The takeover of power in Poland by Communists after World War II was determined by the actions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The article shows when the variant of the establishment by Kremlin of the 17th Soviet Republic in Poland ceased to function as a strategic goal of the USSR and was replaced by a program of permanent dependence and “Sovietisation” of Poland. The paper defines also the role and impact of the Communist party. Initially, the leader of the USSR wanted to keep the external features of independence of the countries liberated by the Red Army. This was due to international considerations. The article analyzes the strategy and tactics of Stalin’s actions both internationally and internally in Poland. It shows the synergy of Moscow’s actions in relation to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It indicates where the Kremlin’s strength in the international arena came from and why the attitude of Great Britain and the USA in the late war period created Moscow comfortable conditions for subjugation of Central and Eastern Europe. It shows why the United States and Great Britain were unable to successfully oppose the Kremlin’s imperial plans until the spring of 1946.

The research objectives of this article are to analyse Bulgaria’s place in the policies of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain in the early post-war years, 1944–1948, and to answer the main research question about the role of an external factor in the Bulgarian Communist Party’s rise to power and its assertion as a leading political force. The method of analysing archival documents and causal connections between the Soviet and American policy, on the one hand, and the actions of the Communist party on the other, makes it possible to trace the geopolitical interests of the USSR and the USA and Bulgaria’s place in them. The article discusses Soviet support for the Bulgarian Communist Party in the context of Moscow’s strategy towards the United States and the way it changed in 1946–1948 as a result of the Cold War. It reveals the role of US diplomacy in the emergence of the anti-communist opposition in Bulgaria and its dependence upon the American support it received, and on Washington’s policy towards the USSR. The research results highlight how the Soviet-American confrontation was projected on domestic political processes in Bulgaria and the way it predetermined the Communist Party’s victory over its opponents.

With the careful examination of available postwar documents of the Communist Party, this paper aims to present the measures taken by the Hungarian Communist Party in 1945 and 1946 to influence Hungary’s economic policy. In the aforementioned period, the Hungarian Communists devised long-term plans for a gradual takeover of political power in Hungary while enjoying the support of the Soviets. The Hungarian Communist leadership tried to create an economic policy that would make the Party itself an integral factor in the stabilization process and thus secure its place in the highest echelons of political power in Hungary. From the beginning, the MKP’s highest priorities were to acquire key political positions and to weaken and disintegrate existing social and political structures. In order to execute this plan, the Hungarian Communist Party created various “instruments” such as the Supreme Economic Council, which was secretly co-ordinated by the State Policy Department of the Hungarian Communist Party.

Yugoslavia was the first country behind the Iron Curtain where the communists assumed total power. By 1945, they had already mostly taken over the mechanisms of power, the police apparatus and the military; furthermore they were supervising the majority of the media in preparation for the 11 November 1945 elections, where the total domination of communists in the state was confirmed. The present paper presents the attitude of the leading communists towards the political parties and leaders of the opposition over the course of six months after the end of World War II. The influence of the opposition was different in the various parts of Yugoslavia. It was the strongest in Serbia and in Croatia, while it barely had any influence in Slovenia. In their public appearances, the leading Communists derided and despised the opposition, associating it with those who had collaborated with the occupation forces during the war. They had already started avoiding the term “opposition” before the elections, while afterwards this word almost vanished from their vocabulary: instead, they would refer to “reactionary forces” or “national traitors”.

This contribution is a part of the project Conceptually-Political and Cultural Pluralism and Monism in 20th Century Slovenia (P6-0281), financed by the Public Research Agency of the Republic of Slovenia.

The end of the World War II at the same time marked the beginning of the breakup war coalition. The Soviet Union tried to consolidate its leading position in its own sphere of interest defined by inter-ally agreements made during the war. It was a heterogenous space in the national, political and economic sense where the local Communist parties that were envisaged to be a support to the future Sovietisation of the region, did not have a strong basis. The exceptions were Yugoslavia and, to some extent, Albania. The Yugoslav Communists, who managed to carry out a revolution during the anti-fascist struggle and in an absolutely strategic location, imposed themselves as an important ally. For the Yugoslav Communists, the Soviet Union represented not only an ally, but also the country that was a role model for the future transformation of the Yugoslav State and society, while for the Soviets Yugoslavia was more than a regional partner and faithful ally. Although the newly signed interstate agreements of a political, military and economic character announced the development of future cooperation, already at the beginning of 1947, the first signs of a more serious crisis in Yugoslav- Soviet relations appeared. The crisis had a number of causes, and it also threatened to serious conflict that would have lasting consequences for general relations between the two countries.

