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After the end of the Second World War, Polish society and culture were subject to significant changes.
| Part of a series on the |
| Culture of Poland |
|---|
| |
| People |
| Traditions |
| Cuisine |
| Festivals |
| Religion |
After the end of the Second World War, Polish society and culture were subject to significant changes.
With expanding urban industrial opportunities in the early postwar era, agriculture steadily became less popular as occupation and lifestyle in new Poland. The service sector, like industry, grew rapidly, even though much less than the service sectors of Western Europe. The result was a postwar exodus from the rural areas and increased urbanization, which split apart the traditional multigenerational families upon which the prewar mostly rural society had been based.
The early socioeconomic reforms were greeted with relief by a significant faction of the population. Most people were willing to accept Communist rule in exchange for the restoration of relatively normal life. Even the Catholic Church believed that any open resistance would be suicidal. Postwar Poland, like the rest of socialist Eastern Europe, saw growing opportunities for higher education and employment and increased rights for women. In many respects, Poland offered women more opportunities in professional occupations than did many countries in Western Europe. Professions such as architecture, engineering and university teaching employed a considerably higher percentage of women in Poland than in the rest of the West. Communist propaganda, and sometimes reality itself, has created the model of the "Communist woman worker", similar to the "woman miner" in Silesia, initially part of the forcible socialist trend in art and culture dominating from the late 1940s to late 1950s. By the year 1980, the majority of Polish medical students were women. [1]
Polish society had already been brought to the edge of disintegration by the ravages of war. In 1945 Warsaw and other cities lay in ruins, and many smaller towns, which had been populated by Jews before the War, were half-empty. Half of the prewar Polish intelligentsia, mainly those of Jewish or middle-class origins, were dead or in political exile. Many children had gone six years without school. Under these circumstances, the political struggle for total control of all aspect of social and economic life in Poland favoured the communists, who held control of the government and security apparatus. Nonetheless a latent popular discontent remained present.
In the early postwar years, only a minority of new recruits from agricultural career were literate. In contrast, by the late 1970s only 5% of workers lacked a complete elementary education. [2] In the same period, the central planning system yielded impressive gains in the education level and living standards for much of the new urban industrial workforce.
In the first two decades of the Communist rule, the health of Poland's people improved overall, as antibiotics became available and the standard of living rose in most areas. The extension of medical services also contributed to this trend. Codifying such advancements, the constitution of 1952 guaranteed universal free health care. [3] However, by the 1970s and 1980s, critical national health indicators showed many negative trends, as economic conditions deteriorated, which, combined with small wages in the medical system, led to rampant corruption.
One of the major achievements during the communist period was the massive housing estate boom. Following wartime destruction of homes, and a population which boomed in the 1950s, there were massive housing availability pressures, which were relieved by large-scale infrastructure building, particularly from the Gierek era onwards. This massive improvement to the population's quality of life however, became insufficient as soon as the baby boomers came of age.
Following World War II, many Poles believed that Poland, unlike other Eastern European countries, did not need an additional phase of terror. Within years, tens of thousands of Poles had joined the Communist Party as well as the Social Democratic and Trade Union organizations in order to create what they saw as the society of the future.[ citation needed ]
Founded in the late 1950s, the first workers' councils to voice opinions on industrial policy, based on the "Polish October" of 1956, marked a fundamental change in the social awareness of the working class. The increasingly literate leadership of these councils, dominated by the rising number of workers that had acquired secondary education, would eventually lead to the formidable labour and professional organizations such as KOR and Solidarność that would gradually come to threaten the socialist order.
Despite the gains in the living standards for much of the growing urban workforce after World War II, with the increasing influence of outside ideas from the West brought by television, radio (such as Radio Free Europe) and magazines, often smuggled by Poles returning to the country, social dissatisfaction with the regime increased, as people became aware of viable alternatives to their lifestyle. By the 1980s, the modernization of Polish society would lead to a complete restructuring of Poland's political life.
