'Roman Dmowski understood': Ethnic cleansing as permanent revolution

European History Quarterly

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 405-427

  Curp, T David ^a  

^a OHIO UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Endecja; Ethnic cleansing; Grunwald; Poland; Roman Dmowski

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650480772     PISSN: 02656914     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0265691405054217     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw 2001), 385.
2. In his article on Polish-German relations during the 1970s and 1980s, Koszel not only discusses the revival but points to the frequency with which General Jaruzelski discussed the dangers that German revisionism presented to Poland. Bogdan Koszel, 'Miȩdzy Dogmatyzmem i Pragmatyzmem', in Anna Wolff-Powȩska, Polacy wobec Niemców: Z dziejów kultury politycznej Polski 1945-1989 (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1993), 104-21.
3. Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, trans. Maya Latyński (Berkeley, CA 1985), 122;
4. and Maria Tomczak, 'Polska Myśl Zachodnia', in Wolff-Powȩska, Polacy wobec Niemców, 189.
5. Jerzy Janusz Terej, Rzeczywistość i Polityka: Ze studiów nad dziejami najnowszymi Narodowej Demokracji (Warsaw 1971), 12;
6. Andrzej Kwilecki and Władysw Tomaszewski, 'Poznań Jako Ośrodek Polskiej Myśli Zachodniej';
7. and Serwański, 'Myśl Zachodnia', in Andrzej Kwilecki, ed., Polska Myśl Zachodnia w Poznaniu i Wielkopolsce: Jej rozwój i realizacja w wiekach xix i xx (Warsaw 1980), 154, 214;
8. and Grzegorz Strauchold, Myśl Zachodnia i Jej Realizacja w Polsce Ludowej w latach 1945-137 (Toruń 2003), 12.
9. For a thorough discussion of Dmowski's nationalist radicalism, see Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York 2000).
10. As Francisco Letamendia has noted, in the modern era successful social revolutions are the historical rarity while the national revolutionary dynamism produced in the aftermath of the French Revolution has continued to spawn new political, social and cultural forms throughout the entire world. Francisco Letamendia, Game of Mirrors: Centre-Periphery National Conflicts, trans. Karen Hatherly (Aldershot 2000), vii, 4-13.
11. To speak of post-1956 Poland as a polity ruled by a national socialist ideology is meant to emphasize both how much more thorough and important a role nationalism played under Gomułka in legitimizing Communist power and to point to the disturbing racial elements (and infrastructure of racial purity that the regime itself maintained throughout the Gomułka era) during the anti-Zionist campaign. For a discussion of the racialized anti-Semitism of the 'anti-Zionist' campaign, see Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw 2000).
12. Z. Bednorz, 'Oni kolonizowali, my - osiedlamy siȩ', in Polska Zachodnia, 12 August 1945.
13. Robert Blobaum, Feliks Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism (Boulder, CO 1984), 67-71.
14. Krystyna Trembicka, 'The Communist Party of Poland (1918-1938)', in Jan Jachymek and Waldemar Paruch, More than Independence: Polish Political Thought 1918-1939 (Lublin 2003), 326-9.
15. Michał Musielak, Polski Zwizek Zachodni 1944-1950 (Warsaw 1986), 26-33.
16. For a discussion of how Endecja influence informed government policy see Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 1918-1939 (Lexington, MA 1993)
17. and Albert Kotowski, Polska polityka narodowościowa wobec mniejszości niemieckiej w latach 1919-1939 (Toruń 2003).
18. and Wojciech Wrzesiński, ed., Polska-Polacy-Mniejszości Narodowe (Wrocław 1992), 77-80.
19. Krzystof Kawalec, Roman Dmowski (Warsaw 1996), 126-7, 320-2.
20. and Ewa Maj, 'National Democracy', in Jan Jachymek and Waldemar Paruch, More than Independence: Polish Political Thought 1918-1939 (Lublin 2003), 158-9.
21. Rossino points out that Nazi Germany fought the war in Poland from the beginning as a racial war. Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence, KS 2003), 1-10.
22. As Amir Weiner also notes, the quasi-racialized Soviet animus towards Poles as an enemy nation was an early development in the Soviet Union, leading to mass deportations of Poles in Soviet Ukraine as early as 1930. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ 2001), 140.
23. Jan T. Gross, Revolution From Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ 2002), 221-2 refers to the Soviet deportations of the Polish population in the Kresy as 'extermination'.
24. Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943-1948, trans. John Micgiel and Michael H. Bernhard (Berkeley, CA 1991), 214-15.