The article deals with the organisation and activities of the propaganda apparatus of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the so-called Agitprop, in the first five years after World War II. The Agitprop apparatus was a very important part of the Communist Party’s structure, and it had crucial tasks in strengthening its power. Through different forms of activities, Agitprop created a desirable public image of the Communist Party and its policy and ideology. Agitprop worked in everyday ordinary situations in factories, schools, institutions, state bodies, party meetings and special subordinated organisations, syndicates, youth organisations, women’s organisations, etc. Besides this, special mass gatherings, meetings, celebrations, parades were organised at various occasions. Great significance was attached to propaganda’s influence in educational system and culture. The main form of Communist propaganda influence was the press that was completely under the control of the Agitprop. The contents of propaganda in the observed period changed in accordance with the internal and international political situation and the main political goals and needs of Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The article is based on archival sources, published documents, press articles and relevant literature.

The study describes developments in Czechoslovakia from the liberation from Nazi rule to the definitive takeover of power by the communists. It focuses mainly on Slovakia. It brings a view to the most important circumstances that determined the political scene in Slovakia. The author briefly mentions the successive reduction of power of Slovak national organs through the three Prague agreements. He captures political developments in Slovakia and the struggle between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Slovakia. The study also focuses on the autumn crisis in Slovakia in 1947, which led to the defeat of the Democratic Party. The so-called anti-state conspiracy, fabricated by State Security through violence and torture, was a major means of curtailing the power of the Democratic Party. The events of February 1948 and the final victory of the communists in Czechoslovakia were also reflected in Slovakia. The Slovak communists illegally deprived the leaders of the Democratic Party of their powers and, more peacefully than in the Czech lands, took control into their hands.

Albania was perhaps the only country to have more than tripled its population of Jews during the Second World War. It did so by hiding or refusing to hand them over to the occupying German forces. By the end of 1944 the Communist-led National Liberation Army gained power replacing the Germans and the former political interwar elites. Despite common knowledge, several armed and unarmed attempts were made by opposition groups to overthrow the regime from 1944 onward. Opposition came also as a response to the repressive policies that the communists conducted methodically in the early years of the regime. Repression consisted of arbitrary arrests, terrorist practices conducted by the then-formed State Security, commonly known as “Sigurimi” as well as a series of show trials against people accused of war crimes or collaboration with the enemy. Aside from these typical forms of revolutionary repression, the regime set up a series of detention facilities, in which the new above-mentioned “alien” class and enemy elements were placed. Such structures consisted of forced labour and concentration camps. This paper seeks to analyze the concentration camps, set up by 1945, in which the newly established regime placed families and relatives of those who opposed Communism. Unlike the labour camps, the concentration ones were reserved only for the elderly, females and children. They functioned from 1945 to 1950 and were born out of necessity, due to the inability to control parts of the country, and as a measure to deprive the insurgents of their social base. While in theory concentration camps functioned as a form of policing and social control, in Albania they partly functioned as hostage centers, where the family members of political prisoners or anti-Communist émigrés were placed. Despite their original function, concentration camps turned soon into death camps as their inmates begun to die of hunger, malnutrition and exposure. Such tragedy affected especially the elderly and children, who were the primary victims of such terrible conditions. The paper draws examples especially from the notorious Tepelena Camp. The site was improvised from derelict barracks, which served various occupant armies in WW2 just outside the small town. The paper tries to uncover the rationale of these detention facilities, taking in consideration both the ideological but also mere survival motives of the regime, combining even the inability of its violence apparatus to effectively deal with this population group.

