Encyclopedia
In the period following its emergence in the 10th century, the
Polish nation was led by a series of strong rulers who converted the
Poles to
Christianity, created a strong
Central European state and integrated Poland into
European culture. Formidable foreign enemies and internal fragmentation eroded this initial structure in the
thirteenth century, but consolidation in the 1300s laid the base for the dominant Polish Kingdom that was to follow. The
Jagiellon dynasty 1385–1569 formed the Polish-Lithuanian union beginning with the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila. The partnership proved profitable for the Poles and Lithuanians, who played a dominant role in one of the most powerful empires in
Europe for the next three centuries. The
Nihil novi act adopted by the Polish
Sejm in 1505 transferred most
legislative power from the monarch to the Sejm. This event marked the beginning of the period known as "Nobles' Commonwealth" when the state was ruled by the "free and equal" Polish
nobility . The
Lublin Union of 1569 established the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an influential player in
European politics and a vital
cultural entity.
By the 18th century the nobles' democracy had gradually declined into anarchy, making the once powerful Commonwealth vulnerable to foreign influence. Eventually the country was
partitioned by its neighbors and erased from the map in 1795. Although the majority of the
szlachta were reconciled to the end of the
Commonwealth in 1795, the idea of Polish independence was kept alive by events inside and outside of Poland throughout the 19th century.
Poland's location in the very centre of Europe became especially significant in a period when both
Prussia and
Russia were intensely involved in European rivalries and alliances and modern nation states were established over the entire
continent. Poland regained its independence in 1918, but the
Second Polish Republic was destroyed by
Germany in the Invasion of Poland at the beginning of the
Second World War. Nonetheless the
Polish government in exile never surrendered and
managed to contribute significantly to the Allied victory.
Nazi Germany's forces were forced to retreat from Poland as the
Soviet Union Red Army advanced, which led to the creation of
People's Republic of Poland, a Soviet satellite state. By the late 1980s a Polish reform movement,
Solidarity, was able to enforce a peaceful transistion from
communist state to
democracy, which resulted in the creation of the modern Polish state.
Over the past millennium, the territory ruled by
Poland has shifted and varied greatly. At one time, in the 16th century,
Poland was the second largest state in
Europe, after
Russia. At other times there was no separate Polish state at all. Poland regained its independence in 1918, after more than a century of rule by its neighbours, but its borders shifted again after the Second World War.
Early history of Poland
The Polish state was born in 966 with the
baptism of
Mieszko I, duke of the
Slavic tribe of Polans and founder of the
Piast dynasty. His conversion from paganism to
Christianity was Poland's first recorded historical event. By 990, when Mieszko officially submitted to the authority of the
Holy See, he had transformed his country into one of the strongest powers in
Eastern Europe. Mieszko's son
Boleslaw the Brave built on his father's achievements, for the first time uniting all the provinces that subsequently came to comprise the traditional territory of Poland. In 1025 he became the first king of Poland. After his death the country entered a period of instability, but was unified under the reign of
Boleslaw the Wrymouth. After he died in 1138, however, the kingdom was divided among four of his sons, ushering in a period of fragmentation. For two centuries, the Piasts sparred with each other, the clergy, and the nobility for control over the divided kingdom. The civil strife and foreign invasions, such as that of the Mongols in 1241, weakened and depopulated the small Polish principalities.
In 1226,
Konrad I of Masovia invited the
Teutonic Knights to Poland to help him fight the pagan
Prussians on the border of his lands. After exterminating the Prussians, the Knights turned their attention to Poland and Lithuania, waging war with them for most of the 14th and 15th centuries.
In the middle of 14th century Poland started to expand to the East and annexed Galich Rus'.
The regional division ended when
Wladyslaw I the Elbow-high united the various principalities of
Poland. His son
Kazimierz the Great, the last of the
Piast dynasty, considerably strengthened the country's position in both foreign and domestic affairs. Before his death in 1370, the sonless king arranged for his nephew, the Andegawen
Louis of Hungary, to inherit the throne.
In 1385, the Union of Krewo was signed between Louis' daughter
Jadwiga and the Lithuanian Grand Duke
Jogaila , beginning the Polish-Lithuanian Union and strengthening both nations in their shared opposition to the Teutonic Knights and the growing threat of
Muscovy.
The Jagiellon Era
The personal union with the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania to the North-East, paved the way for the extension of Polish power far to the East and the creation , of a unified
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth , stretching from the
Baltic Sea and the
Carpathians mountains, to present-day
Belarus and Western and Central
Ukraine .
