Polish People Republic (Greetings Comrades in Japan)

New World (Japanese) Arkadia (Polish) Vestal continent Polish Peninsula

Totalitarian Monoparty System of PZPR and its Satellites (De Facto)

The Polish People Republic (Polish: Polska Rzeczypospolita Ludowa) is a country formerly located in Central-Eastern Europe as the main protagonist alongside Japan in GCIJ. It is currently located on the continent of Vestal, connected by land to the south without being in any of the three zones of civilization.

## History

The history of the People's Republic of Poland, or PRL for short in Polish, officially began in 1952 when the name was changed from the traditional Republic of Poland, but the country was de facto created in 1944 by the Manifesto of PKWN (Polish Committee of National Liberation) which was officially proclaimed in the "liberated" by the Red Army city of Chelm on July 22, 1944.

In reality it had been approved by Joseph Stalin and proclaimed in Moscow only two days earlier and only anti-dated and misrepresented as the will of the "independent" Polish nation which served only as a facade for the sad truth of the formation of the Puppet State in which the people of the West were supposed to believe, the Poles being in large majority devoid of any illusions about the future.

Then, the temporary capital was the largest "liberated" Polish city, Lublin, in the future east of Poland. Only then it moved to Lublin, because Warsaw was a pile of rubble, which only theoretically could be called a city.

Immediately the puppet government began to gain support of the masses by carrying out the agrarian reform in Poland and to destroy the layer which could effectively oppose them, the Polish aristocracy called landowners.

Apart from that, they proceeded to liquidate the Polish underground, i.e. the Home Army, recruited people to the "People's" Polish Army and all other actions aimed at subjugating the country under Moscow's dictates.

One of the less known and less famous crimes of this period was the reopening of German death and concentration camps and their use as Polish "gulags".

After the war, the falsified referendums of 1946 and 1947 were started, which finally gave up the fiction that the USSR would allow the non-communist option to take power in free elections, which were to be held after the war in Poland according to the decisions made in Yalta.

The first years after the war were a period of real robbery of the Polish and former German territories by the USSR, in which the more valuable machines or raw materials were taken to the USSR for nothing, in exchange for German war reparations which the USSR was supposed to pay in lieu of Germany giving up part of its reparations. Of course this never happened.

After the "victory" of PPR (Polish Workers' Party, predecessor of PZPR) the final steps were taken to remove any traces of free market and capitalism, and the three-year plan was launched, the only successful plan in the history of PRL.

What is more, after the elections the period of Stalinism in Poland began in earnest, and any differences within the party began to be curbed by arresting the opposition in PPR and establishing in 1948 PZPR, which combined PPR and PPS (Polish Socialist Party) and establishing ZSL (United Peasant Party) and SD (Democratic Party) - the satellite parties of PZPR, which like the main party were created by absorbing the remnants of the opposition parties, playing a figurative role as if there was democratic pluralism.

Stalinism itself ended with the death of Boleslaw Bierut, a man so cruel and at the same time hated even by Stalin himself that the arrival of his successor Wladyslaw Gomulka was clearly welcomed with relief, even if he himself was little better than Bierut although at least he had something and some moral backbone.

Bierut died in 1956, three years after his master in Moscow, hence the common jokes and the notion from this period that the Soviets killed him.

The Gomulka period began with a thaw which began throughout the socialist bloc with the slogan "Let Poland be Poland" ending the strictures of social realism and temporarily allowing freedom of speech and some loopholes for criticism of the government.

The thaw ended with the brutal pacification of the workers in Poznan in June 1956 during the International Trade Fair, during which the workers tried to draw the world's attention to what was really happening in communist Poland by striking in which 1/3 of the entire city participated.

The strike quickly turned into a rebellion and during the march through the city the power became very popular with anti-communist and anti-Soviet slogans.

> *Any provocateur or madman who dares to raise his hand against the people's power can be sure that the people's power will chop it off!-*Radio address by Józef Cyrankiewicz, Prime Minister of PRL, 29 June 1956
>
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According to the speech, Poznañ citizens were condemned and then the army was sent to quell this rebellion against the authorities.

