Warsaw

views updated

WARSAW.

INTERWAR PERIOD
WORLD WAR II
COMMUNIST RULE
AFTER 1989
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Located on the Vistula River in the flatland of Mazovia, Warsaw (Warszawa) became the capital of Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) in the seventeenth century, thanks to its central location between the historical capitals of Kraków and Vilnius (Wilno). The Commonwealth, once the largest state in Europe, disappeared from maps in the late eighteenth century, partitioned by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; thus Warsaw began the twentieth century merely as a provincial city of the Russian Empire. After the defeated uprising of 1863 the province was deprived even of the name of Poland and was instead called Privislanski Krai, "Vistula Land."

Mass migrations and demographic explosion in 1870–1914 increased the city's population from 260,000 to 885,000. It was the eighth largest city in Europe, the second largest city in the Russian Empire, the largest Polish city, and the second largest Jewish city. Ethnic Poles remained the absolute majority, but the growing Jewish community made up close to 40 percent of the population; the remaining population was mostly Russian or German. Besides a heavy garrison and political oppression, Russian rule brought integration with huge markets of the empire, which helped develop Warsaw's industries: metal, machine, clothing, and food processing, as well as rail transport.

In summer 1914, Varsovians were not as enthusiastic about going to war as were the crowds in Berlin or Paris. It meant fighting for an alien ruler, possibly against other Poles and Jews in the German and Austrian armies. The Germans took Warsaw in August 1915. They abolished religious discrimination, recognized Warsaw as the capital of an autonomous Polish kingdom with a regency council, restored the Polish language in administration and education, and encouraged Jewish political organization. These concessions could hardly balance the hardships and losses that the city suffered during the war. The Russians dismantled or destroyed many factories and all bridges; disruption of trade networks and intensive exploitation by the Germans further affected the economy. First Russian mobilization and eastward evacuation of factories and institutions, then mass labor recruitment to Germany, failing birthrates, and growing death rates reduced the population to below 760,000.

In fall 1918 the occupation regime collapsed. German soldiers offered no resistance when disarmed by patriotic youth. On 11 November, Józef Pilsudski (1867–1935) took power from the regency council and declared Poland's independence. A Polish national movement exploited the window of opportunity that had opened when Germany, Austria, and Russia lost the war and restored independent Poland; Warsaw was the capital again. This was almost lost when a Bolshevik offensive reached the city outskirts several months later. The newborn Polish army defeated the invader in the dramatic Battle of Warsaw of August 1920, which saved the city and possibly a major part of Europe from communist rule, for a time.

INTERWAR PERIOD

Warsaw became the seat of the Polish parliament (Sejm and Senate), the president, the Supreme Court, and the government and military authorities, as well as the scene of major political events. The most dramatic of these were the assassination of Poland's first president, Gabriel Narutowicz (1865–1922), in December 1922, and the Pilsudski coup d'état in May 1926. In local and national elections, Varsovians shifted their votes from nationalist parties (Polish National Democrats; Zionists), which dominated in early 1920s, or those of the left (Socialists; Communists), to the Pilsudski camp after 1926. The Socialists gained strength again in late 1930, while the Communists and Radical Nationalists (ONR) attracted up to 15 percent and 10 percent of votes respectively.

Warsaw became Poland's cultural center: the largest concentration of theaters, cinemas, newspapers, and galleries, including the new National Museum. Almost 40 percent of books in Polish were published in Warsaw, and a third of Polish academic teachers taught there. Expansion of public education reduced the city's illiteracy rate from 30 percent to 6 percent. Higher education remained elitist, albeit the number of students grew by 50 percent (to twenty-three thousand). International cultural competitions (the Chopin competition for pianists and the Wieniawski Violin Competition) symbolized Warsaw's emergence as a European cultural center.

The capital status served the city well, bringing new buildings for the government, cultural institutions, modern residential districts, wide avenues, and parks. Warsaw expanded its territory to 140 square kilometers and almost doubled its population to 1.3 million (plus 140,000 daily commuters from suburban localities). Water, electric, and gas networks more than doubled in size, the number of telephone lines increased fourfold, energy consumption multiplied. The combined length of tram lines tripled, and suburban railroads contributed to rapid growth of population in the greater Warsaw area (to 1.9 million). Motor traffic was light: 2,300 taxis outnumbered horse droshkies only in the late 1930s. Living conditions gradually improved, but half of workers' families lived in single-room dwellings, only a minority of them had a bath.

