POLAND.

Formed in the tenth century, Poland saw periods of national glory and independence as well as of foreign domination. Located at the center of Europe, it experienced all major events of the twentieth century: World War II, the tyrannies of Nazism and communism, the cataclysm of the Holocaust, and the collapse of socialist utopia.

During the sixteenth century the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was one of the most powerful states on the Continent. However, destructive wars against Russia, Sweden, and Turkey in the seventeenth century, coupled with a lack of political and socioeconomic reforms, led to the country's decay. In 1795, upon being partitioned by its three neighbors, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, Poland ceased to exist for 123 years. Throughout the nineteenth century the Poles repeatedly revolted against the partitioning powers, but without success. The advance of modern nationalism into Polish lands in the late nineteenth century nurtured two rival ideological currents advancing a national cause: the National Democrats and the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna; PPS).

Despite foreign dominance, Polish culture produced astonishing works of art. Among the greatest Polish contributors to European culture and science in the period of partitions were the composer Fryderyk (Frédéric) Chopin, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, the writers Boleslaw Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont (the latter two recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature), and Joseph Conrad (a Polish expatriate whose real name was Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski), the great modernist playwright and painter Stanislaw Wyspia?ski, the philosopher and art critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and the scientist and two-time Nobel laureate Maria Sklodowska-Curie (Marie Curie).

1900–1918

At the turn of the century, Polish lands were still largely agricultural and industrially backward territories. The three imperial state administrations displayed conflicting approaches toward their Polish subjects, ranging from highly oppressive rule in Russian and German parts to cultural and political autonomy in the Austrian partition. The period prior to World War I saw the crystallization of political attitudes toward independence and the partitioning powers. Under the leadership of Józef Pilsudski, the PPS subordinated Marxist ideology to the struggle for independence, launching terrorist warfare and labor unrest against tsarist rule from 1905 to 1907. The National Democrats led by Roman Dmowski pursued ethnocentric nationalism and a pro–middle class socioeconomic agenda, opting for limited cooperation with Russia. In the Austrian partition, the powerful Polish aristocrats remained staunchly loyal toward the Habsburgs, while the mushrooming populist movement, under the command of Wincenty Witos, struggled for the material and cultural advancement of the peasantry.

During World War I, Pilsudski formed the Polish legions, military units fighting under the Austrian command against Russia, while Dmowski allied his followers first with the Russian Empire and subsequently with the Entente camp. In 1916 Germany and Austria-Hungary set up the Polish Kingdom, a German-Austrian protectorate carved from the territories captured from Russia. However, following the increasing domination of Germany over the Habsburg Monarchy and military stalemate on the fronts, Pilsudski terminated his support for the Central Powers and created a secret military organization. He was arrested in 1917 and interned in Magdeburg, Germany, until the end of the war. Meanwhile, the collapse of the tsarist empire paved the way for the recognition of an independent Poland by England, France, and the United States. Located in the West, Dmowski's National Committee gradually became the official representative of a future Polish state while facilitating the creation of the Polish army in France and preparing itself for participation in a peace conference. As the Bolshevik Revolution knocked Russia out of the war and military defeats forced the Central Powers to sue for armistice, Poland could finally regain its independence. On 11 November 1918 Pilsudski returned to Warsaw and took control of the Polish governmenton the next day. The eleventh of November 1918, the date the armistice was signed ending World War I, is commonly recognized as the rebirth of Polish statehood.

1919–1939

The Second Republic that emerged in the wake of World War I acquired its borders through the Paris Peace Conference, the anti-German revolts in the Great Poland region and in Silesia, and, overall, the victorious war against the Bolsheviks fought in 1919–1920. The conflict started as Polish and Soviet armies began moving into the territories evacuated by the Germans. In 1920 Pilsudski's plans for building the Poland-led federation to counterbalance the Bolshevik state prompted the Polish leader to conclude a military alliance with the Ukrainian Republic based in Kiev. However, by August 1920 the Soviet counteroffensive had brought the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw. Although the Poles defeated the invaders and chased them eastward, the 1921 Peace of Riga constituted a decisive blow to Pilsudski's federal concepts. Influenced by Dmowski's polonocentric attitudes, the Polish delegation won significant territorial concessions but tacitly ignored the Ukrainians' demands for independence.

