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The long narrative of Poland's history contains, in most tellings, an implicit argument about cultural survival and national values. In that argument, the communist era (1944-1989) is but a detour from Poland's true path. Recent histories of Poland, such as those by Norman Davies, Jerzy Lukowski, and Herbert Zawadzki, tend to be tone-deaf when it comes to this period. Historians need to take the communist era on its own terms, as an integral part of the Polish experience. Anthony Kemp-Welch's Poland under Communism: A Cold War History partially fills this need. It is a compelling, well-written narrative of contestation between regime and society in the PRL (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, the Polish People's Republic), and is only the second monograph in English devoted entirely to postwar Poland and the first written in English. (Andrzej Paczkowski's The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom (University Park, PA, 2003) was first published in Polish in 1996.)
Poland under Communism has two particular strengths. First, Kemp-Welch integrates Poland into an international context. In this telling, Poland does not disappear into Cold-War storage after a brief appearance on stage at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945. At every juncture, Kemp-Welch grounds Polish events and trends in transnational or international history. Each is not merely a backdrop, but a shadow (or, occasionally, the puppet-master) to the events in Poland. Kemp-Welch shows how the Polish case diverged from and yet paralleled changes in the communist world, and how decisions or perceptions in the Kremlin or the White House shaped Polish events. Particularly interesting are the discussion of the Titoist deviation in Yugoslavia and its echo in Wladyslaw Gomulka's downfall in 1948; of student unrest in 1968 in the context of protests in Prague, Berlin, and Paris; and of the policy debates in Washington and Moscow regarding the emergence of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. It cannot be said that there is anything new here, but the non-specialist will find it easier to place Polish experiences into a European narrative.
Second, Kemp-Welch provides the first concise history of Solidarity in English. Nearly three decades after the emergence of what became...