APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9
Germany's Ruhr Basin) lignite, sulfur, copper, iron, lead, and zinc. Benefitting from its natural wealth and central location, Katowice province (Silesia) has become the industrial heart of Poland as well as one of the country's most densely populated areas.
Farther to the south, the rolling hills of Poland's central geographic zone give way to the Carpathian and Sudeten mountain ranges: peaks and ridges thrown up in ages past by the northward thrust of the Alpine-fold mountains against the unyielding rock of the Bohemian Massif and the deeply buried Polish Platform. Elevations here range from about 1,000 feet above sea level in the Moravian Gate area to 8,200 feet in the loftiest part of the Carpathian system. A small mining area - the Lower Silesian coalfield - is located in the Sudeten mountains, and minor deposits of oil and natural gas have been found in the Carpathian. Tourism, however, is currently the most significant economic activity in the area, with its principal center in the attractive environs of Zakopane. As a whole, the region is relatively backward by Polish standards, but its forests and, particularly, its hydroelectric potential offer promise for the future. The Oder and the Vistula, which together with their many tributaries drain almost all of Poland, both rise in this mountainous border zone and course northward across the country's east-west geographic divisions to empty into the Baltic.
Stalinization, De-Stalinization, and the Gomulka Legacy (S)
Poland's postwar internal evolution - political and economic - has gone through a number of distinct phases roughly paralleling changes in the general character of Soviet-East European relations. Transactions from one to another of these periods has generally been marked by varying degrees of violence. In part, this has been due to the character and attitudes of the volatile Polish people. But the basic causes lie elsewhere, in the dismal history of the prewar Polish Communist party, in the stifling influence of the Soviet Union, and in the inability of Poland's leaders to shed their ideological blinders and to adopt a flexible approach to the new problems and requirements generated by marked changes in the internal and external environment.
The foundations of Poland's postwar political order were laid in 1944 when the advancing Soviet Red Army set about the systematic dissolution of the political and military centers then controlled by the non-Communist underground and the London-based Polish Government in exile. To take their place, the Soviets established a single Communist-controlled body, the Committee of National Liberation, in Lublin, granting it recognition in January 1945 as the
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9