Together with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, Poland was one of the major beneficiaries of post–World War I settlement in Europe. However, bitter border disputes as well as territorial claims advanced by Germany and other revisionist powers demonstrated the precariousness of the newly created states in the eastern part of the continent. All three countries were multiethnic states, with their minorities seeking either substantial autonomy or displaying strong irredentism. In Poland, minority groups, mostly Ukrainians, Jews, Byelorussians, and Germans, constituted one-third of the overall population. The successive governments were highly unsuccessful in handling ethnic minorities, wavering between forced assimilation, outright oppression, and increasing exclusion from the rest of society. To a similar extent, the Second Republic failed to implement a decisive land reform plan that might have solved many of the problems faced by the overpopulated, desperately poor, and backward countryside.

Politically the country steered toward authoritarianism. The 1921 constitution defined the lower chamber of parliament, the Sejm, as the strongest institution responsible for the construction of the cabinet. However, the principle of proportional representation coupled with a plethora of political parties resulted in frequent elections and unstable ruling coalitions. After a period of inefficient parliamentary democracy, Pilsudski staged a military coup in 1926 that led to a semidictatorial rule of his followers, commonly known as the sanacja (purification) regime. Political pluralism and direct elections were retained, but the 1935 constitution increased the powers of the executive government while reducing those of parliament. Following Pilsudski's death in 1935, the military took over the government, showing increasingly authoritarian and nationalist traits. The shift from democratic politics to etatism, corporatism, and right-wing authoritarianism to regain political and economic stability was a widespread phenomenon in Eastern and central Europe. In Poland, Pilsudski's heirs also tried to outbid their staunchly nationalist and anti-Semitic opponents from Dmowski's National Democratic Party. Yet the Second Republic proved immune to the totalitarian currents of nazism and communism. The minuscule Communist Party of Poland, widely perceived as an antipatriotic and Jewish-dominated agent of Moscow, was liquidated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purges in 1938. On the other hand, despite the existence of a strong nationalist Right, the regime's proto-fascist inclinations, and popular anti-Semitism, Poland did not develop a mass fascist movement comparable to those in Hungary and Romania.

Under its foreign minister Colonel Józef Beck, Poland moved away from being part of the French alliance system in Eastern Europe toward the independent tactic of balancing its relations with Nazi Germany, Western powers, and the Soviet Union. However, such a strategy was futile and short-lived. In the absence of a European collective security system, which could benefit small and medium-size states, there was little room for maneuver for Eastern European powers trapped between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Having participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938, by the spring of 1939 Poland found itself the next target of German territorial claims. After Hitler's demands were spurned, war was inevitable. British and French security guarantees to Poland offered in March and April 1939 did not mitigate this threat as both states had little means to fight a successful military campaign. In addition, the summer of 1939 saw the failure of the tripartite negotiations among England, France, and the Soviet Union to create an anti-German collective security arrangement in Eastern Europe. The fate of the Second Republic was sealed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 which foresaw the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. Still, in September 1939 Poland was the first country to offer armed resistance to Hitler.