In the north-west, the
Teutonic Knights, in control of
Prussia since the 13th century, were forced after their defeats by a combined Polish-Lithuanian force in the
Battle of Grunwald , and in the later Thirteen Years War, to surrender to the Polish crown the Western half of the territory they had controlled , and to accept Polish-Lithuanian suzerainty, over the remainder in the 1466, Second Treaty of Torun.
During this period
Poland became the home to Europe's largest Jewish population, as royal edicts guaranteeing Jewish safety and religious freedom, issued during the 13th century, contrasted with bouts of persecution in
Western Europe. This persecution intensified following the
Black Death of 1348–1349, when some in the West blamed the outbreak of the plague on the Jews. Much of Poland suffered relatively little from this disease, while Jewish immigration brought their valuable contributions and abilities to the rising state. The greatest increase in
Jewish numbers occurred in the 18th century, when Jews came to make up 7% of the population. Generally speaking, the Kings of Poland, and the
szlachta , were friendly to the Jews, while the peasants and the
Catholic Church were not.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
During the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the 16th century, Poland became an elective monarchy, in which the king was elected by the nobility. This king would serve as the monarch until he died. At that time the country would have another election.
In 1572 CE, the Polish king Zygmunt August died without any heirs. At the time, Poland didn’t have any method of choosing a king if such a thing happened. It took a long time for the Poles to decide how to elect their king. Finally, after much debate, they decided to let the entire nobility of Poland decide who the king was to be. The nobility were to gather near Warsaw and vote in a “free election”. However, they did not have elections every two or four years like most countries do today. Instead, they voted after the death of the old king.
The first Polish election was held in 1573. There were four men running for king in this election. These men were; Henryk Walezy, who was the brother of the king of France, the Russian czar Ivan IV "the Terrible", Archduke Ernest from the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, and the king of Sweden,
Johan Vasa III. Walezy was the winner in a very disorderly election. The reason for so much disorder was that a huge amount of people came to elect the new king. Walezy only served as king for four months. After four months as Polish king, he received news that his brother had died. He then went to France and claimed the throne as
Henry III. This surprised much of the country because Poland had a better economy at the time.
Poland stopped electing kings in 1795, when Russia took over, after the death of Stanislaw August Poniatowski. The elected kings in order of when they were elected were: Henryk Walezy,
Stefan Batory,
Zygmunt Waza III,
Wladyslaw Waza IV,
Jan Kazmierz Waza,
Michal Korybut Wisniowiecki,
Jan Sobieski III, August II "The Strong",
Stanislaw Leszczynski, August III and, last, Stanislaw August Poniatowski.
The
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, following upon the
Union of Lublin, became an interesting counterpoint to the
absolute monarchies gaining power in Europe. Its quasi-
democratic political system of Golden Liberty, albeit limited to nobility was mostly unprecedented in the
history of Europe.
However the series of power struggles between the lesser nobility, the higher nobility and
elected kings undermined
citizenship values and gradually eroded the government's function and authority. After the series of devastating wars in the middle of the 17th century Poland-Lithuania stopped being an influential player in the European politics. Its economy and growth was further damaged by the nobility's reliance on
agriculture and
serfdom, delaying the industrialization of the country. By the beginning of the 18th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commownealth, the largest European country, was little more than a pawn of its neighbours who interfered in its domestic politics almost at will.
With the coming of the
Polish Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century, the movement for reform and revitalization of the country made important gains, culminating in the adoption of the Constitution of May 3, the first modern codified
constitution on the
European continent. However the reforms, which transformed the Commonwealth into a
constitutional monarchy were viewed as dangerous by Poland's neighbours, who didn't want the rebirth of the strong Commonwealth. Before the Commonwealth could fully implement and benefits from its reforms, it was
invaded by its neighbours.
Partitioned Poland
Polish independence ended in a series of
partitions undertaken by
Russia,
Prussia and
Austria, with Russia gaining most of the Commonwealth's territory including nearly all of the former
Lithuania ,
Volhynia and
Ukraine. Austria gained the populous southern region henceforth named Galicia–
Lodomeria, named after the Duchy of
Halicz and
Volodymyr . In 1795 Austria also gained the land between
Kraków and
Warsaw, between
Vistula river and
Pilica river. Prussia acquired the western lands from the
Baltic through
Greater Poland to
Kraków, as well as
Warsaw and
Lithuanian territories to the north-east and
Podlasie. The last heroic attempt to save Poland's independence was a national uprising led by
Tadeusz Kosciuszko, however it was eventually quenched.
