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The end of communism and accession to the European Union have had a huge impact on Poland.  This book provides an overall assessment of the post-1989 transformation in Poland.  It focuses in particular on four key themes: economic transformation and its outcomes; the heritage of the past and national identity; regional development in Poland including the implications of EU accession for regional development; and political developments both before and after EU accession.  In addition the book shows how changes in all these areas are related, and emphasises the overall common themes.  The book is in memory of George Blazyca, of the University of Paisley, whose work on the political economy of transition in Poland is highly regarded, and who did a great deal to support the work of Polish academic colleagues and to promote the work of young scholars. ... Read more

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In the late 1960s, after the Holocaust had brought about the almost total destruction of centuries of Jewish civilization in Poland, senior leaders of the ruling Communist Party initiated a domestic terror campaign that resulted in the unceremonious eviction of thousands of Polish Jews. Why did the leadership of a nation that professed equality among all peoples suddenly drive them into exile? In Forced Out, Arthur Wolak explores this turbulent era, revealing a period in modern European history that offers important lessons about the dangers of political opportunism and the inherent evils of totalitarianism.

Surveying the Jewish experience in Poland from the reign of Poland's kings to the present day, Forced Out details this important yet little-known era in Poland, a nation that has since broken through the Iron Curtain to emerge as one of the West's staunchest allies as a member of NATO and the European Union. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Accurate account of a shameful period
I was in Poland during the events covered in this book. Arthur Wolak has done an important job of historiography, and has to be commended. In 1968 I had been living in Warsaw for about two years, working as a journalist. It was indeed a shameful period in Polish history, in which antisemitism was used as a weapon in what amounted to a power struggle within the PZPR, the Communist Party. I describe my own part in the "March Events" in my book "Strawberries With Everything", published in 2006. [...]

Good for the 1968 Era
The backbone of the book traces the rise in Polish nationalism and and its flip side, anti-Zionism, in "People's Poland" of the 1960s.However, it too glibly attributes this to "Communism" per se.The reality, as to be expected in this part of the world, is much more nuanced than simplistic cold war labeling.

As Professor Jan Gross shows in his major work, "Fear," on Polish anti-Semitism in the immediate postwar period, anti-Semitism in Poland wasstill the purview of the traditional nationalist-Catholic right.Under the banner of "Zydokomuna" Jews and Communists were linked as part of some master anti-Polish conspiracy.Communist attitudes toward this was one of the issues splitting the Party.The "internationalists" - tending to be pro-Moscow, "Stalinist," and heavily Jewish - condemned this tendency as reactionary and sought to punish it.The "nationalists" - with Gomulka as their foremost representative - tended to look the other way to curry favor with the Catholic workers and peasants, who after all were the majority and upon who the regime must base itself.After de-Stalinization, Gomulka's view prevailed.Traditional nationalist scapegoating of Jews was "integrated" into the "People's Democracy."

Unfortunately, this does not indict the Communists so much as Polish society.It is revealing that the Party had to resort to this in order to anchor itself in the popular masses. In this it paralleled the behavior of the Nazi occupation, as outlined in Professor Gross' previous book, "Neighbors."Unlike the Nazis, however, the Polish Communists were at least theoretical exemplars of a professedly anti-racist ideology.The majority of Poles did not change their fundamental attitude to the Party or Communism because of Gomulka's pandering to popular prejudice; but as under the Nazis, anti-Semites found convenient official justification for giving vent to their "time-honored tradition."

The real tragedy for Poland is that only in the totalitarian years of Stalinism could Jews have a semblance of social dignity in the country.Rather than lash out at those who explore this past - as they have done with Professor Gross - Poles should take this to heart and try to devise a society morally broad enough to embrace all its (surviving) members.

of sin and its scapegoat... in communist Poland
On how communist Poland sent into prison or exile the tiny Jewish community that had survided the Holocaust. Jews were again the scapegoats used by our "glorious" European intelligentsia to distract from their own evil and corrupt regime, and specifically in this episode in Polish politics of 1967/8.

The author does a good job pointing out the responsibilities for the antisemitic act that robbed thousands of Polish Jews of their possessions as well as of their own nationality. A shameful and despicable episode in Poland's recent history.

The last quarter of the book, however, besides being a follow-up on the more recent events of Poland up their joining the European Union, is a long and preachy discourse, more to be expected from a propagandist or politician -no matter how well-intentioned- than from an impartial historian. I don't like historians to preach to me even if I agree with what they say. This part if filled with "should"s and "must"s, and universal goodwill kind of discourse.