Despite all of its failures, the Second Republic registered significant successes in culture and science. The Polish literary scene showed particular creativity. While the Skamander group, dominated by such figures as Julian Tuwim, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, and Jan Lecho?, practiced neoclassicist poetry, the younger generation of writers including Czeslaw Milosz, Józef Czechowicz, and Aleksander Wat successfully cultivated the spirit of the avant-garde. Perhaps the most individualistic literary figures in prewar Poland were Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schultz, and the young Witold Gombrowicz, whose works contested and revolutionized the genres of theater and prose. Witkiewicz is also counted among the greatest Polish painters of this period, alongside such figures as Jan Cybis, who expanded the notion of colorism. An art nouveau veteran, Xavery Dunikowski, whose talent exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, is still considered to be the greatest twentieth-century Polish sculptor. A long musical tradition was continued by Karol Szymanowski. In academia, Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski were the towering figures of the Polish school of mathematics and logic. While Marceli Handelsman and Franciszek Bujak introduced modern historiography to Poland, Józef Chalasi?ski, Florian Znaniecki, Ludwik Krzywicki, and Stanislaw Ossowski contributed importantly to the world of sociology.

1939–1945

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and Soviet troops invaded from the east on 17 September. After Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September, the Polish-German war turned into World War II, even though Poland's Western allies had not yet launched a major offensive. The Poles resisted gallantly, but German units quickly overran the outnumbered and poorly equipped Polish army. The brutality of the Nazi onslaught was evidenced by numerous massacres of Polish civilians and prisoners of war and ferocious bombings by the Luftwaffe. The Polish government fled on 17 September to Romania, where it was interned. The mass Soviet invasion hastened the destruction of the Polish army. After a murderous siege Warsaw fell to the Germans on 27 September. The last Polish units capitulated in early October. On 28 September 1939 a new German-Soviet agreement partitioned Poland between the two powers.

In both zones the occupiers ruled ruthlessly. While Nazis massacred the Polish intelligentsia and ghettoized the Jewish population, the Soviets deported hundreds of thousands to the east and executed twenty thousand Polish officers, policemen, and government officials. The largest Soviet massacre took place in the forest of Katy?, east of Smolensk, in April 1940. Altogether six million Polish citizens perished in the war. The Nazis exterminated the country's three-million-large Jewish minority and, with the establishment of death camps such as Auschwitz, turned Poland into the major site of the Holocaust. Although condemned by the government-in-exile and main resistance organizations, the elimination of the Jews met with sympathetic reception among some anti-Semitic Poles who perceived it as an opportunity for social mobility and ethnic homogenization of the country.

Polish statehood continued in the form of the government-in-exile, headed by General Wladyslaw Sikorski and grouping together former opposition politicians. Following France's defeat in 1940, the government moved to London. Those troops that escaped the September catastrophe formed the bulk of the Polish army that fought under Western command in Africa and Western Europe. Following the 1941 Nazi attack on the Soviet Union and the Polish-Soviet friendship treaty signed in the same year, a new army was formed in Russia. Evacuated to the Middle East in 1942, these units later fought in Italy, contributing to the Allied victory in Monte Cassino in May 1944.

The resistance movement was led by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa; AK), the largest partisan force in Nazi-occupied Europe, loyal to the government-in-exile. The Polish underground established its own courts, secret education institutions, clandestine press, publishing houses, and a network of couriers traversing Europe. Among the greatest Polish contributions to the Allied war effort were the breaking of the German Enigma code, the discovery of the German missile V-1, and detailed intelligence reports from Nazi Germany.