Following the
French emperor
Napoleon I's defeat of Prussia, a Polish state was again set up in 1807 under French tutelage as the
Duchy of Warsaw. When Austria was defeated in 1809, Lodomeria was added, giving the new state a population of some 3.75 million, a quarter of that of the former commonwealth. Polish nationalists were to remain among the staunchest allies of the French as the tide of war turned against them, inaugurating a relationship that continued into the
twentieth century.
With Napoleon's defeat, the
Congress of Vienna in 1815 converted most of the grand duchy into a
Kingdom of Poland ruled by the Russian
Tsar, and after the January Uprising of 1863 fully integrated into Russia proper. Several national uprisings were bloodily subdued by the partitioning powers. However, the striving of Polish patriots to regain their independence could not be extinguished. The opportunity for freedom appeared only after
World War I when the oppressing states were defeated or weakened.
Independence Regained
World War I and the political turbulence that was sweeping Europe in 1914 offered the Polish nation hopes for regaining independence. By the end of World War I, Poland had seen the defeat or retreat of all three occupying powers.
Polish independence was eventually proclaimed on November 3, 1918 and later confirmed by the
Treaty of Versailles in 1919; the same treaty also gave Poland some territories annexed by German and Austrian during the partitions . Eastern borders of Poland have been determined by the
Polish-Soviet War. From mid 1920s to mid 1930s Polish government was under the control of
Józef Pilsudski. Polish independence had boosted the development of culture, but Poland was hit hard by the
Great Depression. The new Polish state had had only 20 years of relative stability and uneasy peace before Poland's aggressive neighbours tried to wipe her from the map of Europe again.
World War II in Poland
On August 23, 1939,
Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union signed the
Ribbentrop–Molotov non-aggression pact, which secretly provided for the dismemberment of Poland into
Nazi and Soviet-controlled zones. On September 1, 1939,
Hitler ordered his troops into Poland. On September 17, Soviet troops invaded and then occupied most of the areas of eastern Poland having significant
Ukrainian and
Belarusian populations under the terms of this agreement. After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Poland was completely occupied by German troops.
The Poles formed an underground resistance movement and a
Polish government in exile, first in
Paris and later in
London, which was recognized by the Soviet Union. During
World War II, 400,000 Poles fought under Soviet command, and 200,000 went into combat on Western fronts in units loyal to the Polish government in exile. Many Polish refugee camps were set up, including one in Valdivadé, near
Kolhapur in
India. The camp numbered about 5000, and the Polish embassy in exile had its office in
Bombay. The camp existed from 1943 to 1948.
In April 1943, the Soviet Union broke relations with the Polish government in exile after the German military announced that they had discovered mass graves of murdered Polish army officers at
Katyn, in the USSR. The Soviets claimed that the Poles had insulted them by requesting that the
Red Cross investigate these reports. In July 1944, the Soviet
Red Army entered Poland, defeated the Germans , and established a communist-controlled "Polish Committee of National Liberation" in
Lublin.
There was powerful hatred of the Nazis in Warsaw, and there was often resistance, most famously the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 in which most of the Warsaw population participated, but which was largely instigated by the
Armia Krajowa, or Home Army. The uprising was planned on the condition that the Soviet forces, waiting on the other side of the Vistula River in full force, would help in battle over Warsaw. However, the promised action by the Soviets was dismissed and, after 63 days of the unaided Underground forces, the uprising was suppressed. Professor
Norman Davies famously said that to comprehend the numbers killed, one would have to imagine the Twin Towers every day for 63 days, and it still wouldn't be enough. After a hopeless surrender on the part of the Poles, the Germans went about systematically levelling the city and retreated in January 1945 to the incoming Soviet invasion.
During the war, about 6 million Polish citizens were killed by Germans, and 2.5 million were deported to Germany for forced labour or to extermination camps such as Oswiecim
Auschwitz. In 1941-1943 Ukrainian nationalists massacred more than 100,000 Poles in Galicia and Volhynia. About 3 million Jews died of starvation in
ghettos and labour camps or were killed in the
extermination camps of Oswiecim ,
Treblinka,
Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, Chelmno and others .
More than 500,000 Polish citizens were deported to the
Soviet Union, many of them to
concentration camps and labor camps .
The Soviet government insisted on retaining the territories captured in the course of the
Nazi-Soviet pact , compensating Poland with one fifth of Germany in its extension of 1937 .
