No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
For a long time state socialism in Eastern Europe has had a tendency towards ossification, and this leads to several negative consequences more or less clearly acknowledged by the local leadership. It is in the sociopolitical nature of the rigid Soviet-style system that any far-reaching reforms are difficult to introduce. Therefore, the Polish experiment of the 1970s started by Gierek and his équipe, after taking power in December 1970 from the équipe of Gomulka, should be carefully scrutinized for successes and failures. From the beginning, this has been an attempt to modernize the economy without transforming the power relations within the society. Modern industry and technology have been widely introduced in Poland during the 1970s, and a considerable part of these innovations has been financed by loans from the West. Application of scientific knowledge to production of goods and services, as well as to management and administration, has been generously promoted by the Polish government in order to maximize efficiency. There has also been much more emphasis than before on the rational utilization of human resources. In the first half of the 1970s, this path to modernity was accompanied by the rise of wages and salaries at a much faster rate than in the other countries of eastern Europe, but, on the other hand, the accelerated pressure on the population toward political conformity or at least passivity also occurred. This pressure was treated by many Poles, as well as by several western observers, rightly or wrongly, as the condition imposed by the neighbors of Poland, primarily the USSR, to tolerate any more vigorous contacts of Poland with the West, as well as the relative “secularization” of the Polish people in comparison with the rigid Marxist orthodoxy in which East Germans and Czechs and all Soviet people are constantly kept by their authorities.
1. Maly rocznik statystyczny [“The Small Statistical Yearbook”] (Warsaw: Glowny Urzad Statystyczny, 1977), p. 325.Google Scholar
2. Rocznik statystyczny [“The Statistical Yearbook'] (Warsaw: Glowny Urzad Statystyczny, 1976), p. 586.Google Scholar
3. Maly rocznik statystyczny, p. 83.Google Scholar
4. Wilczynski, Jan, Comparative Monetary Economics (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. Maly rocznik statystyczny, pp. 199–202.Google Scholar
6. Wilczynski, Monetary Economics, p. 204.Google Scholar
7. Maly rocznik statystyczny, p. 204.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., p. 196.Google Scholar
9. Ibid., p. 199.Google Scholar
10. Rocznik statystyczny, pp. 461–466.Google Scholar
11. See Wandycz, Boleslaw, The Land of Partitioned Poland 1771–1918, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).Google Scholar
12. Radomyski, Jan, “Wolna Prasa w PRL” (“Free Press in People's Poland”), Trybuna, vol. 84, 28 (1978).Google Scholar
13. Singer, Bernard, Od Witosa do Slawka [“From Witos to Slawek”] (Paris: Institut Litteraire, 1962).Google Scholar
14. Jancar, Barbara Wolfe, “Modernity and the Character of Dissent,” in The Politics of Modernization in Eastern Europe: Testing the Soviet Model, ed. Charles Gati (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 345.Google Scholar
15. Aspaturian, Vernon V., “The Soviet Impact on Development and Modernization of Eastern Europe,” in he Politics of Modernization in Eastern Europe: Testing the Soviet Model, p. 224.Google Scholar