PRL – historyczna zapaść czy złożona rzeczywistość? Współczesne debaty

Abstract

Talking about the People’s Republic of Poland requires special precautions. It is necessary to be aware of conditions that hinder the formulation of answers to questions important for the assessment of the past. One should note, among others, the following issues: sovereignty or occupation, an alternative to the seizure of power by the communists, the postwar revolution, economic changes, the nature of the system (socialist or totalitarian), transformation of society. Talking about the past on scientific grounds is also complicated by the use of imprecise terminology (e.g. frequent identification of real socialism with communism). Making attempts to balance the PRL is also a result of entanglement of history in politics. The desire to reduce history to a source of arguments for current policy decisions, or a lack of clarity about whether it is also the duty of historians to judge the past, push the main task – the task of explanation – to the background. Further difficulties arise from frequently different value systems of the disputants. Generally, there are two approaches: recognition of the period of the People’s Republic of Poland as permanent regression or assuming that – irrespective of the system – that period left something of value that needs to be described and assessed in a fair way. It is, for example, worth seeing how – from the perspective of the changes taking place after 1989 – people assessed the PRL and how the socio-economic reforms gained people’s understanding, coincided with their beliefs, their value system, which was after all to a large extent shaped in those years.