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Poland's Place in the Soviet Bloc Marshall Digital Scholar Theses, Dissertations and Capstones 2014 Poland’s Place In The oS viet Bloc: Historical And Cultural Linkages, Political Transformation, And Everyday Economic Alternatives In Gdańsk and Wałbrzych Stephen W. Mays Marshall University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/etd Part of the European History Commons, Labor History Commons, and the Political History Commons Recommended Citation Mays, Stephen W., "Poland’s Place In The oS viet Bloc: Historical And Cultural Linkages, Political Transformation, And Everyday Economic Alternatives In Gdańsk and Wałbrzych" (2014). Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. Paper 871. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Poland’s Place In The Soviet Bloc: Historical And Cultural Linkages, Political Transformation, And Everyday Economic Alternatives In Gdańsk and Wałbrzych A thesis submitted to the Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History By Stephen W. Mays Approved By: Dr. Phillip Rutherford, Committee Chairperson Dr. Anara Tabyshalieva Dr. Richard Garnett Marshall University Huntington, West Virginia May 2014 © 2014 Stephen W. Mays All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements This project began in 2008 as a master’s thesis in sociology and first resulted in publication of a book titled A Synthetic Analysis Of The Polish Solidarity Movement (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012). It then expanded into an oral history project concerning the Polish Solidarity Movement and comparison of the lived experience of the last decade of socialism in Gdańsk and Wałbrzych, Poland. Eventually, it included also an investigation of Poland’s place in the Soviet Bloc from 1945 to 1989, and thus became a master’s thesis in the History Department of Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia. The completion of this project - from fall 2008 to spring 2014 - resulted from much assistance, advice, and support from many people. I would especially like to thank my two thesis committee members from Marshall’s History Department, Dr. Phillip Rutherford and Dr. Anara Tabyshalieva, for a plethora of recommendations, much encouragement, and for many exceptional classes in Western and Eastern European history, Soviet and Russian history, as well as Eurasian and Asian history. I also want to thank Dr. Richard Garnett from Marshall’s Sociology Department. Dr. Garnett served on both my sociology and history thesis committees and supervised the IRB approval process for both projects. He also assisted in preparation of the interview schedules for both projects and taught several social theory classes from which much of the historical, political, and economic analysis of this thesis is derived. I also want to thank Dr. William Palmer for classes in early and modern European History and Dr. Chris White for classes in 20th Century US involvement in world affairs; Dr. White’s experience in US involvement in Latin America and Vietnam, and likewise, Dr. Tabyshalieva’s experience in US / Soviet Cold War history and Soviet Bloc / US relations in general, were all of great significance to my political understanding of historical events described in this thesis. Additionally, Dr. Tabyshalieva’s classes on Russia, the USSR, the Russian Federation, and study of current Eastern European events (i.e., the 2014 Ukraine – Crimea – Russia crisis), informs the content of this thesis – and simultaneously – the background of the thesis may inform understanding of the present events. iii I am also greatly indebted to many people outside of Marshall University, and can mention only a few here: I thank Dr. Barbara Wejnert, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, for recommending many of the secondary sources used in this thesis and for sharing with me a profound personal insight into pro-democratic processes in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. I also want to thank Mr. Andrzej Falkowski and Ms. Marta Rutkowska of Gdańsk, Poland, for their invaluable assistance in arranging interviews within Stocznia Gdańska (the old Lenin Shipyard where Solidarity began) and with active members of Centrum Solidarnośći. Much thanks goes to Dr. Paula Gorszczynska, Ms. Marta Skibinska, and Ms. Aleksandra Kristiansen, all of Uniwersytet Gadański, Gdańsk Centre For Translation Studies, for their assistance in personal interviews and translations. I also want to thank Zofia Rudnicka and Tadeusz Drzewiecki for their help in arranging and translating interviews in Wałbrzych and other towns of Lower Silesia. I especially want to thank all the interviewees and contributors from Gdańsk and