:A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960.(Rochester Studies in Central Europe, number 7.)

Abstract

Most studies of Eastern Europe's postwar ethnic cleansing wrap up their narratives with the departure of the expelled in the 1940s or with the imposition of high Stalinism in the early 1950s. T. David Curp, by contrast, extends his inquiry deep into the period of post-Stalinist Poland. In doing so he illustrates not only the immediate role the expulsion may have played in communist victory—a common theme of the literature on the topic—but also the long-term corrosive effects that ethnic cleansing had on communist legitimacy. In addition to offering a new perspective on the construction of communist Poland, Curp's approach compels us to consider the legacies of postwar forced migrations. The book concentrates on the region around Poznań, an ethnically mixed area that Germany lost to Poland in 1918. The anticommunist National Democratic movement of Roman Dmowski (the Endecja) was especially strong here in the interwar period. During the German occupation the Nazis expelled more than one million Poles from the region. Thanks to their Catholic and conservative ideology, the war's Polish survivors might have been expected to resist communist rule. In fact, Poznanians did not participate in the brief and futile postwar anti-communist insurgency. To the contrary, Curp argues, “The fiercely anti-Communist but highly nationalistic society of Poznań, the church, and the Endecja together pioneered collaboration with Poland's Communist rulers—to ethnically cleanse their country” (p. 8).