25. While anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in Polish culture, it is worth noting that both anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda and the process of ethnic cleansing itself (which Poles had endured since 1939 at Nazi and Soviet hands as well as inflicted for another half decade after the war) is likely to have increased national/racial consciousness among Poles. Doris L. Bergen, 'The Nazi Concept of "Volksdeutsche" and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe', Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (October 1994), 569-82.
26. Leszek Olejnik, Polityka Narodowościowa Polski w latach 1944-1960 (Łódź 2003), 28-9.
27. Maria Tomczak, 'Polska Myśl Zachodnia', in Wolff-Powȩskiej, ed., op. cit., 166
28. In secret discussions among fellow National Democratic conspirators, one of the more important surviving Endeks, the activist and historian Zygmunt Wojciechowski, who played a key role in organizing the Home Army's Western Affairs Section devoted to postwar planning of Poland's westward expansion, won acceptance for a series of proposals advocating cooperation with the Communist authorities on the basis of Polish 'reason of state'. Zbigniew Mazur, Antenaci: O politycznym rodowodzie Instytutu Zachodniego (Poznań 2002), 420-5.
29. Hieronim Szczegóła, 'Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne w polityce PZPR', in Czesław Osȩkowski, ed., Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Okresie Stalinowskim (Zielona Góra: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Tadeusza Kotarbińskiego, 1999), 19-24.
30. Teresa Torańska, Them: Stalin's Polish Puppets, trans. Agnieszka Kołakowska (New York 1987), 350.
31. Andrzej Korboński, 'October 1956: Crisis of Legitimacy or Palace Revolution?', in Jane Leftwich Curry and Luba Fajfer, eds, Poland's Permanent Revolution: People vs. Elites, 1956 to the Present (Washington, DC 1996), 49.
32. Observers from the DDR raised concerns about the degree of independence of the ZSL throughout Poland. In Poznań and Zielona Góra these fears were well-founded. In Poznań, where the authorities had advanced collectivization with a great deal of ruthlessness, the peasantry rapidly dismantled the region's collective farms and effectively pressured the ZSL to represent its interests. For all intents and purposes the authorities lost control of the countryside in Poznań for the rest of the 1950s and were only slowly able to break the power and influence of 'village reaction'. Sheldon Anderson, A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc: Polish-East German Relations, 1945-1962 (Boulder CO 2001), 145
33. and WAPP Komitet Wojewódzkie (henceforth KW) PZPR 372: 7 as well as Instytut Pamiȩc Narodowej (henceforth IPN)
34. Leszek Olejnik, Polityka Narodowościowa Polski w Latach 1944-1960 (Łódź 2003), 125-35, 248-60, 326-43 and 425.
35. PAX was an organization of pro-regime Catholics led by Bolesław Piasecki, the prewar fascist leader whose organization broke away from the Endecja. The ZBoWiD (Zwia̧zek Bojowników o Wolności i Demokracjȩ), the League of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, was a veterans' organization that initially was restricted to regime-approved resistance groups but during the 1960s came to encompass more of the wartime anti-Nazi and anti-Communist resistance though it refused to receive members from the mainstream Polish anti-Nazi resistance, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army). See Paczkowski for a discussion of the interconnectedness of Moczar, Piasecki, PAX, and the ZBoWiD and the development of 'socialist patriotism'. Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, trans. Jane Cave (University Park, PA 2003), 300-6.
36. It is important not to confuse the initial challenges that the hierarchy of the Church faced in dealing with the institutional problems created by Stalinism with the remarkable grass-roots vitality of religion. See Krystyna Kersten, '1956 - The Turning Point', in Odd Arne Westad, Sven Hotsmark and Iver B. Neumann, eds, The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994), 58
37. and Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish Opposition (Minneapolis, MN 2003), 59-66.
38. Strauchold, Myśl Zachodnia, 433.
39. Koszel, 'Miȩdzy Dogmatyzmem i Pragmatyzmem (1971-1989)', 94-100.
40. Andrzej Sakson, 'Niemcy w Świadomości Społecznej Polaków', in Wolff-Powȩskiej, op. cit., 415.
41. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, PA 1994), 75-102.