The article focuses on analysis of gender aspects of the Bolshevik authorities’ state policy during the Sovietisation process of the Ukrainian regions immediately after the October Revolution in the 1920s, and of the Western regions of Ukraine in the first postwar years. The main forms and content of public and political activities of female peasants were researched by the comparative method. The Soviet government initiated different activities to involve women in all spheres of life. It was caused, on the one hand, by the necessity of their labor mobilisation in a difficult demographic situation, the expansion of the social base of support for the Bolshevik Party and, on the other hand, it promoted the USSR’s role in the international arena. In terms of the implementation of the policy of gender equality proclaimed by the Bolsheviks, the so-called “Zhenotdely” were created in Russia in 1919. The experience of their activities was transferred to Ukraine in the 1920s and, after more than a decade’s pause, it was implemented in the western regions of Ukraine. Due to the lack of alternative civil society institutions, local “Zhenotdely” partially took over their functions and ran a number of important social spheres. Since the initiative to create “Zhenotdely” was not directed “from below” but “from above” and their activities were fully controlled by the relevant Committees of the CP(b)U, these organisations ipso facto could not reflect the interests of civil society. Generally, the implementation of state gender policy in the Ukrainian regions during the period given was carried out in terms of the so-called socialist transformations and was aimed at establishing and legitimising Soviet power there.

This paper focuses on the period 1949–1951, when the district security groups of three (troikas) and the regional security groups of five were active in Czechoslovakia. These groups of leading district and regional apparatchiks were charged with handling of the entire security and criminal agenda that deserved interest “from a political point of view”, and through them there was almost perfect interconnection of the regions with the central authorities of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. They were established by a resolution of the security commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of 2 February 1949. Their primary task was to control and help the work of security bodies and to resolve personnel issues. In May 1950, their agenda was expanded by a new directive of the Security Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to include other assignments. They were to provide and coordinate cooperation between the party, security organs, local authorities and prosecutors’ offices. The district and regional security groups of three and five were abolished in the autumn of 1951. The paper analyses their role and contribution in securing the hegemony of the Communist Party in the countryside of the East Bohemian regions.

The article aims at reconstructing three types of discourse adopted by the Catholic intelligentsia between 1945 and 1953 in order to delineate a framework for eventual cooperation with Communists. The analysis focuses on three cases: the concept of “radical catholicism” by Fr. Henryk Weryński, Christian Socialism of the Dziś i Jutro group as well as the concept of “minimalism” by Stanisław Stomma further developed together with Jerzy Turowicz. The study of these discourses allows the identifcation of how Catholic political thought changed following the political developments. The withdrawal of Karol Popiel’s Christian Democrats in 1946, their arrests in 1948 as well as the agreement between the Church and the state of 14 April 1950 all had particular relevance for Catholic discourses on Communism and shaped Catholic thought in this regard. In the end the discourses adopted by the Dziś i Jutro and Tygodnik Powszechny groups resorted to similar concepts albeit they adopted them to express different ideas.

After the communist-rigged election to the Legislative Sejm in January 1947, women gained 26 seats, comprising 5.85% of all members of parliament. Over the term of more than five years, the parliamentary activity of female MPs was very diverse. The analysis of shorthand reports from the Sejm reveals that, apart from the representatives of the Women’s League and several individual MPs cooperating therewith, a sizeable group of female members of parliament never took the floor during plenary sessions, restricting themselves at best to speaking at sessions of parliamentary committees. The small representation of women in the parliament was not sufficiently nonconformist to publicly articulate the actual needs of Polish women in the Stalinist era. Additionally, the parliamentary activity of female MPs was restricted by higher instances for political reasons. The most that decision-makers did was to formally support parliamentary feminists, both those aligned with the Women’s League and those outside its structures, in creating a pro-emancipation image of the Communist party among Polish women. In practice, the veracity of this image was belied [by the] insignificant impact of female MPs on the legislative process, as well as by the eventual marginalization of the women’s needs in laws adopted by the parliamentary majority. Consequently, the gap between the propaganda narrative and the actual impact of women on politics (governance) became the reason for the failure of the Party’s endeavours to win the “women’s masses” over for the Communist project. Therefore, in the perception of most Polish women, the announcements of full empowerment of women in the People’s Republic of Poland remained nothing but a hollow propaganda slogan.

