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Gomulka's ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation,’ The Postwar Jewish Communists, and the Stalinist Reaction in Poland, 1945-1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Raymond Taras
Raymond Taras*
Affiliation:
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
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Extract

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 22 , Issue S1: Special Issue - Ethnopolitics in Poland , Summer 1994 , pp. 111 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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References

Notes

* I am grateful to Leszek Gluchowski and Wlodzimierz Rozenbaum for valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.Google Scholar

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