Historians should stick to their job which is telling the past as it was, no more no less.

Very scholarly
I was amazed to read this scholarly examination of events in Poland (67/68) through which I lived as a young teen. Reading this book put these events into a broader historical context for me. I appreciate the background on the main characters involved in PZPR (Gomulka and Moczar) and elucidation of the currents and dynamics that led to that particular eruption of anti-semitism, under the banner of anti-zionism.

A thorough and scholarly examination of a subject.

A well-researched and plainly presented account
Growing up in Canada as the son of Holocaust sruvivors, Arthur Wolak has traveled and studied extensively in a post-Commu-nist Poland. Forced Out: The Fate Of Polish Jewry In Communist Poland is a meticulously, informative, and insightful history of those political, economic, and foreign policy issues and circumstances that led to the post-World War II and holocaust era exodus of most of Poland's remaining Jews. Chapters discuss anti-semitism in Poland, including Communist government propaganda that targeted Jews as scapegoats to distract the population from economic troubles and other systemic failings, as well as the post-communist era future and the relationship between Poland, Poland's Jews, and Israel. A thoughtful, literate, well-researched and plainly presented account, as accessible to the lay reader as it is to sociologists and historians. Highly recommended for Judaic Studies and 20th Century European History academic reference collections.
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Revolutionaries and rebels, shoemakers and tailors, refugees, soldiers, intellectuals, and apparatchiks. They were the extraordinary generation of Polish-Jewish Communists"the last true Communists," as some of them say today. With pathos and deeply informed insight, Jaff Schatz relates the life story of the Jews who joined the Polish Communist Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s, only to become its victims thirty years later.Schatz draws on archival research and interviews with forty-three surviving members of this generation that gave up everything but their dream of a new world order. He frames the personal drama of their rise and fall with important questions about the interaction of biography and history, showing how the lives of The Generation uniquely concentrate the recent history of East-Central Europe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A rebuttal to Mr. Peczkis
This review is largely a rebuttal, of sorts, to the review already posted.It is quite obvious from Mr. Peczkis's tone that he identifies with many Poles who were incensed by Jan Blonski's much-needed 1987 article "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto" and by Jan Tomasz Gross's monumental work, Neighbors.Apparently Mr. Peczkis would like to pin all of Poland's communist-era woes on the handful of Jewish party members who possessed real power, without acknowledging the fact that by the 1960s Polish Jews suffered enormous repression at the hands of the Polish Communist govt., including loss of power within the party, and that by and large the history of Polish communism is that of a state governed--and, yes, supported--by ethnic Poles. Iy hardly needs be mentioned that Gomulka, Gierek, Moczar,and Jaruzelski were all proud members of the Polish nation, or that the quite blatantly antisemitic "anti-Zionist" campaign of the 1960s belies the reality of so-called Polish Jewish Zydokomuna.
Mr. Peczkis even goes so far as to anglicize Jan Tomasz Gross's middle name to Thomas, perhaps as a subtle (or not, but puerile nonetheless) method of questioning Gross's Polishness.Surely it is a sorry sign that Amazon allows such antisemitic rhetoric, dressed up in the guise of objective criticism, to appear on its website.

As for the merits of the above book, it is competent and made good use of the sources which were available at the time, but is somehwat dry in its prose, and perhaps in an effort to be objective does not make stronger, more conclusive arguments of the kind scholars look for, but if read in conjunction with Marci Shore's new monograph Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, the reader is treated to an enlightening narrative as to the reasons why a small group of Polish Jewish intellectuals found in Marxism a key to a better life.That they were sorely disappointed later, and indeed in many cases were broken by the beast they helped to create, is one of the twentieth century's more bitter ironies.

Zydokumuna, Polish-Jewish Property Disputes, and Much More
Jewish author Schatz provides a great deal of information about the Zydokumuna (Jewish Communism in Poland), tracing this phenomenon from before WWI through the 1970's.