This article presents the history of the business school run by the Piarist Fathers in Lida, which operated in 1929–1939. In the second half of the 1930s, 30 per cent of the students were non-Polish and non-Catholic, predominantly Jewish. The school is a little-known example of tolerance in a Catholic school. The Piarists also made efforts to turn their school into a fully co-educational establishment, an initiative that the Church authorities ultimately found objectionable. The author has already published on the subject (Gimnazjum Handlowe Księży pijarów w Lidzie w latach 1929–1939, jako przykład tolerancji religijnej [The Piarist Fathers’ Business School in Lida in 1929–1939 as an example of religious toleration]), but regrettably the article appeared in a journal with a very limited circulation. This is an expanded and amended version of that article. The article is based on sources from Polish and Lithuanian archives and the memoirs of two former students. The history of that business school, colloquially known as the handlówka [trade school], deserves to be remembered for its innovative teaching methods and the successful coexistence of people of different nationalities and religions.

Galeazzo Ciano, the foreign minister of Fascist Italy from 1936 to 1943, was a reliable hand in implementing Benito Mussolini’s policies, and played a major role in the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Rome-Berlin Axis. He gave an account of his diplomatic work in a diary which he started soon after assuming his duties as foreign minister. Polish topics feature relatively frequently in his diary, primarily in connection with Poland’s interwar foreign policy, including Poland’s relations with the Third Reich in the context of the German territorial claims. Ciano also describes the Polish politicians who handled the Polish-Italian relationship and the efforts to implement joint political projects in Central Europe. The article analyses Poland-related entries in Ciano’s diary in 1937–1939 before the outbreak of World War II. By late 1939 Poland had been partly occupied by German forces, and Polish references in Ciano’s diary become marginal.

Following Poland’s military defeat in September 1939, the Polish government re-formed in France and re-established relations with the émigré government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), an area of Poland’s international relations that had been very active before the war. The re-establishment of the relationship was aided by shifts relating to the Ukrainian question on the international stage, particularly the growing British interest in the issue. Despite the financial constraints, the Polish government supported the UPR’s émigré centre led by Vyacheslav Prokopovych and Oleksander Shulhyn, then active as the Ukrainian Committee in Paris. Particularly important from the Polish perspective was the Committee’s clear commitment to the Allied cause; there were also hopes that the terms of a Polish-Ukrainian compromise could be jointly developed and implemented after the end of the war and the liberation of Poland’s eastern territories from Soviet occupation. The Polish side’s objective was to preserve the territorial status quo. In exchange, the Poles were prepared to make considerable concessions to the Ukrainians, including tentative plans for a future Polish-Ukrainian federation. Co-operation with Ukrainian émigré groups mainly occurred in France and Romania. On the Polish side, the Ministerial Committee for the Interior Affairs, headed by General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was particularly involved. Sosnkowski drafted a set of guidelines on the Ukrainian question, but the guidelines were never adopted by the Council of Ministers in exile. The Committee also developed the concept of a separate Ukrainian military unit to fight alongside the Polish Army in France. The article discusses the earliest stage of Polish-Ukrainian contacts in exile until January 1940.

The article discusses the evolution of the official Soviet line on the problem of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Soviet foreign policy in the late 1930s. It argues that throughout the post-war period the official interpretation of the causes of World War II and the reasons for the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were largely based on a set of guidelines contained in a pamphlet entitled Forgers of History. Historical Information written with Joseph Stalin’s direct involvement. Currently, the neo-Stalinist historical narrative concerning the causes of World War II, as adapted to the present situation, continues to function as one of the lines promoted in the Russian political vision of history.

The paper is a contribution to the history of historiography concerning the Hitler-Stalin [Ribbentrop-Molotov] pact and outlines the different research tendencies as well as patterns of perception and interpretation in which the pact was depicted in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. On this basis, the author draws a line to some more recent publications which – also on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the pact – provide information on the status of research related to the Second World War in Germany.