The bloody suppression of the events, during which 50 people were killed and four full divisions of the Polish army were mobilized, led to a political breakdown which resulted in Gomulka becoming the new First Secretary in October, starting a political purge among the loyal servants of Bierut.

This was all the more personal as Gomulka was arrested with his wife in 1951 for right-wing nationalist leanings and imprisoned for several years until the amnesty of 1956 which was announced after Bierut's death in a wave of thaw.

Gomulka during this period enjoyed the real support of the Polish people and was even called Vladislav V, like the Polish kings of old. This period was short-lived with rapid de-Stalinization and partial reforms de facto ending the push for collectivization, for example.

In addition to this, diplomatic relations with the USSR were re-established, during which Poland gained more independence, which until the end of Gomulka's rule was gradually increased. For example, Poland was the only socialist country to be granted privileged status in trade with the USA, which Gierek later exploited.

The thaw ended at the beginning of the 1960s, censorship was reinstated and anti-government newspapers were closed down, and the nation was again shrouded in fear, although the methods of the Stalinist period were never revisited, and generally this period was much lighter than Bierut's rule, although it was still a totalitarian system. Polish art was not as subordinated as during Stalinism and social realism was abandoned.

The sixties were a period of stabilization and slow economic growth and technological development of Poland. The foundations of Polish computer science and shipbuilding were being laid and most of the country had long since been rebuilt, with Warsaw leading the way, although the rebuilding of the Royal Castle was only in 1974.

The last years of Gomułka's rule were a period of fierce struggle between the more reformist and liberal "Puławskiites" led by Gomułka and the hard-headed and anti-liberal "Natolinists" led by Mieczysław Moczar, the founder of Endokunizm, i.e. the combination of Polish Nationalism and Communism within National Communism which Moczar used exclusively as a tool to win supporters by trying to win back Gomułka's supporters by trying to be more nationalist than he was.

The names were taken from the names of streets on which the supporters of a given side in Warsaw met, i.e. Pulawska and Natolinska Streets.

The last two years were a period of deteriorating economic conditions, of which Gomulka and his government were well aware, and of fierce political battles in which the "Natolinians" prevailed, a symptom of which was the expulsion of the last "Jews" from Poland in 1968 by state coercion with zero popular support.

The "Jewry" itself in this period was largely a fiction, the surviving Jews who did not emigrate to Israel melted into the Polish nation to such an extent, that except for those born before the war, none felt Jewish, but Polish. Some of them returned later, usually after the fall of communism, OLT in 1989.

Nevertheless, Gomulka had successes to the end, including the last chord before the tragedy of 1970 in December barely a few days after his success. Namely, by successfully maneuvering he managed to force West Germany to recognize the western Polish border and renounce its claims to Pomerania and Silesia forever.

And the then German Chancellor came to Warsaw for a visit.

In December 1970, as a result of a price hike announced by the government, there were demonstrations against it in Szczecin and in the Tricity (Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot), which turned into riots suppressed by the ZOMO (Motorized Retaliation Unit of the Citizen's Militia, a unit formed to pacify the crowds after 1956 in order to avoid using the army).

Due to the sudden change, which was very rapid as for the totalitarian conditions, Gomulka himself began to suspect that the one who really dismissed him was Brezhnev, and that the demonstrations and strikes and deliberate misleading of workers leading to the death of over 40 people were inspired by Soviet intelligence to pacify the unruly satellite.

Since 1971, Edward Gierek, also sometimes maliciously called Edward I the Generous, had been in power. The period of his power was to be very quickly felt and remembered as the greatest epoch of the People's Republic of Poland, called Gierek's after his name.

Edward Gierek, who had already made a name for himself in Silesia as a good businessman, developing the region effectively, decided to take it to the whole country, and unofficially chose France as his model, where he had spent his childhood and youth working as a miner.

His ambition was to become the France of the Eastern Bloc, continuing the policy of gaining independence from the USSR, although initially blunted so as not to further irritate the Soviets.

