The Communist Experience and Legacy

Abstract

Since the fall of communism there has been a great debate on the place of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in Polish history. Should it be viewed as an externally controlled Soviet satellite run on Marxist-Leninist principles completely alien to the Polish tradition?1 Or is this just one more case of Poland subverting foreign rule from within and eventually producing an original Polonized synthesis? If it was the former, then it represented a basic discontinuity. Both the Solidarity and national-Catholic political camps have argued that communism had to be purged from both political consciousness and practice. If it was the latter, the PRL was a legitimate and continuous section of Polish history, comparable to the nineteenth-century experience; many of its features, in this light, could be regarded as leading on organically through the ‘Negotiated Revolution’ of 1989 to the democratic period. The key issues of the degree of subjugation to the Soviet Union and whether the PRL can justly be described as ‘totalitarian’, remain one of the most important cleavages in contemporary Polish political life.