The last person to face trial before the Supreme National Tribunal was Josef Bühler, an official of the General Governorate tasked with legislation in German-occupied Poland. The trial was held in Kraków and hinged on the question of whether or not Bühler had become merely unfortunately implicated in a system created by the occupation authorities, which he found impossible to oppose despite his own moral qualms. Was Bühler a weak person, completely dominated by and subservient to Hans Frank, but who nonetheless made attempts to help Poles and to impede the occupation machinery to the best of his ability? Or perhaps this was a misleading image crafted for the purposes of the trial, where the only thing that worked in his favour was the scarcity of evidence pointing to his direct involvement in atrocities? The article examines the trial’s evidence in order to answer those questions. It presents an analysis of the defence put forward by the accused and his legal counsel. It also discusses the arguments of the prosecutors and, above all, the position of the judges. They were faced with the difficult task of using conflicting evidence to establish whether Bühler was only a cog in the occupation machinery, as his legal counsel argued, or perhaps the key architect responsible for creating the legal basis for the apparatus of law enforcement and terror in occupied Poland.

The crimes committed against Poles during World War II have attracted the interest of many Polish historians who have published case studies of individual atrocities. One relatively under-researched aspect of this issue, however, is the deliberate and premeditated nature of those atrocities and the systematic implementation of the criminal policies against the Polish nation. As a result, such research fails to provide a full picture of those crimes. The work of historians to establish the actual state of events can serve as a starting point for legal historians, who can then deal with the theoretical task of legally classifying the crime under international law. This can serve the argument that certain actions can be recognised as acts of genocide or crimes against humanity. The history of law thus applied an added perspective that can complement the work being done by historians in other fields to ensure a better understanding of past crimes and atrocities. As a starting point for this kind of coordination between the work of researchers in different areas, there is a need to assess the current state of research involving the court rulings, the requisite expert tests and studies, to develop a shared methodology and a shared vocabulary. When coupled with the rejection of non-academic assumptions (such as the one that no crimes can legitimately be compared to the Holocaust), such efforts should facilitate the research into crimes against the Polish nation from the perspective of Genocide Studies.

This article provides an overview of the problem of the resettlements of Ukrainian populations in the district of Lublin in 1942–1943. Those events are typically overlooked in historical research. However, they are key to any comprehensive analysis of the Nazi resettlements of populations in the Zamość area, a process of which they were part. The resettlements also provide us with a better understanding of the sources of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the district. The resettlements of Ukrainians were occurring in parallel with a range of repressions directed at the Polish population, but the two actions had different aims. The occupying forces’ idea was to move the Ukrainian population away from those areas that were earmarked for German colonisation and into settlements previously inhabited by Poles around the planned zone of German settlement. This way the resettled Ukrainian population would serve as a living shield protecting the German colonists from partisan attacks. According to various estimates, resettlements in the district of Lublin affected 18,000–23,000 Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Central Committee made attempts to intervene in order to influence those events, but their efforts were ineffective, a fact that discredited the Committee in the eyes of the population affected.

This article is the first part of a study that outlines the contacts and relations between Brigadier-General Stanisław Tatar (Deputy Head of Staff for Domestic Affairs in the Staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army in the West) and his self-appointed “Committee of Three” (General Tatar, Colonel Stanisław Nowicki and Lieutenant Colonel Marian Utnik) on the one hand, and the intelligence services of People’s Poland on the other. Tatar and his collaborators led the 6th Department (Special) of the Commander-in-Chief ’s Staff, whose primary task involved supporting the Underground forces in occupied Poland. Late in 1944, the three men formed a so-called “Committee of Three” in order to embezzle funds from the 6th Department. The three men used creative accounting and the existing structures of the 6th Department to turn the considerable amount (US$7 million at the time) into a so-called “Drawa” Fund, which they proceeded to smuggle to several European countries (and even to the United States) and hide there. This action, which bore all the characteristics of deliberate embezzlement, set in motion a chain of events in 1944–1947 which is described in this article. A separate problem (though also one that was inseparably linked to Tatar) was the so-called gold treasure of the National Defence Fund, its development also described in the article. The wide basis of the source information available has made it possible to offer an account of the motivations of Tatar and his fellow committee members, their actions and their consequences (inasmuch as possible within the constraints of an academic publication). The article ends with a description of the handover of the gold treasure to the Warsaw regime as part of Operation “Brzoza” (Birch Tree) and the proposed gradual handover of the “Drawa” Fund. Part two of the publication will focus on that latter operation, which took place in 1947–1949, and on the conflicts between the members of the committee and their activities as agents of the Communist military intelligence (Nowicki and Utnik), ending with their arrest.