The Communist resistance movement consisted of the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza; PPR). Established in 1942, the PPR did not recognize the government-in-exile, running its own small military force. Following the German discovery of Polish officers' mass graves in Katy? in 1943 and the Polish government's request to investigate the massacre, Stalin broke relations with the London Poles, set up the Union of Polish Patriots, and created the Polish army under Soviet command. After the Red Army advanced into Polish lands, the Soviets formed a Communist-dominated provisional government, taking administrative control over liberated territories. In an attempt to prevent a Communist takeover, the Home Army launched a series of strikes against the Germans while revealing its civilian and military structures to the Soviets as legitimate authorities. The biggest military offensive took place in Warsaw in August 1944. The Nazis crushed the Warsaw Uprising with utmost brutality, killing up to two hundred thousand people and burning the city to the ground, while the Soviets refused to assist the rebels. Moscow's refusal to render aid was partly based on military considerations. Romania's switch of sides in August 1944 prompted the Red Army to divert some of its forces to the Balkans. In addition, having recovered from the initial shock of defeats during the Soviet summer offensive, the Germans regrouped their forces in Poland and launched counterattacks. However, it was political factors that were of paramount importance. By September 1944 the Red Army had seized Warsaw's districts located on the Vistula's eastern bank and established bridgeheads west of the city. Yet the destruction of the noncommunist Home Army was to Stalin's advantage. The failure of the revolt paved the way for Soviet domination of Poland. The noncommunist intelligentsia was decimated and the government-in-exile lost any influence in the country. Those AK units that escaped the Warsaw debacle were hunted down by Soviet and Communist forces and massacred or deported to labor camps in the Soviet Union. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Allied leaders decided to move Polish borders westward, agreed on the creation of a coalition government dominated by the Communists, and called for free elections. By the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 Poland had been placed in the Soviet sphere of influence.

1945–1956

The immediate postwar period saw a limited political pluralism. The provisions of the Yalta agreement, which mandated free and unfettered elections, enabled the reemergence of several political parties, including the Polish Socialist Party, the Labor Party, and the agrarian Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe; PSL), led by the former prime minister of the government-in-exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk. Soon the agrarians became the major obstacle to Communist acquisition of absolute power. The bulk of anticommunist partisans who resisted Communist and Soviet security forces were destroyed by 1947, though in some areas skirmishes continued until the 1950s. Intimidated, harassed, and infiltrated, political opposition gradually succumbed to Communist pressure. Following the 1947 rigged elections and the merger of the Communists with the Socialists into the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza; PZPR) in December 1948, the Communist takeover of Poland was complete. In their march to absolute power, the Communists also benefited from the exhaustion of the war-worn population, the acceleration of demands for radical socioeconomic changes (strongly articulated by the Socialists, peasants, and parts of the intelligentsia) as well as the genuine enthusiasm among society to rebuild the devastated country.

The new regime quickly began copying the Soviet system by nationalizing banks and industry, launching giant industrialization, exercising near total control over society through ideology and coercion, and establishing a command economy. Polish foreign policy was subordinated to that of the Soviet Union. In 1955 the country joined the Warsaw Treaty Organization. However, the Communists never succeeded in conquering two enclaves of civil society: the Roman Catholic Church and private farmers. As a result of border shifts, population transfers, and the extermination of Jews, Poland became an ethnically homogenous country with a predominantly Catholic population. Led by the charismatic Cardinal Stefan Wyszy?ski, the church constituted an autonomous spiritual community and a repository of traditional values. Despite Wyszy?ski's arrest in 1953, Catholicism continued to play an important role, especially as the new industrial labor force, recruited mostly from peasants, cultivated strong religiosity. The fiasco of collectivizing agriculture stemmed from the internal divisions within the Communist Party. Wladyslaw Gomulka, a Communist leader who spent the war in occupied Poland while leading the party during the first two postwar years, intended to build socialism in Poland by taking into account national specificities, social structures, political traditions, and cultural predispositions. He was expelled from the party leadership in 1948 and later arrested, but unlike other East European Communist leaders purged under Stalinism, Gomulka was never tried and executed. Too weak to afford bloody purges and show trials like those in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the Polish party pursued a milder Stalinist course.

This relative ideological moderation (moderate compared to other Soviet satellites), coupled with the incompleteness of sovietization and the survival of Gomulka, contributed to the rapid collapse of Stalinism in Poland. Following Stalin's death in 1953 and a more relaxed political atmosphere in the Soviet Union, the PZPR began implementing economic and political reforms. However, Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, commonly known as the "secret speech," put the Polish party in a deep legitimacy crisis. As reform Communists, intellectuals, and workers pushed for more reforms, the government freed political prisoners, liberalized censorship, and revived parliament. June 1956 saw a workers' uprising in Pozna?. Although bloodily suppressed, the revolt accelerated the pace of change. In October 1956, acting against the objections of Soviet leaders and local hard-liners, the party decided to reinstate Gomulka as its leader. Despite the looming threat of military confrontation, dramatic negotiations with Khrushchev in Warsaw sealed Gomulka's return to power.

