Existing scholarship treats congresses of the ruling communist parties in the Eastern Bloc as staged performances intended to manufacture support and signal new policy trends. This article, using the ...examples of extraordinary party congresses held during revolutionary times in Poland (1981) and the German Democratic Republic (1989) offers another perspective. It looks at the events as spaces where rank-and-file delegates could contest particular decisions of their organization, while simultaneously straying away from more radical forms of dissent. This article follows and compares the actions of delegates in both countries by highlighting how they disrupted the agenda of the congresses over the question of elite corruption committed by former members of the party leadership and accountability for these wrongdoings. These episodes show that anti-corruption was a genuinely important moral preoccupation, as well as an argument for demanding change, and that, during the 1980s, ideas grounded in socialism still possessed major legitimacy.
During the tumultuous 1980s, Polish People’s Republic experimented with legal reforms and institutions of the constitutional state. Among these institutions, set up according to the ideas of ...socialist legality, was the State Tribunal, tasked with determining accountability of the former leadership from the 1970s. Brought to life amid debates around economic crisis and official corruption and legally and politically constrained, the Tribunal failed to satisfy popular demands for justice. This article explores the idea of socialist legality by looking at the history of the State Tribunal in Poland. It analyses different understandings of justice and accountability, expressed during the Solidarity Revolution, and shows how they played out in public debates and the legislative process. In order to guarantee legitimacy in the unstable political situation, Polish socialist legality needed to go further than in other Eastern Bloc countries and to address popular grievances. In Poland therefore, socialist constitutional state-building started before martial law and significantly predated the turn to liberal democracy and market capitalism in 1989.
The article examines the relationship between the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, and the First Secretary of the Polish United Worker's Party, Edward ...Gierek, during the 1970s and contributes to the understanding of relationships between Brezhnev and other leaders of the Eastern Bloc. In order to fulfill his foreign policy goals, Brezhnev needed active and willing cooperation from the Eastern Bloc and its leaders benefited from this endeavor. Gierek responded to this demand by entering into an "uneven friendship" with Brezhnev that was established according to the Soviet "friendship code." This privileged relationship was dependent on the inner situation within the Soviet leadership, the progress of détente, Poland's domestic stability, and ultimately did not counterbalance Poland's structurally disadvantageous status in the Eastern Bloc.
This review of Agata Zysiak’s 2016 book Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a ...Working-Class City offers a broad summary of the work and examines it as a general critique of Polish historiography on state socialism. Zysiak’s book opens a discussion on alternatives to national or intelligentsia-based narratives of the past by looking at the story of an unsuccessful experiment to construct a socialist university. However, the author of the review contends that this highly valuable book suffers from a lack of primary-source analysis and omits many postwar experiences.
In the 1970s in Western Europe, in the United States, in the Middle East and in Central and South America many brutal terrorist attacks took place. The public opinion witnessed the activity of ...various groups, representing different systems of values. The acts of political violence were exercised in the name of ideology, national liberation or religion. Polish public opinion during the communist rule observed the happenings from a distance, but with much attention. People’s Poland in the 1970s published more than a dozen academic, journalist and popular works on the topic of terrorism. The most influential weekly papers (Polityka, Kultura) dedicated many features to the problem of terrorism. The article, basing on books and press articles from the period, aims to answer two questions. What did the state of public knowledge about terrorism, which could be acquired from open sources, look like? How was the phenomenon of international terrorism and its various forms described and evaluated?
PDF
