Communist Party of Poland 1918-1929. A Study in Political Ideology

Author:	Simoncini, Gabriele
Year:	1994
Pages:	272
ISBN:	0-7734-9414-6 978-0-7734-9414-5
Price:	$199.95

Focusing on political and ideological aspects, the author presents an organic synthesis of the Party's life, organization, and internal political debates. Party ideology is analyzed in close reference to Soviet Communism and the European Communist movement. The analysis is based on a wealth of archival materials, documents issued by the Party through its conferences, press, and the writings and memoirs of its leaders. The study makes extensive use of the material in the collections of the former Central Archive of the Central Committee of the Unified Polish Workers' Party in Warsaw. This work is the first organic study on the topic to appear in English.

Reviews

"His lengthy bibliography, comprised almost exclusively of primary sources - and twelve pages of secondary sources, only three English-language - demonstrates how effectively he used his time in Poland, especially once the archives of the interwar Communist Party and postwar PZPR were opened up. From these Polish archives we learn of the deliberations and decisions of the Comintern related to the Polish Communist Party in the 1920s. . . . We learn much that is new from Simoncini about the three Ws (Wera Kostrzewa, Henryk Walecki, Adolf Warski), the May error regarding Pilsudski's 1926 coup, th factional fight between majority and minority. . . Simoncini's book makes for stimulating reading. . . . This book offers many clues about why the postwar Polish communist regime deluded itself for 45 years and, because of this, deserves to be carefully studied." - Raymond Taras in The Polish Review