|
Poland The Intelligentsia
The Polish intelligentsia played a unique and vital
role in
several phases of Polish history. During the partition
period of
the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia was the chief
repository ofnational consciousness. Containing the last
vestiges
of the landed gentry that had led the country during its
heyday
as an independent commonwealth, the intelligentsia was the
chief
means by which new and progressive ideas entered the
fabric of
partitioned Poland's society. As such, the class became
the chief
repository of a romanticized, idealistic concept of Polish
nationhood
(see
The Elective Monarchy;
The Impact of Nationalism and Romanticism
, ch. 1). Well into the twentieth century,
the
roughly 50 percent of the intelligentsia that had roots in
the
landowning class maintained the aristocratic values of
their
ancestors. Although those values conferred a distinctly
higher
social status on the intelligentsia in everyday life, they
also
included the cultural heritage that all Poles recognized.
In the first part of the twentieth century, the
intelligentsia was diversified and enriched as more
middle- and
lower-class Poles attained education and upward mobility.
At this
point, the intelligentsia divided philosophically into
conservative idealizes of the past (whose landholdings
gave them
a vested interest in maintaining the status quo) and
liberal
reformers advocating development of capitalism. In the
interwar
period, Poland's social structure was further complicated
by the
rise of a vigorous, practical upper middle class. After
the war,
however, socialism drastically reduced the influence of
this
entrepreneurial class.
Facing a severe shortage of educated citizens, in 1945
the
communists expanded opportunities for political loyalists
to
advance through education into the professions and the
bureaucracy
(see Education
, this ch.). Of the 300,000
college
graduates produced by the education system between 1945
and 1962,
over 50 percent were from worker or peasant families. The
introduction of these groups sharply diversified the class
basis
of the postwar intelligentsia. In the late 1960s, however,
the
policy of preferential treatment in education ended. The
percentage of working-class university admissions dropped
to
below 25 percent. Because the chief means of entry into
the
professional classes remained educational achievement, the
drop
in university admissions drastically slowed mobility from
the
working classes into the intelligentsia. In the postwar
years,
the intelligentsia diversified into several categories of
employment: highly educated professionals, government and
party
officials, senior civil servants, writers and academics,
and toplevel economic managers.
Especially in the 1970s, many members of the
intelligentsia
established careers in the ruling party or its
bureaucracy,
joining the cause of the socialist state with varying
degrees of
commitment. By 1987 all but one of the forty-nine
provincial PZPR
first secretaries had at least a bachelor's degree. The
strong
presence of the intelligentsia in the party influenced the
policy
of the ruling elite away from standard Soviet practice,
flavoring
it instead with pragmatic nationalism
(see PZPR and Successor Parties
, ch. 4). Then, as that force exerted subtle
influence
within the establishment, other elements of the
intelligentsia
joined with worker and student groups to express open
dissent
from the system. They objected to the system as a whole
and
decried the increasingly stressful conditions it imposed
on
Polish society in the 1970s and 1980s. The most salient
result of
this class alliance was the Solidarity movement, nominally
a
workers' movement that achieved broad support in the
intelligentsia and finally toppled the last communist
regime.
In the 1980s, the activist elements of the
intelligentsia
resumed the traditional role as protectors of national
ideals
from outside political interference. In this role, the
Polish
intelligentsia retained and gradually spread the values it
had
inherited from its nineteenth-century predecessors:
admiration
for Western society, disdain for contact with and reliance
on
Russia and the Soviet Union, and reverence for the
prepartition
commonwealth of the nobility and the romantic patriotism
of the
partition era.
As it had after Poland regained its independence in
1918,
however, the intelligentsia reverted to its naturally
fragmented
state once the common enemy fell. In the early 1990s, the
official communist leadership elite had disappeared
(although in
reality that group continued to control powerful economic
positions), and no comparably identifiable and organized
group
had taken its place. In this atmosphere, a wide variety of
social
and political agendas competed for attention in the
government,
reflecting the diverse ideas proposed by the
intelligentsia, the
source of most of Poland's reformist concepts in the early
1990s.
Data as of October 1992
|
