Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland

This study, originally published in 1980, was based on previously unavailable documents brought to the West in 1972. It provides a detailed account of the problems faced by a communist party taking power in a country in which it was opposed by the majority of the population. The eighteen months covered in this book were crucial for the establishment of communist rule in Poland. They saw the setting up of a governmental structure effectively dominated by the communists and the emergence of a security apparatus. The documents bring out clearly the conflicts within the Polish Workers Part over strategy and tactics and reveal the way Soviet officials, and above all Stalin, exercised close supervision and control over the situation in Poland.

The work is significant not only because of the light it sheds on Polish politics in the last years of the Second World War, but also because of the way it illuminates Soviet policy. It constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of how Soviet power was established in Eastern Europe and is essential reading for all those interested in the area and in the origins of the Cold War.

Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of Global Education Outreach Project of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, author of Politics in Independent Poland (1972), The Little Dictators (1975), The Great Powers and the Polish Question (1976), co-author of A History of Modern Poland (1980) and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1981) and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish writing in Poland: an anthology (2001) and The neighbors respond: the controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (2004).

His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3, 1914 to 2008 (Liverpool University Press, 2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History (2014), which has been translated into French, Polish and Lithuanian.

Boleslaw Drukier (1913–2006) was a Polish educator, historian of the workers' movement and communist activist.