Personnel policy was one of the main instruments of power employed by the Communist authorities. One of its most prominent elements was the ‘nomenclature’, system established exactly as in the Soviet model. Formally, it was an index of managerial positions in the state decided by appropriate levels of the communist party. In practice, the result was a Communist elite – a closed, self-reproducing caste which established a monopoly of social, political and economic power. They would not be subject to scrutiny from any lower body and would enjoy multiple benefits as a result of their place in the hierarchy. The nomenclature was combined with a highly-regulated process of information circulation. Therefore, the Communist party produced multitudes of documents related to the nomenclature system. After 1990, they were stored in the state archives and became a great source for studies of the Communist’s personnel policies, especially those of the Communist nomenclature. The article is an attempt at a synthetic study of the documentation and information included there that are direct results of the nomenclature’s existence in the context of both the ideological as well as the realistic implications for the Communist system in Poland.

At the turn of the 1970s and 80s, the Czechoslovak security apparatus formed an interest in the undercover and espionage activities of the various state security forces in Communist countries in the Eastern Bloc tasked with operations against international terrorism and the training and deployment of special antiterrorist units. Following the establishment of a counterintelligence directorate for “special and unusual types of criminal activity” (the 14th Department of the National Security Corps or SNB), the leadership of the new structure was given the opportunity to make several international study trips to the Soviet Union, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria and even Yugoslavia. Reports from those official visits to security institutions in other Communist countries were filed with the leadership of the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs. The accounts capture a cross-section view of the status of counterintelligence structures tasked with containing international terrorism (and partly also so-called “domestic” terrorism) in Eastern Europe, including the organisational structures, training programmes and tactics for deploying special antiterrorist units. During those meetings, representatives of the Czechoslovak state security services (Státní Bezpečnost, StB) and public law enforcement and criminal police (Veřejná Bezpečnost, VB) were given access (obviously limited) to information concerning the activities of the 2nd Main Directorate of the KGB (USSR), the 5th Directorate of the KGB (USSR), but also the special Alpha Unit of the 7th Directorate of the KGB (USSR), the 2nd Directorate and the 3rd Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in People’s Republic of Hungary, and the line units of the Revolutionary Regiment of Public Security, the 22nd Main Department of the Ministry of State Security (Hauptabteilung XXII MfS, “Terrorabwehr”) and the special units subordinated to a special working group of the permanent operational staff of the Ministry of State Security (AGM/S MfS) of the German Democratic Republic, the central apparatus of the Polish Security Service, as well as the special security unit in the Main Directorate of the People’s Police, the 2nd Main Directorate in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the special motorised regiment, the federal directorate of counterintelligence at the Secretariat of Internal Affairs, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the special anti-terrorist unit of the Militia Brigade. The aim of this article is to serve as a reference work based primarily on the information sourced from Czech archives in order to provide new insights into the collaboration and exchange of information within the Communist Bloc regarding the establishment, training, organisation and, ultimately, deployment of special anti-terrorist units working within the counterintelligence apparatus aimed against the activities of terrorist groups and organisations.

The paper presents South Korean efforts to establish economic and political relations with Communist Poland which resulted in establishment of diplomatic relations on 1 November, 1989. In the 1970s the Republic of Korea (ROK) decided to initiate contacts with selected Communist states in order to find new export markets and to get wider international recognition. It was a part of competition with Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for legitimacy. For many years Communist Poland ignored South Korean initiatives and continued to maintain diplomatic relations with North Korea. Polish approach to South Korea has changed in the 1980s when Communist Poland faced a serious economic crisis and the ROK’s economy grew rapidly. The remarkable economic development of South Korea convinced the USSR and its satellites to perceive the ROK as a potential source of credits and investments. Taking into account internal problems and new Soviet policy towards South Korea, the authorities of Communist Poland decided to start trade with the ROK. However, South Korea’s representatives declared that the ROK would give credits and invest in Poland only after establishing full diplomatic relations. Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski gave a green light to do so, but the final step was made when the government was led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Thus, Poland became the second state from the collapsing Eastern Bloc to establish diplomatic relations with the ROK.