1956–1970

Gomulka's reappointment marked the culmination of the post-Stalinist political thaw in Poland. The new government halted collectivization, reestablished working relations with the church, and passed economic reforms that improved the standard of living and availability of consumer goods. After the reign of the doctrine of socialist realism, the late 1950s saw an explosion of intense cultural production. Films of Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Wojciech Has, and Jerzy Kawalerowicz—to name only a few members of the Polish school—raised Polish cinema to international prominence. The younger generation of acclaimed filmmakers, including Roman Pola?ski and Jerzy Skolimowski, debuted in the 1960s. In the sphere of fine arts, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Jan Lebenstein, and Józef Szajna gained worldwide acclaim for their role in the revival of graphics, poster designing, and painting. Polish theater became recognized thanks to plays of Tadeusz Ró?ewicz, Slawomir Mr?zek, and Tadeusz Kantor. Among the most notable literary figures were the older writers Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and Jerzy Andrzejewski and representatives of the younger generation Tadeusz Konwicki and Marek Hlasko. Yet perhaps the most extraordinary works of Polish literature came from exile. Founded in Paris by Jerzy Giedroyc, the review Kultura and the Literary Institute actively promoted and publicized such figures as Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Andrzej Bobkowski, and Gustaw Herling-Grudzi?ski. Within Poland, Polish jazz left the catacombs and instantly won international recognition. Music of Krzysztof Komeda-Trzci?ski, Zbigniew Namyslowski, and Tomasz Sta?ko revolutionized European jazz.

However, by the mid-1960s the political atmosphere in Poland became more oppressive as the Gomulka regime grew increasingly authoritarian, conservative, and economically incompetent. Having tightened censorship, Gomulka antagonized the liberal intelligentsia, while a head-on competition between the party and the church over the 1966 Millennium celebrations of Polish statehood and the coming of Christianity to Poland alienated him from the clergy. In an attempt to legitimize its flagging rule, the regime embraced aggressive nationalism. It used anti-Semitism and Germanophobia to single out internal and external enemies: party liberals and young intellectuals, some of them of Jewish origin, as well as advocates of the Polish-German reconciliation. This "nationalization" of Polish communism culminated in the 1967–1968 anti-Semitic campaign. The brutal suppression of the pro-democratic student protests in March 1968, combined with the anti-Jewish witch hunt (which led to the forced emigration of thirteen thousand Polish Jews) and Polish participation in the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, discredited communism in Poland on ideological and moral levels. In December 1970, following the massacre of workers protesting food price increases on the Baltic Sea coast, the Polish party politburo sacked Gomulka, replacing him with Edward Gierek.

1970–1980

Gierek pacified labor unrest by withdrawing unpopular price increases and raising wages. A pragmatist and longtime member of the Belgian and French Communist Parties, Gierek believed that the regime should soften its ideological stance and coercion. In his mind-set, economic prosperity alone could guarantee social compliance.

Gierek started under promising auspices. He used cheap loans from the Soviet Union and the Western banks to launch rapid industrial modernization. As a result, wages soared and the availability of consumer goods greatly improved. However, by the mid-1970s economic growth rates began to drop. The misguided policy of investing in technically obsolete industrial projects failed to produce exportable goods that could be used to pay back loans. While rampant corruption rivaled the incompetent management of party officials, the regime conducted self-laudatory propaganda. The dissonance between Gierek's public message and the actual conditions in Poland resulted in widespread apathy, moral disillusionment, and opportunism, brilliantly portrayed in works of the young filmmakers Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kie?lowski, and Marceli ?ozi?ski. Their biting critique of society in crisis was aptly dubbed the "cinema of moral concern."

