Michael Fleming: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944-50. (Basees/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, Bd. 58.) Routledge. London – New York 2010. XVII, 199 S. ISBN 978-0-415-47651-5. (109,99 €.) Drawing on recent studies such as Padraic Kenney’s Rebuilding Poland and Jan Gross’s Fear, Michael F l e m i n g offers the latest proof that communist rule in Poland relied heavily upon preexisting xenophobic tropes and nationality policies as a way to consolidate power in a postwar environment of exacerbated ethnic hatred. Inherently unpopular in Poland and imposed by Soviet occupiers, the communist system in Poland attained control only by sponsoring the most extreme nationalist goal: an ethnically cleansed, homogenous Polish nation-state established primarily at German expense on western, often industrialized spaces. By highlighting the communist-nationalist symbiosis that characterized the immediate postwar regime, F.s work takes on the deeply influential nationalist mythologies which the communists and their academic, often nationalist adherents upheld through most of the Cold War (and even recently). While recognizing that Soviet and Polish communist terror coerced Poles to support the new regime, F. demonstrates that the communist party attained “sufficient consent” from the people to maintain its power “through the manipulation of nationality policy, national myths and tropes, and the linking of land reform to the new national and territorial configuration” (p. 1). It was a process which F. traces back to 1935, when, to appear relevant in public opinion, the interwar communists started to adopt xenophobic slogans persecuting national minorities. The communists’ utilitarian shift from tolerance to nationalism only increased amid the ethnic cleansing and border shifts at the end of World War II, when “through the drive to national homogeneity, and nationality policy more generally, the communists were able to secure sufficient acquiescence from Polish society to enable them to move forward with their social, political and economic programmes” (p. 2). After establishing this contextual basis, the heart of F.s book is the third chapter, which convincingly demonstrates that the communist party obtained popular support by directing social anger against the most helpless and despised targets: national minorities. In an endnote, he adds a useful assessment of how the state then used the creation of “non-people” in Polish territory to persecute its political opponents on the grounds that they were unPolish (p. 75, note 74) – a development that could have received more treatment. The fourth chapter outlines how the repressive structures of the early communist and Stalinist states were directed against national minorities, notably Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, and “autochthonous” populations. Here the author summarizes specific violent actions against the various groups. The fifth chapter ties in the role of the Polish Catholic Church, which before the onset of state persecution in 1947 gave substantial support to the nationalist (and communist) line from the party. This was due in large part to its acquisition of formerly German church properties and its alienation from the Vatican, which had opposed the postwar border revisions and ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations, notably Germans (p. 101). Thus in the crucial, immediate postwar period, though the church sought to “outflank” the communists through appeals to the Right, “the result was merely to align itself with the PPR nationality policy and to foster an illiberality in the political culture of which the PPR was the chief beneficiary” (p. 108). Perhaps most original is F.s inclusion in chapter six of two forgotten incidents in postwar Polish nationalities policy: the attempt to bring “home” proletarians of Polish descent who had settled in Germany’s Westphalian industrial area before the war and the integration of Greek refugees from the