The Revolution, Completed and Defended

The author disputes Leder’s idea in Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej [A Missed Revolution: Exercise in Historical Logic] (2014) that a great revolution, eliminating the “late feudalism” of the 19th century, occurred in Poland in the years 1939–1956 and that it happened because of the war’s destruction of the old social structures and the Nazi genocide of the Jewish population, that is, the bourgeois class, which was replaced in the years 1945–1956 by unconscious beneficiaries of the change. The beneficiaries were unaware, he writes, because the essence of the changes and their benefits never entered the social imaginary. The core of the author’s polemic is the claim that such change, which was conducted by force and by foreigners, can not be called a “revolution,” that is, the passage of society to modernity. Furthermore, the author claims that the great Polish revolution was conducted in full by the nation, by the peasant classes, in the years 1914–1922, and was popular and independence-oriented in nature. It was the continuation of the Polish independence uprisings of the 19th century, the result of changes in the social structure that had been occurring for years in the Polish lands, which were at the time divided between the partitioning states, and of deepening self-awareness among the people. The revolution was continued after Poland’s acquisition of independence in 1918. The Second World War, and foreign intervention, only disrupted that process