Revolutionary Peasant Parties in the Second Polish Republic

Abstract

The aim of this article is to summarise the current state of academic research regarding revolutionary peasant parties in the Second Polish Republic: the Independent Peasant Party (IPP), Union of Peasant Left “Self-Help” and Belarussian Peasant and Workers “Hromada” that operated in the north-eastern borderlands. These political formations, whose target group was peasants, were crypto-communist. Although officially independent, they were actually agencies
of the Communist Party of Poland (CPP) and Communist Party of Western Belarus, which were in turn branches of Soviet intelligence in Poland. These groups aroused greatest interest among researchers prior to 1989 (during the existence of the communist block) due to the fact that Polish historians, members of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party at the time, monopolised scientific research. Members of the PUWP’s satellite United People’s Party also had the
opportunity to work on this issue, but their influence was much weaker. Articles regarding the Hromada were also available; however, much more detailed and important were those written in the Belarussian SSR. Practically in all cases those scientific papers were written in line with the communist ideology that praised the work of these parties. Still, thanks to research in Polish and Soviet archives, we can obtain valuable information about them and their members. After the decline of the communist block the topic has received much less attention from researchers both in Poland and Belarus, except for those who had already worked on it during the communist era and published a few fragmentary articles. As a result, the issue discussed in this article is still waiting for comprehensive and honest scholarship.