The intention was to do this by investing heavily in the economy with Western loans, using Western technology to export new and better goods to the West in order to repay the loans and then make money.

OTL's policy was ultimately to fail and lead Poland into the catastrophe of the 1980s, during which a new rebellion broke out that this time would be the wave that would finally bring down the Eastern bloc.

Nevertheless, barely four years after Gierek took power, on April 1, 1974, Poland was transferred to the New World, and Gierek's plan had a chance to come true without the need to maintain the socialist economy in its current form and to keep the USSR at its expense.

This miracle was later called the *Transfer* (pol.*Przeniesieniem*), the Call(pol.*Wezwaniem)* or after Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland of that period, the Rescue (pol.*Uratowaniem)*.

## Military

The main defensive and offensive force of PRL is Armed Forces of People's Republic of Poland, also known as People's Army of Poland (LWP).

People's Army of Poland was created in 1943 and its first combat unit was Tadeusz Kosciuszko 1st Infantry Division. The first battle of this alternative to the Polish Armed Forces in the West was the disastrous and completely unnecessary Battle of Lenino, in which the Poles suffered heavy losses.

Eventually, the LWP successfully expanded during the war and the "liberation" of Poland allowed for universal conscription and the creation of the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies with a total of 200,000 men.

The last battle of the Polish People's Army was the Battle of Berlin, in which it supported the Red Army's attack on the city, independently taking part of the city, including the Brandenburg Gate, on top of which hung the Polish Flag.

At the end of the war the Polish People's Army (LWP) was expanding, and despite the ruin of Poland it continued to grow and by the end of Stalin's life had reached over 600,000 men, a formidable force for a country plundered and ruined by war that had lost one fifth of its population.

The period of Gomulka's rule was a time during which the Polish People's Army was purged of Soviet officers, headed by Rokossovski, and the concept of the Polish Front was introduced, making the Polish People's Army the second military force of the Warsaw Pact.

The army was reduced to 350 thousand men, modernized and got rid of WWII-era equipment, which was moved to warehouses to wait for World War III.

The *Transfer* has been the Polish Armed Forces in the midst of its next phase of planning for modernization and replacement with more modern equipment.

Very soon it was to be successfully tested in the war with Parpaldia, where it smashed into dust the Imperial Army of Parpaldia, becoming in general opinion the most powerful Army of the Third Zone of Civilization. And as it later turned out, not only the third.

The Armed Forces of the People's Republic of Poland currently number over 400 thousand men divided into:

Operational Forces

-Land Forces divided into 16 divisions

-Navy divided into 3 flotillas

-Air Force divided into 3 Squadrons

Armed Forces of Territorial Defense

-Armed Forces of National Air Defence divided into 3 Corps

-Internal Defense Forces divided into 5 Brigades and 5 Regiments which in wartime are expanded to the level of Divisions

-Territorial Defense Forces divided into 2 Brigades and 5 Regiments which are expanded in time of war to Divisions and new ones are created.

As part of the mobilization of the LWP can expand to more than a million men, which happened after the transfer for a short while allowing by the way to detect some shortcomings of the system.

The Commander-in-Chief of the LWP for the duration of the war is Marshal of Poland Wojciech Jaruzelski who led the war against Parpaldia and was therefore promoted during the Campaign.

## Diplomatic Relations

Currently Poland maintains relations with all countries of the Third Zone of Civilization as well as with HME from the Center and Mu from the Second.

It also has ambassadors in Japan and the countries of the Roderius continent.

Currently it has very cordial relations with the Kingdom of Altaras, which as a result of the Parpaldian-Altaran War became a Polish protectorate, being dependent on military and economic support.

Another country with which it maintains very cordial relations is the Fiedland People Republic, which is a satellite of Poland in the West Roderius, currently controlling ¼ of the entire territory of Louria.

It maintains neutral but warm relations with Japan and its satellites Que-Toyne and Quilla. It has strategic partnerships with Mu and Riem, and cool relations with Parpaldia and HME.