Three-quarters of the population growth resulted from migration. Old industries recovered relatively quickly from war, and new ones emerged, including chemical, car, aircraft, and armament industries. Warsaw was also a major trade center. Workers, mainly semiskilled or unskilled, made up 47 percent of the population in 1921 and 53 percent (340,000) in 1938, when those self-employed (craftsmen, shopkeepers, and so forth) numbered 126,000. A notable group (123,000) was intelligentsia and white-collar workers, who staffed education, media, culture, and the expansive state and city administrations. Some forty to seventy thousand people were unemployed; sixty thousand were domestic servants, almost exclusively female, which contributed to the city's female majority.

Migrations resulted in the relative decline of the Jewish community to 29 percent in 1939, but in absolute terms it grew. Warsaw had more synagogues and houses of prayer than any other city in the world, as well as numerous Jewish schools, hospitals, newspapers, and cultural institutions. While acculturation made progress among the youth, the community's first language remained Yiddish; only a minority declared Polish as their mother tongue. Jewish identities, religious and secular, remained strong and synergic with high political mobilization by several Zionist parties, the religious Agudas, the socialist Bund, and so forth. Warsaw's Jews concentrated in the northwestern districts, such as Muranów and Leszno; among the bourgeoisie, its lower strata in particular, 85 percent of petty traders, 55 percent of craftsmen, 60 percent of doctors, and 37 percent of lawyers were Jewish. Ethnic tensions, which had marked the city since the early twentieth century, rose along with the economic hardships and radicalization of politics in the 1930s. Polish nationalists, the far-right ONR in particular, put anti-Semitic slogans at the forefront, called for boycott of Jewish shops, and harassed Jewish students.

WORLD WAR II

In World War II Warsaw suffered greater losses than any other city in human history. It resisted the heavy bombing and repeated attacks of the German army till 27 September, when lack of supplies and hope for relief forced surrender. During the siege, sixteen thousand civilians and soldiers perished and more than sixty thousand were wounded. The subsequent German occupation aimed at reducing Warsaw to a provincial city, not even the capital of their General Government (a rump of Poland annexed neither to Germany nor to the USSR). Its principles were racist hierarchy, ruthless terror, unlimited exploitation, and plunder; genocide followed. In Warsaw, the Germans (thirty thousand in 1943) had separate districts, restaurants, seats in trams, and so on, "for Germans only." Poles, as an "inferior race," were to serve them as slave labor, terrorized into obedience. The lowest category were the Jews, who were deprived of any rights. Food rationing expressed it well: in 1941 the daily food ration in Warsaw was 184 calories for a Jew, 699 for a Pole, and 2,613 for a German.

Beginning in November 1940 all Warsaw Jews were closed behind the ghetto walls. Half a million people, Jews of Warsaw and deportees from other localities, went through the Warsaw ghetto—the largest in Europe, with 460,000 inmates at the peak moment. Starvation and disease took more than one hundred thousand lives before the great deportation to the death camp of Treblinka in July–September 1942, when more than three hundred thousand perished. When the final liquidation of the ghetto with some sixty thousand remaining Jews began in April 1943, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization and Jewish Military Union met Germans with fire. Despite great asymmetry of forces, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising continued until 8 May. Germans burned the ghetto house by house. Some twenty-five thousand Jews attempted to survive on the "Aryan side," in hiding or under a false identity; a minority succeeded.

Occupied Warsaw was under direct Nazi rule. Germans issued decrees, and appointed and controlled city administration and the Jewish Council to administer the ghetto. Key institutions of the new order were the SS-Police departments, the Pawiak prison (of sixty-five thousand inmates, 1939–1944, thirty-two thousand were executed and twenty-three thousand deported to camps) and the Labor Office, which shipped to the Reich ninety thousand Polish slave workers. The starvation-level food allocation and exploitative wages resulted in an unprecedented expansion of the black market. The occupiers took over all Jewish and major Polish business; many German companies supplying the German army opened branches in Warsaw. Besides the official, systematic plunder of valuables and cultural treasures, many Germans robbed on their own; corruption flourished.

