Dr Mikolaj Kunicki

Between the Brown and the lied probes the trajectories of the modern nationalist movement and political continuities in Poland and East Central Europe from the inter-war period to the end of the Cold War. Tracing the evolution of the Marxist party-state into a nationalist-populist regime, it also captures the multifaceted nature of church-state relations in communist Poland, relations that oscillated between mutual confrontation, accommodation, and dialogue. Ironically, under communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger. This happened in spite of the fact that the government deployed nationalist themes in order to portray itself as more Polish than communist. Between the Brown and the Red also introduces to the reader one of the most fascinating figures in the history of twentieth-century Poland and the communist world. © 2012 by Ohio University Press. All rights reserved.

This article complements studies on 1968 in Poland that have explained the anti-Semitic campaign by pointing to the Soviet factor, traditional Polish anti-Semitism, or factional conflict within the Polish Communist Party. The article attributes March 1968 to the communists' growing reliance on Polish nationalism. It narrows the scale of historical observation to the case of Bolesław Piasecki (1915-79), a prominent nationalist politician. A fascist in the 1930s and a proregime Catholic activist after the war, Piasecki was the leading proponent of the mutual reinforcement of nationalism and communism. Melding Piasecki's role in the 1968 drama with the ideological metamorphosis of the Polish Communist Party, the article argues that under certain conditions, not only did the communists utilize nationalism, but they also prolonged the existence of the nationalist radical right, which supplied the chauvinistic message during the anti-Semitic campaign. © 2005 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved.