Culture in People's Republic of Poland

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After the end of the Second World War, Polish society and culture have been subject to significant changes.

1 Post-Second World War
2 See also
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Post-Second World War

The Communist years in Poland didn't see any dramatic changes, neither political nor social. There were no shifts in the social class composition, the role of women in society, and access to health and educational services. With expanded urban industrial opportunities in the early postwar years, agriculture steadily became less popular as an occupation and as a lifestyle. The service sector, like industry, grew rapidly in size in the postwar era, but much less than the service sectors of Western Europe. The result was a postwar exodus from the rural areas and increased urbanization, which split apart the traditional multigenerational families upon which rural society had been based.

In the same period, the central planning system yielded impressive gains in the education level and living standards for much of the new urban industrial workforce. In the early postwar years, only a minority of new recruits from agricultural career were literate, but by the late 1970s only 5% of workers lacked a complete elementary education.^[1]

Postwar Poland, like the rest of socialist Eastern Europe, saw growing opportunities for higher education and employment and increased rights for women. In many respects, Poland offered women more opportunities in professional occupations than did many countries in Western Europe. Many professions, such as architecture, engineering and university teaching, employed a considerably higher percentage of women in Poland than in the rest of the West, and a majority of Polish medical students in 1980 were women.^[2] Communist propaganda, and sometimes reality itself, has created the stereotype of the "Communist woman worker", similar to the "woman miner" in Silesia, part of the socialist realism trend in art dominating from late 1940s to late 1950s.

In the first two decades of Communist rule, the health of Poland's people improved overall, as antibiotics became available and the standard of living rose in most areas. The extension of medical services also contributed to this trend; codifying this trend, the constitution of 1952 guaranteed universal free health care.^[3] However, by the 1970s and 1980s, critical national health indicators showed many negative trends, as economic conditions deteriorated, which, combined with small wages in the medical system, led to rampant corruption.

One of the major achievements during the communist period was the massive housing estate boom. As a result of wartime destruction, and a population which boomed after the war, there were massive housing availability pressures, which were relieved by large-scale infrastructure building, particularly from the Gierek era onwards. Although eyesores to Western observers, and often lampooned by the Poles themselves due to the sometimes dubious construction quality, this was a massive improvement to the population's quality of life.^{[citation needed]}

The reforms were greeted with relief by a significant faction of the population. Tens of thousands of Poles who had joined the Communist Party and some Social Democratic, Communist and Trade Unionist Poles, celebrated the opportunity to create what they saw as the society of the future. Many Poles believed that the reason for this was that Poland, unlike other Eastern European countries, did not need an additional phase of terror. Polish society had already been brought to the edge of disintegration by the Nazi occupation: Warsaw and other cities lay in ruins, and many smaller towns, which had been populated largely by Jews before the War, were empty. Half of the prewar Polish intelligentsia, mainly those of Jewish or middle-class origins, was dead or in political exile. Many children had gone six years without school. Under these circumstances, most people were willing to accept even Communist rule in exchange for the restoration of relatively normal life. Even the Catholic Church believed that any open resistance would be suicidal. In such circumstances a struggle for total control of every aspect of social and economical life in Poland favoured the communists, who held control of the government and security apparatus. Nonetheless a latent popular discontent remained present.

Founded in the late 1950s, the first workers' councils to voice opinions on industrial policy, based on the "Polish October" of 1956, marked a fundamental change in the social status of Polish workers.^{[citation needed]} The increasingly literate leadership of these councils, dominated by the rising numbers of workers that had a secondary education at that time, led to the formidable labor and professional organizations that would gradually come to threaten the socialist order.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the gains in the living standards for much of the growing urban workforce after the World War II, with the increasing influence of outside ideas from the West brought by television, radio (such as Radio Free Europe) and magazines, often smuggled by Poles returning to the country, social dissatisfaction with the regime increased, as people became aware of viable alternatives to their lifestyle. By the 1980s, the modernization of Polish society would lead to a complete restructuring of Poland's political structure.

An important role in shaping social attitudes was played by culture. Despite censorship and administrative interference, the patronage of the state and some leeway left to artistic creativity permitted the development of the Polish film school, theater, arts, music and literature after destalinization of 1956. Of great importance to the loosened fetters of censorship was the literary and scientific activity pursued in exile. Radio Free Europe played a significant role in molding public opinion. Similar roles were played by the Paris-based periodical "Kultura" and a number of similar publications. As a result, Poles were not isolated from European culture, which was, indeed, so close to them. The importance of the emigre cultural community was highlighted by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to Czesław Miłosz in 1980.[1]