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Poland The 1989 Elections and Their Aftermath
After months of haggling, the round table talks yielded
a
historic compromise in early 1989: Solidarity would regain
legal
status and the right to post candidates in parliamentary
elections (with the outcome guaranteed to leave the
communists a
majority of seats). Although to many observers the
guarantee
seemed a foolish concession by Solidarity at the time, the
election of June 1989 swept communists from nearly all the
contested seats, demonstrating that the PZPR's presumed
advantages in organization and funding could not overcome
society's disapproval of its ineptitude and oppression.
Solidarity used its newly superior position to broker a
coalition with various small parties that until then had
been
silent satellites of the PZPR. The coalition produced a
noncommunist majority that formed a cabinet dominated by
Solidarity. Totally demoralized and advised by Gorbachev
to
accept defeat, the PZPR held its final congress in January
1990.
In August 1989, the Catholic intellectual Tadeusz
Mazowiecki
became prime minister of a government committed to
dismantling
the communist system and replacing it with a Western-style
democracy and a free-market economy. By the end of 1989,
the
Soviet alliance had been swept away by a stunning
succession of
revolutions partly inspired by the Polish example.
Suddenly, the
history of Poland, and of its entire region, had entered
the
postcommunist era.
* *
*
The list of English-language literature on the history
of
Poland, formerly sparse, has improved considerably in
recent
years, stimulated in great part by the dramatic events of
contemporary times. The leading survey is Norman Davies's
twovolume God's Playground. Davies covers the same
territory
in a single volume in Heart of Europe, recommended
despite
its confusing reverse chronological organization. The
older, twovolume , Cambridge History of Poland and Oskar
Halecki's
The History of Poland are standard but dated. Adam
Zamoyski's The Polish Way is a popular account
aimed at
the general reader. One of the most significant and
controversial
topics arising from the Polish tradition of heterogeneity
receives sound and balanced coverage in the composite work
The
Jews in Poland, edited by Chimen Abramsky and others.
For the medieval period, Eastern and Western Europe
in the
Middle Ages, edited by Geoffrey Barraclough, discusses
Poland
in its regional context. Pawel Jasienica's The
Commonwealth of
Both Nations addresses the early modern era in
colorful
style. The nineteenth century is best summarized in The
Lands
of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 by Piotr S. Wandycz.
Recommended general sources for the modern period
include
M.K. Dziewanowski's Poland in the Twentieth
Century,
The History of Poland since 1863, edited by R.F.
Leslie,
and Hans Roos's A History of Modern Poland (all of
which
predate the upheavals of the 1980s).
Monographic treatment has not caught up with the
collapse of
East European communism, and no complete English survey of
the
rise and fall of the Polish People's Republic yet exists.
The
most perceptive commentator on contemporary Central
Europe, the
journalist Timothy Garton Ash, covers the developments of
the
decade from the rise of Solidarity to the end of communist
rule
in his three works The Polish Revolution, The
Uses of
Adversity, and The Magic Lantern. (For further
information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of October 1992
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