This study analyses the issue of enfranchisement of the nomenklatura [uwłaszczenie nomenklatury] at a time of economic transformation in Poland (1989–1990). The term “enfranchisement/propertisation of nomenklatura” is used here to describe the process of Communist party members and high ranking officials gaining the right to own and manage state properties and assets (from state owned enterprises). The main tool for this appropriation of means during the transformation period was so the called nomenklatura company [spółka nomenklaturowa]. It can be defined as a company that was closely related to a state-owned enterprise, and its shareholders were the management of that enterprise as well as members of the party and state apparatus (or members of their families), connected by political party codependence, and administrative or social ties. The actual purpose of establishing and operating the nomenklatura company was for the company’s management to exploit it for personal benefits at the expense of state-owned enterprises. The key element of this study is to analyse two issues: the politics of the Communist authorities towards appropriation and the politics of the Mazowiecki government and other Solidarity cabinets regarding this problem. An analysis of how those groups made their decisions and how they chose strategies in dealing with the appropriation of means by nomenklatura shall make it evident that this phenomenon was, in principle, an unforeseen side effect of economic reforms rather than the result of planned actions.

Bishop Michał Klepacz was a major figure in the Catholic Church in People’s Poland. He became Bishop of Łódź, a diocese which had been particularly badly affected by the war. As a bishop, he not only faced the privations caused by World War II, but also had to lead his diocese during the Stalinist period. Actively involved in forging relations between the state and the Catholic Church, he was viewed by the Communist authorities as an effective politician who sought to find compromise between the interests of the Church and the interests of the new, anticlerical state authorities.

The opportunity to examine the respective accounts provided by both sides of a conflict, event or problem can offer valuable insights into the past and bring us closer to the actual course of events. This article presents and juxtaposes two sets of notes prepared by both participants in a meeting held on 5 March 1966 in the building of the d iocesan curia office in Katowice. The participants in that meeting included Edmund Łata, Head of the Department for Religious Denominations in Katowice, and Herbert Bednorz, Bishop Coadjutor of Katowice. The official visited the curia office in order to deliver a letter from the Prime Minister regarding the so-called “Bishops” Address’, a famous conciliatory letter from the Polish bishops to their German counterparts dated 18 November 1965. The Bishops’ Address did not dominate the meeting. The host largely dictated the course and the topics of the conversation, which he turned to the crucial problems of the official state policy on religious denominations in the Katowice diocese, and highlighted its repressive and discriminatory nature. The two sets of notes differ in their length and level of detail, presumably on account of the differences between their intended purpose, as well as the individual differences between the two men. It appears that the head of the Department forReligious Denominations was afraid to draw criticism for his visit on account of holding informal contacts with the Curia or treating the Church too favourably. As a result, his notes provide a detailed description of the circumstances and events leading up to the meeting. The bishop’s aim was to record the official position of Łata, and of the state authorities more generally, regarding issues that were relevant to the Curia and the diocese; as a result, his account is more concise and laconic than Łata’s. The two accounts are complementary. They demonstrate the mindsets, intentions and goals of both parties, their mutual attitudes, the atmosphere of the meeting and the character of the conversation, as well as what they felt were the most salient points of the meeting and the background of their conversation. The sources presented are interesting, given the unusual venue and formula as well as the topics discussed, both related to the official religious policy in the diocese, and related personally to Łata, which the bishop brought up during the meeting. The set of notes drafted by the official was located in the State Archive in Katowice, filed with the records of the Department for Religious Denominations and kept in the collection of the Voivodeship Office in Katowice. The bishop’s account was found in the Archdiocesan Archive in Katowice in a set of files concerning the talks and correspondence with state authorities that constitutes an integral part of the Substantive Records archival collection (Akta rzeczowe).