In 1976 Gierek resorted to the very solution advanced by Gomulka six years earlier—a general food-price increase. As labor unrest engulfed Poland, in the city of Radom local party headquarters were besieged and burned. Despite government suppression of the riots in the form of brutal arrests, beatings, and the sacking of hundreds of workers, the government soon rescinded the price increases.

The pacification of protests had a mobilizing effect on dissident intellectuals who, in September 1976, formed the Committee for the Defense of Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotników; KOR). The KOR, among other things, offered legal advice and financial support to the prosecuted workers and their families. The group included former reform Communists, veterans of the 1968 student protests, and members of the prewar Socialist Party as well as several cultural figures and a clergyman. The KOR soon expanded its activities into the defense of human and citizen rights, underground publishing, the establishment of independent trade unions, and the overall promotion of a civil society. In comparison to dissidents in other Communist states, KOR members, though repeatedly harassed by police, enjoyed relatively lenient treatment. As the Polish government signed the Helsinki peace, security, and civil rights accords and tried to secure more loans, it chose not to antagonize Western leaders by brutalizing the opposition. By the end of the decade Poland boasted several opposition groups of different political persuasions.

The dialogue between intellectuals and workers promoted by KOR encompassed only a tiny fraction of the Polish society. However, the late 1970s saw the rapprochement between opposition intellectuals and the strongest autonomous institution in Poland, the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders had become increasingly outspoken about human rights. The major boost to this trend was and Marceli Lozin the naming of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Kraków as Pope John Paul II in 1978. During his 1979 trip to Poland the pope's sermons attracted millions of laypeople and paved the way for a spiritual revolution and political upheaval in 1980.

1980–1989

In the summer of 1980, a rising foreign-trade deficit, hidden inflation, and mounting national debt led to the government's decision to radically adjust prices and cut domestic food supplies. Strikes and work stoppages paralyzed the entire country. In the coastal city of Gdansk, workers of the Lenin Shipyard went on strike on 14 August 1980. Under the energetic leadership of the young free trade union activist Lech Wa??sa and coached by members of the democratic opposition, the strikers combined economic postulates with political demands. They soon established the Interfactory Strike Committee in the Baltic region. In addition to economic concessions, the committee's demands included the creation of independent trade unions with the right to strike, the release of political prisoners, and freedom of expression. The action sparked a wave of political strikes across Poland. By the end of August the government yielded to this pressure and signed a series of agreements allowing the establishment of independent and autonomous labor unions. These accords toppled the Gierek regime and paved the way for the creation of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity" in September 1980.

The first autonomous labor organization in the Soviet bloc, Solidarity soon evolved into a nationwide movement that by the year's end claimed nine million members and in the following year ten million. During the sixteen months of its legal existence, the union sparked an unparalleled wave of social activism, patriotic euphoria, and national unity. By radicalizing its initial nonpolitical, self-limiting agenda, Solidarity sought a semipluralist system in which citizens would share with the Communist Party responsibilities for ruling the state. The realization of this program would essentially end communism in Poland. Subjected to Soviet pressure and eager to reinstate the Communist Party's rule, the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski decided to destroy Solidarity by force. With the declaration of martial law on 13 December 1981, military and police units sealed off the country, arrested thousands of Solidarity activists, and introduced a draconic penal code. In 1982 Solidarity was officially banished.