Silesia,
Pomerania and southern
East Prussia, along with
Gdansk, were definitively attached to Poland and the remaining German population either fled or was forcefully
expelled, with claims of as many as 500.000 out of 8 millions losing their lifes during the process.
People's Republic of Poland
In June 1945, following the February
Yalta Conference, a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity was formed; the
US recognized it the next month. Although the Yalta agreement called for free elections, those held in January 1947 were controlled by the
Communist Party. The
communists then established a regime entirely under their domination. The
Polish government in exile existed till 1990, although its influence was degraded.
In October 1956, after the 20th Soviet Party Congress in
Moscow ushered in
destalinization and riots by workers in
Poznan ensued, there was a shakeup in the communist regime. While retaining most traditional communist economic and social aims, the regime of First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka began to liberalize internal Polish life.
In 1968, this trend was reversed when student demonstrations were suppressed and an
anti-Zionist campaign initially directed against Gomulka supporters within the party eventually led to the emigration of much of Poland's remaining Jewish population. In December 1970, disturbances and strikes in the port cities of
Gdansk,
Gdynia, and
Szczecin, triggered by a price increase for essential consumer goods, reflected deep dissatisfaction with living and working conditions in the country.
Edward Gierek replaced Gomulka as First Secretary.
Fueled by large infusions of Western credit, Poland's economic growth rate was one of the world's highest during the first half of the 1970s. But much of the borrowed capital was misspent, and the centrally planned economy was unable to use the new resources effectively. The growing debt burden became insupportable in the late 1970s, and economic growth had become negative by 1979.
In October 1978, the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyla, became
Pope John Paul II, head of the
Roman Catholic Church. Polish Catholics rejoiced at the elevation of a Pole to the
papacy and greeted his June 1979 visit to Poland with an outpouring of emotion.
On July 1, 1980, with the Polish foreign debt at more than $20 billion, the government made another attempt to increase meat prices. A chain reaction of strikes virtually paralyzed the Baltic coast by the end of August and, for the first time, closed most coal mines in
Silesia. Poland was entering into an extended crisis that would change the course of its future development.
On 31 August, 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in
Gdansk, led by an electrician named
Lech Walesa, signed a 21-point agreement with the government that ended their strike. Similar agreements were signed at
Szczecin and in
Silesia. The key provision of these agreements was the guarantee of the workers’ right to form independent
trade unions and the right to strike. After the Gdansk agreement was signed, a new national union movement "
Solidarity" swept Poland.
The discontent underlying the strikes was intensified by revelations of widespread corruption and mismanagement within the Polish state and party leadership. In September 1980, Gierek was replaced by
Stanislaw Kania as First Secretary.
Alarmed by the rapid deterioration of the PZPR's authority following the Gdansk agreement, the Soviet Union proceeded with a massive military buildup along Poland's border in December 1980. In February 1981, Defense Minister Gen.
Wojciech Jaruzelski assumed the position of Prime Minister, and in October 1981, was named party First Secretary. At the first Solidarity national congress in September–October 1981, Lech Walesa was elected national chairman of the union.
Martial law
On December 12–13, the regime declared martial law, under which the army and
ZOMO riot police were used to crush the union. Virtually all Solidarity leaders and many affiliated intellectuals were arrested or detained. The United States and other Western countries responded to martial law by imposing economic sanctions against the Polish regime and against the Soviet Union. Unrest in Poland continued for several years thereafter.
In a series of slow, uneven steps, the Polish regime rescinded martial law. In December 1982, martial law was suspended, and a small number of political prisoners were released. Although martial law formally ended in July 1983 and a general amnesty was enacted, several hundred political prisoners remained in jail.
In July 1984, another general amnesty was declared, and two years later, the government had released nearly all political prisoners. The authorities continued, however, to harass dissidents and Solidarity activists. Solidarity remained proscribed and its publications banned. Independent publications were censored.
Solidarity's victory
In late 1980s the government was forced to negotiate with
Solidarity in the
Polish Roundtable Negotiations. The Polish legislative elections, 1989 become one of the important events marking the
fall of communism.
The Third Republic
After 1989 Poland became one of the newer Europan democracies and adopted a market-based economy. The shock therapy Balcerowicz Plan during the early 1990s enabled the country to transform its economy into one of the most robust in
Central Europe.
Poland joined
NATO on May 27, 1999 and the
European Union on May 1, 2004.
See also