Wałbrzych who shared with me their many stories and personal histories which are the central theme of this project. Finally, I want to personally thank a very prominent contributor from Wałbrzych who wishes to remain anonymous. This individual provided invaluable historical material toward completion of this thesis, and in return asked that I include in it a short article about Wałbrzych’s Jewish population. The thesis ends with a reprint of the article, titled Before The Multilingual Hum Quietened: The Birth Of Polish Wałbrzych, by Marek Malinowski and Paul Wieczorek (page 256.) It is dedicated to Wałbrzych’s current Jewish citizens. They are the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of the survivors of the Gross-Rosen concentration camps, forced labor in Wałbrzych and other Sudetenland towns during WWII. iv Preface On The Relevance Of This Study To Current Events, Historical Falsification, And The Unfinished Twentieth Century At the time of this research project’s completion (April, 2014) US troops are being deployed to Poland, Ukraine is on the brink of civil war, and American / Russian relations are nearly as strained as during the darkest days of the Cold War. Concurrently, in American universities, Russian studies and the former ‘Sovietology’ field are of ever decreasing levels of importance, enrollment, and funding; the thinking seems to be – ‘why study a failed system?’ Post-Cold War US triumphalism has not only negated the achievements of the USSR but has also relegated an entire chapter of world history to irrelevance. However, neoconservative faith in ‘the end of history’ has proven, in recent months, to have been very shortsighted. Understanding of the deep historico-cultural linkages between Poland and Russia, Poland’s place in the former Soviet system, and Russia’s economic and geopolitical aims – both ‘noble’ and ‘dastardly’ – are more pertinent than ever as East Central European events take the world stage. This study contributes, in a limited way, to the type of holistic understanding lacking in many discussions of the current crisis. It invites further research on a variety of related topics – for example, Pan-Slavism and the Roman Catholic / Eastern Orthodox ‘schism,’ political- economic perceptions of former Soviet Bloc citizens per generational segment and the weltanschauung of citizens per each nationality, nationalist ambitions in Ukraine and the ‘pull’ of the West in relation to Russian ambitions of ‘empire restoration,’ and Polish-US geopolitical and economic strategies and ‘conspiracies’ (i.e., stated and unstated goals of the Eastern Partnership Community). It also begs questions concerning recent geopolitical alignment in relation to historical antecedents. For example, Poland has had very little ‘brotherly love’ for Ukraine until recently, Ukraine being - unlike the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary - more traditionally aligned with Russia, and more culturally, linguistically, and religiously similar (only 6% of Ukrainians are Roman Catholic whereas over 90% of Poles and some 60% of Slovaks and Hungarians are Roman Catholic). The old saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ comes to mind here. Furthermore, this study refutes prevalent historical falsifications – common both in the ‘everyday understanding’ of average Americans and common also among some American academics – concerning the nature of the Socialist system in the USSR and its Eastern European satellites, and the goals inherent in this system’s transition. US right-wing narratives, steeped in Reaganesque, neoconservative economic agenda-making, generally seek to justify world capitalist ‘victory’ by way of a supposed Eastern European (and Russian, for that matter) rejection of socialism and longing for unregulated free-marketism and an end to the ‘social safety net’ which is portrayed by neoconservatives as a form of ‘dependence’ which negates personal v initiative. This study demonstrates, by way of first-hand interview data with high-level Solidarność activists (for example, Jerzy Borowczak, current director of Fundacja Centrum Solidarności), that the Solidarity Movement’s goal was establishment of a form of social democracy very similar in philosophy to that of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party – not a ‘dictatorship of capital’ and an ‘every man for himself’ mentality as fetishized by America’s Republican Party, its far-right factions, its wealthy ultra-conservatives, and its lower-class supporters, in which have been installed a ‘false consciousness’ congruent with elite agendas. Those such engaged in an effort to rewrite the past per mythologies spun from the 1989 – 1991 Soviet
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