Polish underground press
Polish underground press, devoted to prohibited materials (sl. Polish: bibuła, lit. semitransparent blotting paper or, alternatively, Polish: drugi obieg, lit. second circulation), has a long history of combatting censorship of oppressive regimes in Poland. It existed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including under foreign occupation of the country, as well as during the totalitarian rule of the pro-Soviet government. Throughout the Eastern Bloc, bibuła published until the collapse of communism was known also as samizdat (see below).
Partitions of Poland
In the 19th century in
World War II
In the
Polish People's Republic
In the Polish People's Republic during the 1970s and 1980s, several books (sometimes as long as 500 pages) were printed in quantities often exceeding 5,000 copies. In 1980 and 1981, during the short legal existence of Solidarity trade union, actual newspapers were also published.
Most of the Polish
Throughout the communist era, Poland's Catholic Church and some Christian organizations and groups were allowed to publish a number of periodicals with a certain amount of freedom and a more or less clear anti-communist stand in various periods - but censored. The weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, half openly supporting KOR since 1976 and Solidarity since 1980, and monthly Więż were among the most popular.
A news-sheet Solidarność, printed in the Gdansk shipyard during the August 1980 strike, reached a print run of 30,000 copies daily.[3] The communist regime then allowed for two legal periodics to be published under the government control and censorship, yet with a significant margin of freedom: in January 1981, a regional weekly Jedność in Szczecin, and in May the nationwide weekly Tygodnik Solidarność with Tadeusz Mazowiecki as chief editor and circulation of 500,000. Both newspapers were dependent on the government grants of printing paper, which limited the number of copies. Semi-legal news bulletins were printed by Solidarity and other opposition groups in almost every town, on paper sent as an aid by some Scandinavian and Western-European trade unions, without the regime's consent, but for the time being rarely prosecuted. All that ended December 13, 1981, when General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law and banned Solidarity.
The Polish underground press drew on experiences of
There were important differences of scale between Polish underground publishing and the
As an indication of how many Poles had access to underground publications in the martial-law decade, 3 of every 4 responders in a research in Kraków by the Niezależne Biuro Badania Opinii Społecznej NSZZ „Solidarność” (Solidarity's Independent Public Opinion Poll Bureau) in 1985 claimed to read it (26% "regularly", 47% "often", 22% chose "irregular and rare", with the remaining 5% declaring "never".[5] However, this range of influence had to be far more modest in smaller towns and countryside, where few underground groups were active.
See also
References
- ISBN 83-02-05500-X(in Polish)
- ^ Straszewska, Maria (1967). "Biuletyn Informacyjny 1939-1944". Najnowsze Dzieje Polski: Materiały i Studia z Okresu II Wojny Światowej.
- ^ Colin Barker, The rise of Solidarnosc. International Socialism Quarterly, 17 October 2005.
- ^ Archiwum Opozycji. Materiały dotyczące oporu wobec władzy komunistycznej (Collected materials of the anti-communist opposition in Poland). Ośrodek KARTA Center. Retrieved October 15, 2011.
- ^ Wierzbicki, Paweł (2012). ""Tygodnik Mazowsze" — cudowne dziecko drugiego obiegu (The wonderful child of Bibuła)" (PDF). RCIN Digital Repository.
External links
- Marek Kaminski - Book of Polish Political Prisoner and Underground Publisher makes various references to Polish underground publishing
- Foundation "Karta" founded to preserve documents related to Polish underground publications
- Kantorosinski, Zbigniew (1991). The Independent Press in Poland, 1976-1990. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.