in Endekian tradition, heavily supported the Kaczynskis.

The League of Polish Families (LPR) was even further to the right than Law and Justice and counted many former neo-Nazi skinheads among its membership. Its radical All-Polish Youth auxiliary often resorted to physical violence at rallies and protests. LPR leader, Roman Giertych, had a sterling Endek pedigree; his grandfather, Jedrzej, and father, Maciej, were both pioneers of the ethno-nationalist movement.

By 2007 Polish voters had had enough. Fortunately, for Poland and for Europe, Law and Justice was defeated in the parliamentary elections by the centrist Civic Platform Party. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has led Poland back to a position of respectability within the European community after the disastrous and dangerous Kaczynski regime. However, there still exists a strong Dmowskian undercurrent in Poland, which has the very real potential to rise up once again.

Professor Pankowski has written an extremely well-documented account of the radical right in Poland. This is a college text, thus the hefty price tag, but it's a must-read for those who were mortified by the ascension of the radical right to the highest levels of the Polish government from 2005-2007. I highly recommend this book.
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