Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 (Cold War International History Project) 1st Edition

by Pawel Machcewicz (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0804762052

ISBN-10: 0804762058

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Hardcover, Illustrated, September 8, 2009

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Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 offers a social history of the mass movements that prompted political change and altered Polish-Soviet relations in 1956 but avoided a Soviet armed response. Pawel Machcewicz focuses on the people's expression of grievances, and even riots―as opposed to "top-level" activities such as internal Communist Party struggles. He carefully depicts the protests that took place in Poznan in June 1956 and across Poland the following October and November. The manuscript is based largely on new archival materials (mainly Party and security apparatus documents) that were originally prepared to provide detailed information to the Party leadership about what was happening on the ground. The book includes a selection of photographs from Poznan in June 1956 taken secretly by the police.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rebellious Satellite makes a real case for 1956 as the first 'People's Revolution' and it is critical for understanding subsequent communist and post-communist history." -- Jane Leftwich Curry, Santa Clara University

"Machcewicz has broken away from the method of analysis dominant in the historiography of 1956, which basically limited itself to descriptions of the decisions made by the Warsaw political center combined with information about the ferment within the opinion-forming milieux of the intelligentsia." -- Dariusz Jarosz, Warsaw University

"[Machcewicz presents] the voices and actions of workers and peasants and makes effective use of social movement theory to analyze the trajectory of protest and demands. The result is a vivid portrait of twelve months of upheaval: Machcewicz shows us stormy meetings in factories and in city squares; the radical language of graffiti and homemade fliers; and determined peasants reclaiming their land from the collective farms." -- Padraic Kenney, Journal of Modern History

About the Author

Pawel Machcewicz is currently with the Institute of Political Studies in Warsaw. He was a Cold War International History Project Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in both 1994 and 2007. He was recently named the Polish Prime Minister's personal representative for the creation of a new World War II Museum in Gdansk.

Product details

Publisher : Stanford University Press; 1st edition (September 8, 2009)
Language : English
Hardcover : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 0804762058
ISBN-13 : 978-0804762052
Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,207,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11,757 in Russian History (Books)
- #21,228 in European History (Books)

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H. Campbell

Bottom Up History of the Polish Crisis

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2019

This book is not an in-depth political history of the tumult in Poland in the wake of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin revelations at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Instead it is a look at the average Pole's reactions to the liberalization that occurred in the post-"Secret Speech" era. These are based on the Polish secret police's own records of graffiti, letters, speeches, overheard conversations and clandestine fliers as well as interviews he conducted, memoirs, newspaper articles, etc. The crucial event was the Poznan riots in June 1956 that started off as economic protests organized by workers into an anti-communist anti-Soviet local revolution, where army units were required to violently suppress the frenzied masses, who were intent on ejecting the Russians, restoring religious practices in schools, raising salaries and putting Wladyslaw Gomulka back in control of the Polish government. Gomulka emerged from political oblivion as a "reforming crusader" by many Poles, ironic considering he was one of the orthodox communists who helped the Russians control the country after the war. But the fact he had been vilified for his post-war assertion of Polish rights viz Moscow by the Stalinists who were now cowering in the shadows made him a more appetizing alternative to Ochab, who had replaced the inveterate (and deceased) Stalinist Bierut. (Ironically even Bierut, by virtue of having died in Moscow during the now infamous Congress, became "martyrized" by a Polish population eager to paint the Russians as anti-Polish monsters.) In the wake of Poznan and parallel to the impending tragedy in Hungary, Gomulka organized the most "democratic" elections in Poland prior to the revolutionary one in 1989. Curiously, even Radio Free Europe endorsed Gomulka's slate of party-selected candidates, convinced that the alternative, a Soviet intervention, would have been calamitous. By this time Gomulka had already convinced Khrushchev to forego intervention, remove Russians from key positions in the government and military and restore more fairness in Polish-USSR trade relations. The voices of the Poles begin to sound similar pretty quick, of course; universal revulsion of Russian domination and exploitation, desire for making Catholic life less difficult, disgust at the poverty prevalent in Poland compared to their socialist neighbors, fair treatment of returning Anders army veterans, returning cities like Lwow and Wilno to Poland, allowing Poles trapped in Russia to return home, abolishing farming collectives, etc. Only some of this desiderata was accomplished, of course, but there is no doubt that post-Stalin Poland was a far better place than before. Naturally, as the cynics had assured, even Gomulka's "Polish Autumn" was short lived. Before long he began asserting more state control over all aspects of Polish life and making the Party the only arbiter of saociety's progress. This book is a good examination of how a socialist society reacted to a sudden paradigm shift caused by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. In many ways the seeds sown by Premier K would only germinate under Gorbachev with fatal consequences for socialism. Fitting that it was in Poland that these fruits first sprouted to undermine Russia's empire.

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