The Poles represent the northwestern branch of the Slavonic race. They speak Polish, a member of the Western Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is most closely related to Be-lorussian, Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian. From the very earliest times the Poles have resided on the territory between the Carpathians, Oder River, and North Sea. Boles-law I “Chrobny” or the Brave (967-1025) united all the Slavonic tribes in this region into a Polish kingdom, which reached its zenith at the close of the Middle Ages and slowly declined during the mid to late eighteenth century. Hostility to Polish nationalism formed a common bond between the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian governments. Thus, Poland was partitioned four
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times. The first partition (August 1772) divided one-third of Poland between the three above-named countries. The second partition (January 1793) was mostly to the advantage of Russia; Austria did not acquire land. In the third partition (October 1795), the rest of Poland was divided up between the three autocracies. After the defeat of Napoleon and collapse of his puppet state, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1814), a fourth partition occurred (1815), by which the Russians pushed westward and incorporated Warsaw. Until then Warsaw had been situated in Prussian Poland from 1795 to 1807. Potent anti-Russian sentiment has long prevailed among the Poles who are predominantly Catholic, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as evidenced by four popular uprisings against the Slavic colossus to the east: 1768, 1794, 1830-1831, and 1863. According to the 1890 census about 8,400,000 Poles resided in the Russian Empire.
Finally in 1918, an independent Poland was reconstituted. Later in August 1939 a pact was signed between Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, which contained a secret protocol authorizing yet a fifth partition of Poland: “In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San.” The next month Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland; the Red Army did not interfere.
After more than four decades of the Cold War, during which Poland was a Soviet “satellite” and belonged to the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, partially free elections were held in 1989. The Solidarity movement won sweeping victories; Lech Walesa became Poland’s first popularly elected post-Communist president in December 1990. In 1999 Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic. It is scheduled to enter the European Union in 2004. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES
POLICIES, TSARIST; POLAND
Connor, Walter D., and Ploszajski, Piotr. (1992). The Polish Road from Socialism: The Economics, Sociology, and Politics of Transition. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Hunter, Richard J., and Ryan, Leo. (1998). From Autarchy to Market: Polish Economics and Politics, 1945-1995. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lukowski, Jerzy, and Zawadzki, Hubert. (2002). A Concise History of Poland. New York: Cambridge University Press. Michta, Andrew A. (1990). Red Eagle: The Army in Polish Politics, 1944-1988. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Snyder, Timothy. (2003). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
POLICE See STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF.
After decades of harsh limits on Polish autonomy, many Poles were hopeful that the situation would improve after the 1855 coronation of Alexander II. There were indeed concessions: Martial law was lifted, an amnesty was declared for all political prisoners, a new Archbishop of Warsaw was named (the position had been vacant since 1830), and censorship was made somewhat less restrictive. In 1862 a Pole named Aleksander Wielopolski was made governor of the Polish Kingdom, in an attempt to cooperate with the aristocratic elite and marginalize more radical national separatists and democratic revolutionaries. All these attempts at conciliation failed, as patriotic demonstrations broke out in late 1861 and intensified throughout 1862. The Russians tried to suppress these protests with deadly force, but that only generated more anger among the Poles, and the unrest spread.
Wielopolski tried to quash the disturbances on the night of January 23 by organizing an emergency draft into the army targeted at the young men who had been leading the demonstrations. This, too, failed, as it prompted the national movement leaders to proclaim an uprising (which was being planned in any case). The rebels proclaimed the existence of the “Temporary National Government,” which would lead the revolt and (they hoped) pave the way for a true independent Polish government afterwards.
The “January Uprising” (as it is known in Poland) was fought primarily as a guerrilla war, with small-scale assaults against individual Russian units rather than large pitched battles (which the Poles lacked the forces to win). Over the next one and one-half years, 200,000 Poles took part in
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the fighting, with about 30,000 in the field at any one moment.
After the revolt was crushed, thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia, hundreds were executed, and towns and villages throughout Poland were devastated by the violence. All traces of Polish autonomy were lost, and the most oppressive period of Russification began. See also: POLAND
Leslie, R. F. (1963). Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856-1865. London: University of London, Athlone Press. Wandycz, Piotr. (1974). The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
The Politburo, or Political Bureau, was the most important decision-making and leadership organ in the Communist Party, and has commonly been seen as equivalent to the cabinet in Western political systems. For most of the life of the Soviet system, the Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966) was the major focus of elite political life and the arena within which all important issues of policy were decided. It was the heart of the political system.
The Politburo was formally established at the Eighth Congress of the Party in March 1919 and held its first session on April 16. Formed by the Central Committee (CC), the Politburo was to make decisions that could not await the next meeting of the CC, but over time its smaller size and more frequent meeting schedule meant that effective power drained into it and away from the CC. There had been smaller groupings of leaders before, but these had never become formalized nor had they taken an institutional form. The establishment of the Politburo was part of the regularization of the leading levels of the Party that saw the simultaneous creation of the Orgburo and Secretariat, with these latter two bodies meant to ensure the implementation of the decisions of leading Party organs, in practice mostly the Politburo.
From its formation until late 1930, the Politburo was one arena within which the conflict between Josef Stalin and his supporters on the one side and successive groups of oppositionists among the Party leadership was fought out, but with the removal of Mikhail Tomsky in 1930, the last open oppositionist disappeared from the Politburo. Henceforth the body remained largely controlled by Stalin. Its lack of institutional integrity and power is illustrated by the fact that various of its members were arrested and executed during the terror of the mid- to late 1930s. After World War II, the Politburo ceased even to meet regularly, being effectively replaced by ad hoc groupings of leaders that Stalin mobilized on particular issues and when it suited him.
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the leading Party organs resumed a more regular existence, although Nikita Khrushchev’s style was not one well suited to the demands of collective leadership; he often sought to bypass the Presidium. Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Politburo became more regularized, and the overwhelming majority of national issues seem to have been discussed in that body, although an important exception was the decision to send troops into Afghanistan in 1979. For much of the Mikhail Gorbachev period, too, the Politburo was at the heart