An important role in shaping of the social attitudes of Poles was played by culture and art. Despite censorship and administrative interference, the patronage of the state and some leeway left to artistic creativity permitted the development of the Polish film school, theater, arts, music and literature after destalinization of 1956. Of great importance to the loosened fetters of censorship was the literary and scientific activity pursued in exile. Radio Free Europe played a significant role in molding public opinion. Similar roles were played by the Paris-based periodical "Kultura" and a number of similar publications. As a result, Poles were not isolated from European culture, which was, indeed, so close to them. The importance of the émigré cultural community was highlighted by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to Czesław Miłosz in 1980. [4]
The history of Poland spans over a thousand years, from medieval tribes, Christianization and monarchy; through Poland's Golden Age, expansionism and becoming one of the largest European powers; to its collapse and partitions, two world wars, communism, and the restoration of democracy.
Solidarity, full name Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity", is a Polish trade union founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. Subsequently, it was the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state. The union's membership peaked at 10 million in September 1981, representing one-third of the country's working-age population. Solidarity's leader Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and the union is widely recognised as having played a central role in the end of Communist rule in Poland.
Edward Gierek was a Polish Communist politician and de facto leader of Poland between 1970 and 1980. Gierek replaced Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in the Polish People's Republic in 1970. He is known for opening communist Poland to the Western Bloc and for his economic policies based on foreign loans. He was removed from power after labour strikes led to the Gdańsk Agreement between the communist state and workers of the emerging Solidarity free trade union movement.
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The interwar Communist Party of Poland was a communist party active in Poland during the Second Polish Republic. It resulted from a December 1918 merger of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) and the Polish Socialist Party – Left into the Communist Workers' Party of Poland. The communists were a small force in Polish politics.
The history of Poland from 1939 to 1945 encompasses primarily the period from the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to the end of World War II. Following the German–Soviet non-aggression pact, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 and by the Soviet Union on 17 September. The campaigns ended in early October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland. After the Axis attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the entirety of Poland was occupied by Germany, which proceeded to advance its racial and genocidal policies across Poland. Under the two occupations, Polish citizens suffered enormous human and material losses. According to the Institute of National Remembrance estimates, about 5.6 million Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation and about 150,000 died as a result of the Soviet occupation. The Jews were singled out by the Germans for a quick and total annihilation and about 90 percent of Polish Jews were murdered as part of the Holocaust. Jews, Poles, Romani people and prisoners of many other ethnicities were killed en masse at Nazi extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibór. Ethnic Poles were subjected to both Nazi German and Soviet persecution. The Germans killed an estimated two million ethnic Poles. They had future plans to turn the remaining majority of Poles into slave labor and annihilate those perceived as "undesirable" as part of the wider Generalplan Ost. Ethnic cleansing and massacres of Poles and to a lesser extent Ukrainians were perpetrated in western Ukraine from 1943. The Poles were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists.
The Polish People's Republic was a country in Central Europe that existed from 1947 to 1989 as the predecessor of the modern Republic of Poland. With a population of approximately 37.9 million near the end of its existence, it was the second most-populous communist and Eastern Bloc country in Europe. Having a unitary Marxist–Leninist government, it was also one of the main signatories of the Warsaw Pact alliance. The largest city and official capital since 1947 was Warsaw, followed by the industrial city of Łódź and cultural city of Kraków. The country was bordered by the Baltic Sea to the north, the Soviet Union to the east, Czechoslovakia to the south, and East Germany to the west.
The Polish Workers' Party was a communist party in Poland from 1942 to 1948. It was founded as a reconstitution of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) and merged with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in 1948 to form the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). From the end of World War II the PPR ruled Poland, with the Soviet Union exercising moderate influence. During the PPR years, the conspiratorial as well as legally permitted centers of opposition activity were largely eliminated, while a communist system was gradually established in the country.
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Edward Lipiński was a Polish economist, intellectual, social critic and human rights advocate. During the almost seven decades of his career, he held a series of academic and government advisory positions, founded several organizations, published books and essays on economic policy. His works concerned business cycles, growth theory, history of economic thought and other areas of economics. Lipiński was a fighter for Polish independence and a socialist activist in the Second Polish Republic. In the Polish People's Republic, Lipiński was an influential Marxian economist and a long-term member of the communist party. Outspoken in his criticism of government policies, he became active in opposition circles.
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