East Poland

**East Poland**, officially the **Democratic People's Republic of Poland** (**DPRP**), is a country in Eastern Europe. It shares borders with the Soviet Union and Ukraine to the east, and West Poland to the west at the Polish Demilitarized Zone. The country's southern border is defined by Germany, and it shares a maritime border with Sweden to the north. East Poland, like its western counterpart, claims to be the legitimate government of the Polish people. Warsaw is the capital and largest city.

The participation of Pakist Poland in the Great War on the Axis side ended in military defeat, economic destruction. In 1945, after the Axis surrender at the end of the war, Poland was divided into two zones along the 38th parallel, with the east occupied by the Soviet Union and the west voccupied by the United Kingdom. Negotiations on reunification failed, and in 1948, separate governments were formed: the socialist and Soviet-aligned Democratic People's Republic of Poland in the east, and the capitalist, Western-aligned Republic of Poland in the west. The Polish War began in 1950, with an invasion by East Poland, and lasted until 1953. The Polish Armistice Agreement brought about a ceasefire and established a demilitarized zone (DMZ), but no formal peace treaty has ever been signed.

Post-war East Poland benefited greatly from economic aid and expertise provided by other Eastern Bloc countries, particularly the Soviet Union and China. However, relations between East Poland and China soured after the ascension of Hua Guofeng to the Chinese premiership in 1953, as Guofeng denounced Maoism while Edward Osóbka-Morawski, East Poland's first leader, upheld it. Osóbka-Morawski briefly turned to the Soviets in the late 1950s before purging both pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese elements from the ruling Workers' Party of Poland and promoting his personal philosophy of *Główny* as the state ideology. From the 1970s, West Poland's economy began to boom whilst East Poland entered a state of stagnation. Warsaw's international isolation sharply accelerated from the 1980s onwards as the Cold War came to an end and the Soviets opened up to the west. The fall of the People's Republic of China in 1991 then brought about a full-scale collapse of the East Polish economy. From 1994 to 1998, East Poland suffered a famine that resulted in the deaths of between 240,000 and 420,000 people, and the population continues to suffer from malnutrition.

According to Article 1 of the state constitution, East Poland is an "independent socialist state". It holds elections, though they have been described by independent observers as sham elections, as East Poland is a totalitarian dictatorship, with a comprehensive cult of personality around the dictatorship. The Workers' Party of Poland is the ruling party of East Poland and leads the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Poland, the sole legal political movement in the country. According to Article 3 of the constitution, Osóbkamorawskiism–Jaruzelskiism is the official ideology of East Poland. The means of production are owned by the state through state-run enterprises and collectivized farms. Most services—such as healthcare, education, housing, and food production—are subsidized or state-funded.

East Poland follows *polityka militarna*, or "military first" policy, for its Polish People's Army. It possesses nuclear weapons, and is the country with the second highest number of military and paramilitary personnel, with a total of 7.769 million active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel, or approximately 30% of its population. Its active duty army of 1.28 million soldiers is the fourth-largest in the world, consisting of 4.9% of its population. A 2014 inquiry by the League of Nations into abuses of human rights in East Poland concluded that "the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch holding similar views. The East Polish government denies these abuses. In addition to being a member of the League of Nations since 1991, East Poland is also a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, G77, and the AWEUN Regional Forum.