Polish Nationalism in the Post-Communist Era

Abstract

In 1989/90, the Communist system of government in Poland formally came to an ignominious end. Stripped of the protective hand of the Soviet Union, which had been responsible for its establishment in 1944/45, the Communist regime was replaced by a parliamentary democracy, at the centre of which stood the most militant and successful patriotic movement in Poland since the end of the Second World War, Solidarność (Solidarity), under the charismatic leadership of Lech Wałęsa.¹ This putative metamorphosis in Poland’s political situation represented the culmination of a deeply embedded disenchantment on the part of a substantial majority of the Polish people with a regime whose political, social and ethical values had always been alien to them. After all, during the inter-war period, the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) had attracted exiguous popular support, and was widely and rightly perceived to be a party whose ultimate objective was the destruction of the independent Polish state that had been created in 1918, and its subjugation to the Soviet Union. The remnants of this party, which Stalin himself had dissolved in 1938 because of its feeble performance and ideological unreliability, formed the basis of a revived wartime Communist movement sponsored by the Soviet dictator with the same aims as its pre-war predecessor.²