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Was PRL Poland?


peterweg  37 | 2305  
3 Sep 2012 /  #31
No Delph, not hundreds of thousands: millions of Poles were either Party members or benefited from being associated with a Party member.

Irrelevant as they didn't have free of choice. When they had real freedom they voted a few percent for the communists.
Harry  
3 Sep 2012 /  #32
The USSR and Red China had even a higehr % of party members.

Got a source for that? The highest figure I've seen for peak membership was 19 million in the late 1980s, which was approximately 10% of the USSR's adult population. For China, peak membership appears to be now, with some 80 million members. But with a population of 1.34 billion, that is a long way short of 10% of the adult population. Given that the population of Poland in the late 1970s was 35 million, that 3.5 million membership means that one in ten Poles were in the party, meaning that about 14% of the adult population were paid-up card-carrying Communists.

Irrelevant as they didn't have free of choice.

They had no choice? Really? Perhaps you can tell us what the punishment was for not joining the Communist party?
Ziemowit  14 | 3936  
3 Sep 2012 /  #33
Was PRL Poland? The given reponses answer either 'yes' or 'no'. In reality, the answer is not a 'black or white' one as many would want to see it.

Czechoslovakia is an example that better illustrates this dilemma. Was ČSSR Czechoslovakia? If it was, why the leader of the Czechoslovak communist party at the time, Mr Dubcek, could not introduce "socialism with a human face" into his country in 1968. Why should such a plan provoke the military intervention of the Soviet Union along with its Warsaw Pact allies (with notably Albania among them, as one of the PF member would certainly stress) against the country? 'Socialism with a human face' would inevitably mean more than 'one brand of shaving soap' in Czechoslovakia, but the Prague Spring of 1968 was not allowed to go ahead. Two brands of it was a luxury that would be too much of a bourgeois thing, and thereby not Czechoslovakian at all?
Harry  
3 Sep 2012 /  #34
Was ČSSR Czechoslovakia? If it was, why the leader of the Czechoslovak communist party at the time, Mr Dubcek, could not introduce "socialism with a human face" into his country in 1968. Why should such a plan provoke the military intervention of the Soviet Union along with its Warsaw Pact allies (with notably Albania among them, as one of the PF member would certainly stress) against the country?

The only problem with that line of reasoning is that if one accepts it, one has to conclude that the country which was in the 1930s where the Czech Republic and Slovakia are now was also not Czechoslovakia, given the way that that nation was unable to put into practice any policies at all in its Sudetenland region and had to accept the loss of that land following the joint Nazi-Polish invasion of the region.

As for Albania taking part in the 1968 invasion, please do stop lying about that: Albania refused to send any forces, just as Romania also did. Only four of the members of the Warsaw pact sent troops to join the Soviet forces invading Czechoslovakia.
Ziemowit  14 | 3936  
3 Sep 2012 /  #35
As for Albania taking part in the 1968 invasion, please do stop lying about that: Albania refused to send any forces

Indeed, I was wrong with that. Being so preoccupied with the role of Albania in the invasion of Czekoslovakia, I made this obvious mistake for which I apologize. Surely, my intention was to write:

Why should such a plan provoke the military intervention of the Soviet Union along with its Warsaw Pact allies (with notably Albania not among them, as one of the PF member would certainly stress) against the country?

I'm sure the famous case of Albania having been a European communist country, but not being an ally of the Soviet Union from a certain point of time, that you put forward in one of the previous threds will now stick to my mind properly.
Harry  
3 Sep 2012 /  #36
Being so preoccupied with the role of Albania in the invasion of Czekoslovakia

How can you be pre-occupied with that which does not exist?

Anyway, to get back to the topic, as the argument seems to be that PRL Poland was not a Poland in which the Polish people were in control and thus was not Poland, wouldn't that also mean that interbellum Poland (at least from 1926 onwards) was not Poland?
Ziemowit  14 | 3936  
3 Sep 2012 /  #37
Being so preoccupied with the role of Albania in the invasion of Czekoslovakia,

How can you be pre-occupied with that which does not exist?

Again, I am explaining this as follows: being so preoccupied with this famous case of Albania in the question of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, I have used the word 'role' where the word 'case' would perhaps be more appropriate. But anyway, the word 'role' is justified - as despite the fact they did not take part in the intervention - you had brought up the case of Albania for the disputed question of the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.

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