A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945-1960 by T. DavidCurpReview by: Richard BlankeSlavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Summer, 2008), pp. 455-456Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652863 .

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Book Reviews 455

emigration and its European-federalist position and emphasizes the role of Catholics at

home, especially of "Tygodnik Powszechny." Gulinska-Jurgiel covers the changing focus of

communist propaganda from 1960 to 1970 with its stress on western threats to European

stability and security. The Rapacki Plan is seen as symptomatic for this phase. While attacks on German revisionism intensified under Wladyslaw Gomulka, the United States came in

creasingly to be presented as the great enemy. Guli?ska-Jurgiel contrasts this official stand

with the attempts at German-Polish reconciliation undertaken by the Catholic Church and intellectuals. Discussing the mounting crisis from 1976 to the collapse of communism, Domnitz stresses the growing debates about Europe and east central Europe in the op

position circles. Europe is seen as a Europe of nations that cannot fully understand itself

without Poland. The Communist Party's attempts to resort to European rhetoric are seen

as desperate

moves to strengthen its position. Klaus Bachmann explores current Polish European concepts in detail. He insight

fully examines the debates about Poland and the European Union, the stand of the Eu

roskeptics, and different visions of Europe. Domestic concerns and demagoguery greatly affect these debates, and the issues are often misunderstood by the public and awkwardly handled by Polish diplomats.

"Poland or Freedom in the Heart of Europe" the concluding essay by Gesine Schwan, the president of Europa-Universit?t Viadrina, tells the story of the author's growing inter

est in Poland and her deep understanding and empathy for its problems. It is a fitting conclusion to this valuable book, which aims to bring Poland closer to the Germans in the

European context and to promote their mutual cooperation.

Piotr S. Wandycz

Yale University

A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945-1960. By T. David

Curp. Rochester Studies in Central Europe. Rochester: University of Rochester Press,

2006. x, 270 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00, hard bound.

In this detailed and closely argued account of how Polish communists consolidated their

power in postwar western Poland, T. David Curp advances one thesis in particular: that

Poland's radically revised territorial makeup?in particular, the Grand Alliance's deci

sion to turn several German provinces (minus their 9 million inhabitants) over to Po

land?amounted to a "national revolution" that led to a marriage of convenience (or, as he sees it, a remarkable degree of national solidarity) between Iosif Stalin's minions

and the traditionally anticommunist society of western Poland, with its strong National

Democratic, Catholic, and agrarian traditions. Even (or precisely) the most aggressively nationalist and xenophobic elements in prewar Polish society, such as the Polish Western

Union (PZZ), were welcome partners in the campaign to secure the newly acquired lands.

After a couple of years, however, the "Stalinists" in the ruling party began to overreach and

upset the recently established sense of national solidarity. In Curp's terminology, the poli cies pursued after 1948 were "socially and culturally revolutionary" but "anti-nationally

counterrevolutionary" (107). In particular, they called into question the commitment to

national homogeneity, the leading role of the church, and the rights of settlers to the

property only recently seized from the Germans; and thereby set the stage for the Poznan

"revolution" of 1956.

Curp confines his study to two regions, roughly equivalent to the present-day regions of Great Poland and Lubusz, which represented two very different faces of postwar "west

ern Poland." He has much more to say about the former region, mainly because it was part of prewar Poland and already had an overwhelmingly Polish population. The expulsion of its small remaining German minority, which less radical prewar methods (and "ethnic

self-cleansing") had already reduced from 34 percent in 1918 to 9 percent by 1931, had

only a marginal impact on Great Polish society as a whole. By contrast, Lubusz and its

composite replacement population were almost entirely the product of ethnic cleansing; here the regime had a freer hand, and fewer traditional forces to deal with. The contrasts

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456 Slavic Review

between these two regions, although a recurring theme in this book, might have been

more fully developed. A more serious problem is that the title and subtitle of this work may create false

expectations. Most historians will understand the phrase "clean sweep" as a reference to

Winston Churchill's speech to Parliament (15 December 1944), in which he sought to

justify his country's acquiescence to history's most ambitious ethnic cleansing project. But

there is no reference to this in the text; indeed, the entire great power background to

this problem, which allowed Poland to help itself to so much German territory in the first

place, is absent. Similarly, the ethnic cleansing referred to in the subtitle, while it set the

stage for the developments treated here, does not receive much attention; issues related to

ethnic cleansing are limited to the first third of the book, after which the focus shifts to the

machinations of the ruling party, church-state relations, peasant resistance to collectiviza

tion, and other issues in which ethnic cleansing played only a peripheral role, especially

in

Great Poland. And while concluding that "the moral and ethical critique of ethnic cleans

ing is compelling" (195), Curp does not otherwise address such questions. In sum, this is a

study of Polish politics after ethnic cleansing had largely taken place,

of interest chiefly to historians of Poland rather than to those whose primary interest is

ethnic cleaning. It is a well-researched and factually dense monograph, based squarely on archival sources and on the Polish- and English-language literature. (Unfortunately,

German-language works and sources were not used; as a result, the introductory chapter in particular, dealing with pre-1945 developments,

seems rather one-sided and incom

plete.) But Curp presents a lot of revealing and interesting material from inside the Polish

party-state; and as an addition to the not exactly voluminous English-language historical

literature on postwar Polish politics, this book will be more than welcome.

Richard Blanke

University of Maine

From Solidarity to Martial Law: The Polish Crisis of 1980-1981: A Documentary History. Ed.

Andrzej Paczkowski and Malcolm Byrne. Foreword, Lech Walesa. National Security Archive Cold War Readers. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007. xlvii,

548 pp. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. Photographs. $65.00, hard bound.

From Solidarity to Martial Law is the latest volume in a series of National Security Archive

Cold War Readers devoted to presenting a "truly multinational approach to Cold War

history" by documenting "key episodes in the Cold War based on the latest archival doc

umentation from the former Soviet bloc and newly declassified Western sources" (dust

jacket). Previous volumes have dealt with the East German uprising in 1953, the Hungar ian Revolution of 1956, and the Prague Spring of 1968. Official documents pertaining

to

the Polish crisis have been available for some time and have been used by, among others, Tina Rosenberg ( The Haunted Land: Facing Europe

s Ghosts after Communism, 1995), Timothy Garton Ash (The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 3d ed., 2002), and Andrzej Paczkowski (The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, 2003) in their writings on recent Polish history. With the publication of this volume, covering the period from

July 1980 to January 1982, a broader audience can now easily

access this material to inform

on-going research or simply to become better informed on the decision-making processes

surrounding the imposition of martial law in Poland, an event that arguably triggered "the

beginning of the end" for communist rule in eastern Europe. For those looking for clear answers to critical questions, however, these documents

are unlikely to suffice. As Tina Rosenberg points out, "martial law documents leave a trail

of mud. Polish and Soviet archives hold tens of thousands of documents, many of them

full of fascinating details about martial law. But they do not conclusively answer the big

question: Was [Wojciech] Jaruzelski a hero or a traitor?" (180). Did he save Poland from

Soviet invasion or in fact ask for Soviet troops to intervene in the event that martial law

was a failure, only to be told by Soviet leaders that invasion was off the table, certainly by

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