APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
The Society
A. Introduction (U/OU)
Scarred by repeated foreign incursions from both east and west, Polish society has depended on a strong fusion of nationalism with Roman Catholic culture for the survival of its national consciousness and traditional social values. Despite domination since 1947 by a Soviet-imposed Communist regime, the Poles have retained their Western social, cultural, and political roots. Although these traditional values survive, the institutional fabric of Polish society has been largely reshaped by wartime social upheavals and by rapid postwar industrialization and urbanization.
The transformation of Poland's prewar, largely rural society—dominated by relatively small social elites—into an increasingly urban, mass society was facilitated by the unprecedented political, economic, and ethnic changes brought about directly by World War II. The wartime extermination of the sizable Jewish minority by the Nazi occupiers, the postwar expulsion of Germans from the so-called Regained Territories (former German lands in the west and north), and exchanges with the U.S.S.R. of nationality groups as a consequence of boundary shifts, produced an ethnically and religiously homogenous population about 98% Polish and 95% Roman Catholic.
Following the war, the surviving remnants of the traditionally influential landed gentry were impoverished through land reform and removed from social leadership. The prewar middle class was also soon deprived of its economic strength through nationalization of industry, commerce, and most services and its class consciousness and influence on society was destroyed by discriminatory Communist social policies. A massive postwar rise of a largely ex-peasant working class unfamiliar with the demands of urban society but ideologically courted by the Communist regime has contributed to social tensions.
Because of postwar circumstances and subsequent totalitarian controls, the Polish regime has been successful in structurally transforming Polish society; it has not been successful, however, in imbuing it with its own values and making it effectively serve Communist political, economic, and social goals. Strong attachment to individual ism, resistance to imposed authority, deeply felt nationalism, and adherence to religious faith continue to be the main determinants of the national character.
The political upheaval of 1956 marked a revolt against a Stalinist past and wrested from Poland's leaders a repudiation of terror and coercion as instruments of rule. But the initial liberalism and promise of a better life attributed to the Gomulka regime, which then came to power, were largely the illusions of an exuberant populace; the regime itself made few commitments. Indeed, its backsliding from initial reforms and the gradual atrophy of its leadership at all levels of the bureaucracy during the late 1960's intensified the strains between the rulers and the ruled. These strains, fueled by major economic blunders and sparked by ill-timed price rises, finally exploded in December 1970. The ensuing rapid political change represented the first instance of a proletariat overthrowing a Communist regime whose theory had failed in practice. More importantly, it ushered in a change not only of leadership but also of generations.
The current regime of Edward Gierek is not based on concession and weakness; in fact, its stress on social progress and material abundance is matched by its insistence on hard work and social responsibility. But, for the first time in Poland's history under Communist rule, the rulers have promised to consult their subjects and, more importantly, are pledged to the proposition that material and social development is the determinant of the validity of the guiding political and social theory.
Gierek's rule by no means spells the beginning of a free society. As a tough but thoroughly pragmatic administrator, Gierek knows that the dominant position of the Soviet Union makes the basic elements
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
