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Poland Consolidation of Communist Power
The shattered Poland that emerged from the rubble of
World
War II was reconstituted as a communist state and
incorporated
within the newly formed Soviet sphere of influence in
Eastern
Europe, despite the evident wishes of the overwhelming
majority
of the Polish nation. The deciding factor in this outcome
was the
dominant position gained by the victorious Red Army at the
end of
the war. At the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam in 1945,
United
States presidents and Britain's prime minister, Winston
Churchill, met with Stalin to determine postwar political
conditions, including the disposition of Polish territory
occupied by the Red Army. At Yalta in February, Stalin
pledged to
permit free elections in Poland and the other
Soviet-occupied
countries of Eastern Europe. At Potsdam in July-August,
the
Allies awarded Poland over 100,000 square kilometers of
German
territory, west to the Oder and Neisse rivers, commonly
called
the Oder-Neisse Line
(see
fig. 11). In turn, about 3
million
Poles were removed from former Polish territory awarded to
the
Soviet Union and resettled in the former German lands;
similarly
about 2 million Germans had to move west of the new
border.
The Yalta accords sanctioned the formation of a
provisional
Polish coalition government composed of communists and
proponents
of Western democracy. From its outset, the Yalta formula
favored
the communists, who enjoyed the advantages of Soviet
support,
superior morale, control over crucial ministries, and
Moscow's
determination to bring Eastern Europe securely under its
thumb as
a strategic asset in the emerging Cold War. The new regime
in
Warsaw subdued a guerrilla resistance in the countryside
and
gained political advantage by gradually whittling away the
rights
of their democratic foes. By 1946 the coalition regime
held a
carefully controlled national referendum that approved
nationalization of the economy, land reform, and a
unicameral
rather than bicameral Sejm. Rightist parties had been
outlawed by
that time, and a progovernment Democratic Bloc formed in
1947
included the forerunner of the communist Polish United
Workers'
Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza--PZPR) and its
leftist allies.
The first parliamentary election, held in 1947, allowed
only
opposition candidates of the now-insignificant Polish
Peasant
Party, which was harassed into ineffectiveness. Under
these
conditions, the regime's candidates gained 417 of 434
seats in
parliament, effectively ending the role of genuine
opposition
parties. Within the next two years, the communists ensured
their
ascendancy by restyling the PZPR as holders of a monopoly
of
power in the Polish People's Republic.
Data as of October 1992
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