In common with many others, he suggests that the desire for a better world and the elimination of anti-Semitism were major causes of the Zydokumuna. However, there are problems with this thesis. Anyone who became a Communist willfully overlooked the fact that Communism was from the beginning, to anyone who looked objectively at it, a movement based on lies, violence, and totalitarianism. Instead, throughout the 1920's, Polish Jews chose to look at the Soviet Union through rose-colored glasses. The eventual appearance and growth of anti-Semitism among Communists (p. 354), the arrests and executions of many Jewish Communists by Stalin (p. 102), the WWII deportations of Polish Jews to Siberia (p. 161), the obvious rottenness of Soviet society (p. 155), etc., all failed to permanently turn devotees away from Communism. An obvious double standard emerged: The real or imagined injustices of Polish society were cited as a ground for turning to Communism, but the much greater injustices under Communism were willfully overlooked.Perhaps becoming (and remaining) a Polish Communist had less to do with fighting injustice and more with exercising a visceral and entrenched hatred of Poland, of religion, and of free enterprise.

Schatz estimates that Jews comprised as much as 70% of high and medium level functionaries in the Communist party (pp. 360-361), with overall membership commonly reaching 50-60% (p. 96), sometimes more. In fact, Schatz (p. 96) remarks: "Given this background, a respondent's statement that "in small cities like ours, almost all Communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration". Note that a 50-70% level corresponds to Jews being five to seven times more common in the Communist Party than in the general Polish population.

However, Schatz attempts to minimize the overall scale of the Zydokomuna by alleging that, while a lot of Polish Communists were Jews, comparatively few Polish Jews ever became Communists. This is disingenuous. To begin with, only a small percentage of the population of a given nationality ever becomes active formally active in politics.Second, for every CP member, there are many fellow travelers. In fact, Schatz later inadvertently demolishes his own argument when he writes (p. 82): "Western analysts who deem the membership of the Polish Communist party as insignificantly small often commit the mistake of forgetting that the movement acted underground, that membership was punishable by a severe prison sentence, that the devotion of the movement's cadres made up formuch of its quantitative weakness, and, finally, that the movement had significant influence on a relatively large group of sympathizers and supporters."

Schatz (p. 98) allows for Polish Jews accounting for 2/5ths of the Communist vote (meaning that the Jewish popular vote for Communism was fourfold that of the Jewish share of Poland's prewar population). He then again tries to downplay the scale of the Zydokomuna by alleging that only 5% of Polish Jews voted for the Communists. However, this ignores at least two facts. First of all, voters usually prefer to vote for parties that have a chance of winning an election. Second, most Communist sympathy was covert in nature, only becoming manifest when Polish rule weakened.Apropos to this, Schatz neglects the large number of Jews who seemingly came out of the woodwork to attack Poles during the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War and only superficially (and euphemistically) discusses the repeat of the same (p. 153) during the Soviet conquest of eastern Poland in 1939. Schatz argues that the degree of postwar Jewish involvement in the UB (Bezpieka: Communist security forces) cannot be accurately known. In doing so, he does not mention numerous reports of Polish political prisoners who identified their torturers as Jews.Second, the determination of the true scale of Zydokomuna is hindered by the fact that Polish Communist Jews were strongly encouraged, on numerous and successive occasions (pp. 184-185, pp. 213-214,and p. 365) to hide their Jewishness by changing their names and otherwise pretending to be ethnic Poles.Note also that this disguise began long before the Red Army had entered Poland and set up the UB terror apparatus, which eventually cost the lives of perhaps 300,000 Poles.

The killing of a few hundred Jews by Poles, partly the result of postwar property disputes, has recently gotten a great deal of one-sided media attention as a result of the publication of Fear, by Jan Thomas Gross.Writing 15 years earlier, Schatz had the following take on this subject (p. 206): "Thus, the stonethrowing and grudging surprise that `so many Jews are still alive' that met many returnees on crossing the border were not accidental. The wartime German occupation resulted in a barbarization of social life, and Nazi propaganda contributed to the dehumanization of the Jew in the public mind. Against this background, the fact that Jewish Communists were conspicuous in the regime's side of the power struggle reinforced one of the traditional elements in image of the Jew, namely, that of a servant of anti-Polish interests (to such a degree that anyone who served the new regime was liable to be suspected of being a Jew).It was not the actual number of Jews on the regime's side but their visibility that reinforced this Jewish stereotype."

Again, bearing in mind the gentile disguise of most Polish Communist Jews, the true scale of Zydokomuna can only be given a minimal estimate. However, note that, unlike the fantastic anti-Polish thesis advanced by Jan Thomas Gross, Schatz is, to his credit, at least willing to recognize the brutalization of the war-ravaged Polish people, and the very real Zydokomuna, as factors in these killings. In conclusion the Zydokomuna was no bogeyman. It was detrimental to the Polish nation and contributed to the sufferings of Poles and Jews alike.