Despite repression, Solidarity continued its struggle underground. It organized political protests, work stoppages, and established a massive network of clandestine institutions. By the mid-1980s Jaruzelski's government softened its stance and began implementing moderate social, economic, and political reforms. When Mikhail Gorbachev launched his perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union, Jaruzelski became his leading follower in the Eastern bloc, hoping to pacify society and reform the economy while retaining the political power of the Communist Party. However, the goals of liberalizing the political system and introducing market mechanisms without legalizing Solidarity proved contradictory. In 1988 the government's plans to implement austerity measures provoked a giant wave of Solidarity-led strikes. Conducted from February to April 1989, the Roundtable Talks between Solidarity and the government led to the legalization of the union and secured its participation in parliamentary elections. On 4 June 1989, in the first partially free elections conducted in Eastern Europe since Communist takeovers, Solidarity won an overwhelming victory, taking 99 of 100 seats in the Senate and all of the 169 seats it was allowed to contest in the lower chamber of parliament, the Sejm. In August 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki formed the Solidarity-led coalition cabinet, the first noncommunist government in the Soviet bloc.

1989–2005

Following Solidarity's victory, the Mazowiecki government implemented sweeping reforms. In 1990 it implemented economic "shock therapy," commonly known as the Balcerowicz plan (named after Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz), beginning a transformation to a market economy. However, with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the political solutions reached by the Roundtable Talks became increasingly anachronistic. The year 1990 saw the division of Solidarity into numerous factions, disunited in their attitudes toward market reforms, de-communization, and Lech Wa??sa's presidential ambitions. In the presidential elections of 1990 Wa??sa defeated Mazowiecki, while the 1991 general vote produced a fragmented parliament. Rising unemployment, cuts in welfare spending, and an overall sense of insecurity in society resulted in the electoral victory of the ex-communist Alliance of Democratic Left (SLD) in 1993. Presidential elections two years later saw the leader of the alliance, Aleksander Kwa?niewski, defeat Wa??sa. Kwa?niewski went on to win a second term in 2000.

Despite these frequent changes, Poland nevertheless has become a fully fledged democracy and a market economy. The transition did not occur without serious difficulties, however. The country continues to battle high unemployment, low incomes, and a crumbling public infrastructure. Its oversize farming sector is costly and inefficient. Economic inefficiency coupled with corruption brought down the SLD government in 1997 and later its right-center successor, the Electoral Action "Solidarity" (AWS) cabinet in 2001. The SLD government of Leszek Miller, which ruled the country from 2001 to 2004, advanced political cronyism and corruption even further. Following Miller's resignation in 2004, the country was ruled by the minority government of Marek Belka. The general elections of September 2005 produced the defeat of the SLD and the victory of the national conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) and Civic Platform (PO), another center-right party. Between them, the two parties took over 50 percent of the vote. However, the outcome of negotiations on forming a coalition government collapsed after Lech Kaczy?ski of PiS defeated Donald Tusk of PO in presidential elections in October 2005. In 2006, Poland had a minority government dominated by the Law and Justice Party. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz of PiS served as prime minister.

Admittedly, most Polish political leaders, regardless of their political affiliations, contributed to Poland's integration with international institutions. In 1998 the country joined NATO and in May 2004 the European Union. A major U.S. ally in Europe, Poland participated in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq; since 2003 Poland has led an international peacekeeping force of 9,000 troops, including 2,500 from Poland, in south-central Iraq.

In staunch contrast to the prewar period, Poland does not have any border disputes and protects its minorities according to international legal and ethical standards. After 1989 Polish diplomacy treated Soviet republics as full subjects of international law and ardently supported national movements in Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine. In December 1991 Poland was the first country to officially recognize independent Ukraine and played an important role in the peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian political crisis of 2005.

See alsoAuschwitz-Birkenau; Eastern Bloc; Gomulka, Wladyslaw; Jaruzelski, Wojciech; John Paul II; Katy? Forest Massacre; Milosz, Czeslaw; Minority Rights; Occupation, Military; Pilsudski, Józef; Resistance; Solidarity; Ukraine; Wajda, Andrzej; Wal?sa, Lech; Warsaw; Warsaw Ghetto; Warsaw Pact; Warsaw Uprising; World War II.

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Mikolaj Kunicki