(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Mazowiecki becomes the first non-communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc (19 August); Poland ceases to be a so-called ‘People’s Republic’ (29 December) Balcerowicz’s economic reforms (January); PZPR dissolves itself (27-29 January) and is replaced bv a social democratic party, labelled in 199 т as the Left Democratic Alliance (SLD); re-emergence of the Polish Peasant Party (PSD (May); re-united Germany recognizes the Oder-Neisse frontier (14 November); Walysa succeeds Jaruzelski as president of the Third Republic (December)

Polish-German treaty of friendship (17 June); dissolution of the Comccon (June) and of the Warsaw Pact (July); first fully democratic elections since the Second World War (October): Poland recognizes the independence of Ukraine (December)

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199 J

1992

1993

1994 T995

1996

¹997

T998

^T999

2000

2001

2003

2004

2005

Poland signs treaties of good neighbourliness and co-operation with Ukraine (t8 May), Russia (22 Mav) and Belarus (23 June); Hanna Suchocka forms a centre-right government (July)

Remaining Russian troops leave Poland (18 September); Waldemar Pawlak forms a centre-left government (October)

Polish-Lithuanian treaty (April)

Revaluation of the Polish zloty (January); centre-left administration under Jozef Oleksy (March): Aleksander Kwasniewski elected president (November)

Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz becomes centre-left prime minister (7 February)

New liberal constitution endorsed by popular referendum (25 May); centre-right coalition with Jozef Bu/ek as prime minister (September)

Sejm ratifies Concordat with the Vatican (February) Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join NATO (12 March)

Kwasniewski re-elected as president (8 October) Parliamentary elections (September): implosion of Solidarity; centre-left government under Leszek Miller Poland joins the US-led invasion of Iraq (20 March); national referendum on joining the Kuropcan Union (7 and 8 June)

Poland formally joins the HU (1 May); Marek Belka forms a government of experts (June)

Death of Pope John Paul 11 (2 April)

PARTI

POLAND, TO 1795

Piast Poland, ?—1385

The Romans never conquered Poland: a source of pride to its first native chronicler, Bishop Vincent of Krakow, writing around 1200, but a nuisance to the modern historian. Since Rome neither subjugated nor abandoned Poland, there is no widely recognizable Year One from which to launch a historical survey. The year ad 966 has to serve, for in that year Mieszko, the ruler of what has come to be known as ‘Poland’, accepted (and imposed) Latin Christianity. We know as little about this event as we do about anything else that happened during the next hundred years or so. The written record begins to assume substantial proportions only in the fourteenth century. Some eighty years before Bishop Vincent, an unknown clergyman, possibly of French origin (he has come to be called Gall-Anonim, ‘the anonymous Gaul’), produced the earliest chronicle emanating directly from the Polish lands. Archaeological and toponymic evidence, the accounts of foreign observers and travellers, inform the historian little better than the folk memory on which Gall relied to locate the founder of the ruling house in a successful peasant adventurer called ‘Piast’,who had overthrown a tyrannical predecessor, Popiel (supposedly gnawed to death by some very hungry mice), at some point in the ninth century ad. Historians are more inclined nowadays to accept that Mieszko’s immediate forebears, Siemowit, Lestek and

* The label ‘Piast’ was attributed to the ruling dynasty only in the late seventeenth century by Silesian antiquarians. Medieval sources used formulae such as 'the dukes and princes of Poland’ (‘duces et principes Poloniae’).

Siemomysl, were real persons, not just figments of Gall’s imagination; and that it was under them that the early foundations of the future Regnum Poloniae were laid, with commercial and administrative centres in Gniezno and Poznan. Echoes of Lestek’s realm are to be found in contemporary Byzantine and Germanic chronicles.

The later twentieth century has added its own myths. In the forty or so years after the Second World War, Polish historiography was wont to depict a ‘Piast Poland’ whose boundaries were curiously congruent with those of the post-1945 state. This reflected more than an attempt by a deeply unpopular communist regime to legitimize itself by appeal to an original past. It was also symptomatic of a genuine need for stability after a thousand years of a history when borders were rarely fixed, but could contract and expand, twist and disappear within the span of a lifetime, taking in or discarding groups of people some of whom even today cannot wholly decide on their own identity: ‘Poles’? ‘Germans’? ‘Ukrainians’? ‘Jews’? ‘Belarusians’? ‘Lithuanians’?