Beneath, there was an underground city of secret military and political organizations, people in hiding, and the black market. It was the capital of the Polish Underground State, a unique conspiratorial structure, including the Home Army (forty thousand sworn soldiers in Warsaw alone), the civilian administration of the delegate of the Polish government-in-exile, secret tribunals, political parties, and youth organizations. It was the center of illegal publishing, underground education, and forbidden cultural activity. All these were punishable by death, yet German terror, including street round-ups and public executions, proved counterproductive. By summer 1944 there were almost one thousand armed assaults on German targets, including the simultaneous destruction of railroads around the city in November 1942 and the assassination of Warsaw's SS and police commander in February 1944.

The underground city rose to open battle in the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August 1944. This sixty-three-day-long battle was lost; fifteen thousand Polish soldiers and at least 150,000 civilians perished. The Germans emptied Warsaw (the left bank) of the remaining half a million people and over the next three months systematically destroyed the city with fire and dynamite; to Germany they shipped twenty-seven thousand wagons of plundered property. When a Soviet offensive forced them out in January 1945, Warsaw was a sea of ruins.

Estimates of Warsaw human losses range from seven to eight hundred thousand: more than the combined losses of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and Hamburg. Buildings and infrastructure were destroyed in 85 percent of the city, including 90 percent of industrial buildings and equipment; 90 percent of churches, museums, and theaters; 80 percent of hospitals; and 70 percent of residential buildings. Invaluable cultural treasures, libraries, and archives were lost. Early twenty-first-century estimates of the material losses exceed $40 billion.

COMMUNIST RULE

Despite the destruction and horror, Warsaw was resurrected. Returning refugees, a vast influx of migrants from the countryside, and young cohorts of baby-boomers gradually repopulated the city: from less than half a million in 1946, to 800,000 in 1950 and 1.1 million in 1960, to the prewar level of 1.3 million in 1970 and 1.6 million since 1980. Greater Warsaw grew to 2.3 million.

Varsovians, old and new, did their best to raise their city from the ruins. The new, communist regime made rebuilding a priority, in order to shore up its weak patriotic credentials. In ten years the houses of the Old Town had been rebuilt in their fifteenth-to seventeenth-century styles, St. John's Cathedral rose from ruins in its gothic form, the National Theater regained its classicist facade, and so forth. The Royal Castle was entirely rebuilt in the 1970s. Monuments were restored (though not all) and new ones erected, including the monument of the Heroes of the Ghetto (1948), a huge memorial of Soviet soldiers (1950), and hundreds of stone tablets commemorating the German executions. Instead of a statue of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), Warsaw was given the massive Palace of Culture and Science (1955). The city regained its position as the cultural center of Poland; by the 1960s it had twenty-four theaters, fifty cinemas, major art galleries, concert halls, and museums. Sixty percent of Polish writers and journalists worked in the city, as well as every second composer, every third painter, and every fourth actor. It was the seat of 60 percent of Poland's research institutes and sixteen university-level schools, including the two largest ones (Warsaw University and Polytechnic). The student population grew from twenty-seven thousand in 1950 to eighty thousand in 1980, while 80 percent of Warsaw's teenagers went to secondary schools.

This city was very different from old Warsaw. It had lost its diversity and had a highly homogeneous, Polish, predominantly Roman Catholic population. War decimated old elites, and the new regime made the upper bourgeoisie, private entrepreneurs, domestic servants, and the unemployed disappear, while it greatly enlarged its favorite groups: industrial workers and bureaucrats. "Old" Varsovians became a minority among immigrants, many of whom needed time to learn urban ways of life. Class and ownership structures changed in a revolutionary way: all private real estate within city limits became public; all but the smallest enterprises were nationalized. Ninety-five percent of the city labor force were employees of the state-owned enterprises, state-controlled cooperatives, and public institutions. The city remained mostly female: in the early postwar years there were 140 women per 100 men (!), later the proportion stabilized at 115:100.

Warsaw's layout changed too. Many streets were altered, widened, and extended, especially the major east-west and north-south thruways. The city expanded to 495 square kilometers and absorbed several suburbs and satellite towns, which increased the population but decreased its density to just a third of the prewar level. New housing districts emerged, first in the areas of complete war destruction (such as Muranów), then in more distant suburbs such as Ursynów-Natolin and Bródno (each built to house one hundred thousand inhabitants), Stegny, Bemowo, and Goclaw. These districts made up of gray concrete apartment blocks are the greatest monument of the communist period.

