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The People's Republic of Poland ( Polish:Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, PRL) was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1989, during its period of rule by the Communist party, officially called the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR). The Communists were in effective control of the Polish government from 1944 onwards, but the new name was not adopted until the 1952 constitution came into effect.
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| National motto: none | |||||
| Official language | Polish | ||||
| Capital | Warsaw | ||||
| Largest City | Warsaw | ||||
| Area - Total - % water | 312,685 km˛ 2.6% | ||||
| CurrencyFor exchange rates, see here. A currency is a unit of exchange, facilitating the transfer of goods and services. It is a form of money, where money is defined as a medium of exchange rather than e. a store of value. A currency zone is a country or region | ZlotySee all Polish coins and banknotes Zloty (literally meaning "golden", plural: zlote or zlotych depending on the number) is the Polish currency unit. ISO 4217 currency code: PLN Exchange rate (09/2004): 1 USD 3. 55 PLN; 1 Euro 4. 35 PLN Exchange rate (11/2 (PLZ) | ||||
| Time zoneTime Zone was also an old historical computer game. Time zones are areas of the Earth that have adopted the same standard time. Formerly, people used local solar time (originally apparent and then mean), resulting in time differing slightly from town to t | UTCCoordinated Universal Time or UTC also sometimes referred to as Zulu time , the basis for civil time differs by an integral number of seconds from atomic time and a fractional number of seconds from UT1. Time zones around the world are expressed as positi +1 | ||||
| National anthemA national anthem is a generally patriotic musical composition that is formally recognized by a country's government as their state's official national song. During the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, with the rise of the national state, most count | Mazurek Dabrowskiego | ||||
| Calling Code | 48 | ||||
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin was able to present his western allies, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with a fait accompli in Poland. His armed forced were in occupation of the country, and his agents, the Polish Communists, were in control of its administration. The USSR was in the process of incorporating the lands in eastern Poland which it had occupied between 1939 and 1941 (see Polish areas annexed by Soviet Union), with some minor variations in Poland's favour (the most important of which allowed Poland to retain Bialystok). In compensation, the USSR awarded Poland all the German territories in Pomerania, Silesia and Brandenburg east of the Oder-Neisse Line, plus the southern half of East Prussia.
Stalin was determined that Poland's new government would be controlled by the Communists, and therefore ultimately by him. He had severed relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943, but to appease Roosevelt and Churchill he agreed at Yalta that a coalition government would be formed. The Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, resigned his post and with several other leaders of the Polish exiles went to Lublin in eastern Poland where the Communist-controlled provisional government had been established. This government was headed by a Socialist, Edward Osóbka-Morawski , but the Communists held a majority of key posts. It was recognised by the western Allies in July 1945. Stalin also agreed that Poland would receive $US10 billion in reparations money from Germany.
In April 1945 the provisional government signed a mutual pact with the Soviet Union. The new Polish Government of National Unity was finally constituted on June 28, with Mikolajczyk as Deputy Prime Minister. The Communists' principal rivals were Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe PSL), and the veterans of the wartime Home Army (AK) and of the Polish armies which had fought in the west. But at the same time Soviet-oriented parties held the balance of power, especially the PPR, under Wladyslaw Gomulka and Boleslaw Bierut. Harry S. Truman and Winston Churchill were aware of the predominance of pro-Soviet parties and decided on a policy of strong resistance to Stalin.
The Western Allies, and particularly Roosevelt, have been criticised, both by Polish writers and some western historians, for what most Poles see as the abandonment of Poland to Stalin. There is no doubt that Roosevelt was naive to accept Stalin's promises at Yalta. But is difficult in retrospect to see what effective action the Allies could gave taken. Stalin was in full physical control of Poland. Only the threat of force could have deterred him, and in the circumstances of 1945 this would have been an empty threat, as Stalin well knew. Public opinion in the west would not have accepted the possibility of a war with the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviets had just played the leading role in defeating Hitler, at a cost of 20 million Soviet dead.
Mikolajczyk and his colleagues in the government-in-exile insisted on making a stand in defence of Poland's pre- 1939 eastern border, a position which was not defendable in practice when Stalin was in occupation of the territory in question. (For more on the Polish border issue, see Curzon line.) They refused to accept the proposed new Polish borders, and thus infuriated the Allies - in particular Churchill. This made the Allies less inclined to stand up to Stalin on the question of the composition of the postwar government. In the end the exiles lost on both issues: Stalin annexed the eastern territories, and controlled the new Polish government. At least Poland preserved its status as an independent state: some influential communists such as Wanda Wasilewska were in favour of Poland becoming a republic of the Soviet Union.
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