Norman Davies is one of his generation’s most acclaimed and prolific historians. His specialty is Central Europe, with an occasional dalliance into his native England. I’m certain I’ve read three of his books, and possibly as many as five. He wrote a 1,000+ page, two-volume history of Poland in 1981 that was abridged to just under 500 pages a few years later. This is the 2001 edition of that abridgment. The story is not told in chronological order.
Poland’s communist dictatorship was forcibly imposed by the USSR. There weren’t enough communists in Poland to run a factory, never mind a country in 1944. It was another example of alien-imposed tyranny, a Stalinist creation that lasted until 1989. However, it was never as extreme, violent, or brutal as it had been in the USSR. The Catholic Church was too strong and too deeply rooted to be oppressed completely. There were modicums of both political and economic flexibility, unlike anything in the USSR. The visit home by the newly elected Polish Pope in 1979 was psychologically uplifting and easily led to Solidarity’s rise and successful strike the following year. The regime responded with Jaruzelski’s martial law in December 1981. The suppression that followed was severe, and the economy continued its downward spiral. After almost four decades of Soviet domination, Poles stood in line for bread, their country was bankrupt, and a donee of foreign beneficence. “The essence of Poland’s modern experience was humiliation” at the behest of the Soviets.
The only European country whose war lasted as long as Poland’s was Germany’s. For 2,078 days, the Poles fought, died, and hoped for a restoration of their freedom. “In proportion to its size, Poland incurred far more damage and casualties than any country on earth.” The two occupying powers of 1939 murdered the leadership class of the country, the Germans put the Jews in ghettos, the Soviets deported two million people to Siberia, and the Soviets murdered 4,500 Polish officers at Katyn. After Barbarossa, western Poland became the home of the camps, where nine to ten million people, half of them Jewish, were killed. When the tide turned, Poles were happy to be rid of the Germans, but deeply anxious about the Soviets. The Soviets brought their own ready-to-go Polish government with them in 1944. For two years after the war, Polish patriots flailed at the Soviet occupiers before they were defeated. When it was all over, Poland had lost significant lands to the east, eighteen percent of its population, and all for naught. They had sacrificed, fought long and hard, and were back under the Russian heel.
When the Great War began, Poland did not exist. Ethnic Polish men were drafted into the armies of the three empires that had partitioned their country. Polish independence was adopted as an Allied war aim. By the end of the war, the lands that would become Poland were devastated and had lost fifteen percent of their population. The Second Polish Republic was created by the Treaty of Versailles and six border wars fought by the Poles. The two-year, far-ranging war with the Soviet Union saw the Red Army suffer its only defeat, and Marshal Pilsudski became a true national hero. Forming a reborn republic on the ruins of war was no easy task, and in 1926 Pilsudski took over after a military coup. The country was economically stable, the population grew, and Pilsudski tried to steer between and away from Germany and the USSR. After his 1935 death, his successors watched as Germany took over the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The frail Second Republic was “foully murdered by two assailants acting in collusion.” The years between 1918 and 1939 would prove to be fondly remembered as the only ones between 1795 and 1989 in which Poles lived in freedom.
The Polish republic was destroyed in 1795. “The overwhelming experience for all Poles during five long generations was one of foreign rule and political oppression.” Polish culture, language, and aspirations survived, and “When the world of the empires fell apart, the Polish idea of nation proved sufficiently mature to seize its destiny.”
Freedom arrived almost miraculously as “a country of forty million had extracted itself from the communist morass with no violence and with relatively few conflicts.” Massive amounts of foreign debt and a moribund economy offered Jaruzelski limited elbow room to save Polish communism. Lech Walesa, while in prison, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, further diminishing the regime. In early 1989, the government began negotiations with Solidarity. The sides agreed to reverse martial law, legalize Solidarity, and allow free elections. Solidarity swept the elections, and Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would not interfere in Poland’s internal affairs. While the rest of the Eastern Bloc collapsed, Poland remained calm. Jaruzelski still controlled the army and the police, but a free market economy was emerging. In nationwide elections, the communists were swept into the dustbin of history, and Lech Walesa became president. Poland was free.
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