Large industrial zones grew at the outskirts. Machine and automobile manufacturing, electrical engineering, electronics, tool making, metallurgy (including the Warsaw steelworks), printing, and clothing, food, and pharmaceutical industries dominated the city's economy. A third of the city's labor force (245,000 in 1980) worked in industry, which provided 8 percent of national industrial output. Production and employment grew fast especially in the 1950s and early 1970s; the 1980s were a decade of crisis and drift. Policy makers were proud of industrial growth and ignored environmental damage; the city did not have a sewage treatment plant.

Warsaw has long been Poland's biggest hub of rail, road, and air routes, but it did not have a subway until 1995. Buses (six hundred kilometers of lines in 1980s) became the basis of urban transport. Motor traffic grew slowly; there were 60,000 passenger cars in 1970 and 280,000 in 1980. Through most of the communist period "scarcity" was the key word for daily life; the measure for shortages of food and consumer goods was the length of queues in front of shops. Living standards improved: in 1980 the city had one person per room (15 square meters per person), 90 percent of dwellings had water and gas. However, services were poor, telecommunications included: in the late 1970s two households in three did not have a telephone.

Public life changed profoundly. The communists gutted the Sejm and other elective bodies, turning them into empty facades. They multiplied ministries (to thirty-four in 1952) and government agencies, and transformed trade unions, youth organizations, and so forth, into mass, centralized, and bureaucratic structures, all under strict control of the Party and its Politburo. Warsaw became the scene of monotonous political rituals, mass rallies, and parades. The Warsaw Pact was signed there in 1955. New landmarks in the city's political landscape were the Party headquarters, the Ministry of Public Security (Ministry of Internal Affairs since 1955), and the Soviet Embassy. Political crises destabilized the scene a few times, in particular in October 1956—when Wladyslaw Gomulka (1905–1982) managed to calm unrest and placate Soviet leaders, whose tanks were approaching Warsaw—and in March 1968, when the authorities crushed a student rebellion and unleashed the "anti-Zionist" campaign. During other major Polish crises (December 1970, August 1980) the city was relatively calm. This was not unrelated to living standards that were better than elsewhere in the country and to the concentration of Party members, who made up 14 percent of the city adult population.

The visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, with great crowds vividly reacting to his sermons, showed a different Warsaw. Since the mid-1970s groups of democratic opposition had emerged among Warsaw's intelligentsia. Following the general labor strikes of summer 1980, which brought the Solidarity movement into the world's view, such independent initiatives mushroomed. Despite the declaration of martial law in December 1981 and mass arrests and other persecutions through the 1980s (including the murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko [1947–1984]), the movement survived in the underground. Warsaw became, as it had been in World War II, the center of an impressive underground publishing movement. In spring 1989, in round table talks, Party and opposition leaders negotiated a compromise on (semi-)democratic elections, which were then won by the opposition. Through the domino effect, this led to the end of the communist regimes in Europe.

AFTER 1989

Beginning in 1989, Warsaw underwent a rapid transformation from command to market economy. After the shock therapy of the early 1990s, Warsaw's economy took off. Liberalization, privatization, and opening to foreign products and investment changed the city's economic profile, social structure, and outlook. Many big state-owned enterprises declined, while thousands of small businesses emerged as well as wealthy financial institutions; services and commerce displaced industry; and the Warsaw Stock Exchange reopened (in the former Communist Party headquarters). Warsaw has led Poland in reintegrating with the world economy, which has been undergoing globalization and rapid technological changes.

With the highest wages and lowest unemployment in Poland, the city has attracted many migrants from less fortunate regions of Poland and other countries (mainly post-Soviet republics), while natural growth declined. New social groups emerged; income disparities multiplied. The number of cars doubled, causing traffic problems, which the first subway line and two new bridges only partially solved. A construction boom transformed the skyline with new office towers and hotels; pubs, clubs, and shopping centers became favorite places of leisure. New patterns of consumption emerged as well as new social problems, such as homelessness and long-term unemployment.

Political reforms gave the city a real local government. Democratization introduced new emotions and style into city politics, with changing coalitions of liberals, (postcommunist) social democrats, Christian democrats, nationalists, and various populists. Citizens watched the public scene via new media: newspapers, radio stations, and Web sites. Long overdue monuments appeared, such as those to the Home Army and to Pilsudski, while the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), founder of the Soviet political police, was removed; many streets changed their communist-era names. Noisy protests of miners, farmers, or nurses in front of government buildings became familiar sights, while contributing to traffic problems. The visits of foreign leaders became increasingly frequent. After Poland's accession to the European Union in May 2004, Varsovians elected their first deputies to the European Parliament.