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The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism was one of the most important forces in shaping the world of Polish Jewry for almost two centuries, but our understanding of it has long been dominated by theories based on stereotypes rather than detailed analysis of the available sources. In this award-winning study, Marcin Wodzinski challenges the long-established theories about the conflict by contextualizing it, principally in the Kingdom of Poland but also with regard to other parts of eastern Europe. Covering the period from the earliest anti-hasidic polemics in the late eighteenth century through to the post-Haskalah movements of the twentieth century, it follows the development of this important conflict in its central arena. Using source materials (including many hitherto unknown documents) in Polish and five other languages, Wodzinski has succeeded in reconstructing the way the conflict expressed itself.Identifying the motives, the methods, and the consequences of the conflict as it was played out in five Polish towns (Lodz, Opoczno, Piotrkow, Warsaw, and Warta), he shows that it was primarily informed by non-ideological clashes at the level of local communities rather than by high-level ideological debates. Much attention is also devoted to the general characteristics of hasidism and the Haskalah, as well as to the post-Haskalah movements. Here too Wodzinski challenges the ideologically charged assumptions of a generation of historians who refused to see the advocates of Jewish modernity in nineteenth-century Poland as an integral part of the Haskalah movement. Extensive consideration is given to the professional, social, institutional, and ideological characteristics of the Polish Haskalah as well as to its geographic extent, and to the changes the movement underwent in the course of the nineteenth century. Similar attention is given to the influence of the specific characteristics of Polish hasidism on the shape of the conflict, especially as regard the size of the movement and the evolution of hasidic communal involvement.In consequence the book presents a synthesis that offers both breadth and depth, contextualizing its subject matter within the broader domains of the European Enlightenment and Polish culture, hasidism and rabbinic culture, tsarist policy and Polish history, not to mention the ins and outs of the Haskalah itself across Europe. An extensive appendix presents translations of nineteen important and hitherto unknown sources of relevance to a nuanced understanding of many aspects of nineteenth-century Jewish history in Poland and eastern Europe more generally. ... Read more

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Paying particularly close attention to the provisional party organization and to the party secretaries who direct its activities, this book examines the changing position and role of the Polish United Workers' Party and its apparatus between 1975 and 1986.The role of the party secretaries and the way they perform is seen as a major determinant of the nature of party leadership and of the strength of political authority in communist states.The author argues that the protracted crisis of the Polish system reflects less the weakness of communist party power than critical problems encountered in accumulating and exercising authority.The crisis of 1980 was as much due to inadequate political strategies as to the economic failings of the Gierek regime. ... Read more

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A description of the creation and then the erosion of the monolithic media system in Poland and an investigation of the professions, institutions, and individuals supporting, opposing, or reforming the existing media system at various times. ... Read more

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The May 1926 coup d’état in Poland inaugurated what has become known as the period of sanacja or “cleansing.” The event has been explored in terms of the impact that it had on state structures and political styles. But for both supporters and opponents of the post-May regime, the sanacja was a catalyst for debate about Polish national identity, about citizenship and responsibility to the nation, and about postwar sexual morality and modern gender identities. The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the coup. Eva Plach shifts the focus from strictly political contexts and examines instead the sanacja’s open-ended and malleable language of purification, rebirth, and moral regeneration. In tracking the diverse appropriations and manipulations of the sanacja concept, Plach relies on a wide variety of texts, including the press of the period, the personal and professional papers of notable interwar women activists, and the official records of pro-sanacja organizations, such as the Women’s Union for Citizenship Work. The Clash of Moral Nations introduces an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from International Advances in Economic Research, published by Atlantic Economic Society on May 1, 2000. The length of the article is 3374 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Marketization and Poland's Transfer Payments.
Author: Bozena Leven
Publication: International Advances in Economic Research (Refereed)
Date: May 1, 2000
Publisher: Atlantic Economic Society
Volume: 6Issue: 2Page: 232

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Over the last decade privatization, decentralization and public procurement processes have provided opportunities for unscrupulous civil servants to benefit in central and eastern Europe: the case of Bulgaria, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia are considered. Conflict of interest is the power of public officials to promote their private interest, the private interests of their relatives or the commercial enterprises in which they participate. ... Read more

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This work focuses on the management and financing of primary, secondary and vocational schools in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. It focuses particularly on the varied divisions of responsibility between the State, local government and school managements and the way these have evolved over the past decade. ... Read more