The history of Poland

Poland's history is that of a state that rose, vanished and returned. The Piast dukes founded a Christian kingdom in the tenth century, and union with Lithuania in the fourteenth century made the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth one of the largest states in Europe, with an elected monarchy and a powerful nobility. In the late eighteenth century its neighbours partitioned it out of existence, and for 123 years Poles lived under Russian, Prussian and Austrian rule. Reborn in 1918, Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 and became the main site of the Holocaust. After four decades of communist rule, the Solidarity movement helped bring democracy in 1989, and Poland has since joined NATO and the European Union.

The lands between the Oder and the Vistula were visited by early humans for hundreds of thousands of years, with Neanderthal tools found in the caves of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland. Modern humans settled as the ice sheets withdrew around 10,000 BCE. Farming arrived with the Linear Pottery culture, migrants from the Danube region, from about 5500 BCE, as part of the spread of the Neolithic Revolution across Europe. Neolithic communities in Kuyavia left some of the oldest traces of cheese-making in Europe, a pot from Bronocice bears one of the earliest known images of a wheeled vehicle, and the striped-flint mines of Krzemionki were worked for more than two thousand years.

In the Bronze and early Iron Ages the Lusatian culture built fortified settlements, the best known being the timber stronghold of Biskupin, raised in the eighth century BCE on an island in a lake. The Celts reached the south around 400 BCE, and later cultures with Germanic elements traded with the Roman world along the Amber Road, which carried Baltic amber south to the Danube and Italy. When Germanic peoples moved away during the Migration Period, Slavic peoples became dominant. Historians and archaeologists still debate when the Slavs first appeared in the region, but by the ninth century a geographer in Bavaria listed many West Slavic tribes, among them the Vistulans around Kraków and the Polans of Greater Poland, who gave Poland its name.

The Polans' rulers, the Piast dynasty, built a state around the strongholds of Gniezno and Poznań in the tenth century. In 966 Duke Mieszko I accepted baptism, probably through his marriage to the Czech princess Dobrawa, tying Poland to Rome and Christianity in its Latin form rather than to the Byzantine church. Mieszko placed his realm under papal protection, which helped guard it against the German emperors. His son Bolesław I the Brave hosted Emperor Otto III at Gniezno in 1000, when an archbishopric was founded there, fought long wars with the Holy Roman Empire, briefly took Kyiv from Kievan Rus' in 1018, and was crowned king shortly before his death in 1025.

The young monarchy nearly collapsed in the 1030s amid a pagan revolt and a Czech invasion, and Casimir I the Restorer rebuilt it with Kraków as its centre. In 1138 Bolesław III Wrymouth divided the kingdom among his sons, and for nearly two centuries Poland was a patchwork of duchies ruled by competing Piast princes. During this fragmentation, Duke Konrad of Masovia invited the Teutonic Knights in 1226 to fight the pagan Prussians on his northern border; the knights conquered Prussia and built the State of the Teutonic Order, which became a formidable rival. The Mongol invasion of Europe devastated the south in 1241, when Duke Henry II the Pious of Silesia was killed at Legnica. To repopulate their lands, dukes invited German settlers, who founded towns under German law, and Jewish communities, protected from 1264 by the Statute of Kalisz.

Władysław I the Elbow-high reunited most of the core provinces and was crowned in Kraków in 1320. His son Casimir III the Great, who reigned from 1333 to 1370, codified laws, built castles and walled towns, welcomed Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere, and in 1364 founded the university in Kraków. He accepted the loss of Silesia to Bohemia and Pomerania to the Teutonic Order but expanded eastward into Red Ruthenia around Lviv. Poland is thought to have suffered less than western Europe from the Black Death. Casimir died without a son, and the crown passed to his nephew Louis of Anjou, king of Hungary.

Louis's daughter Jadwiga was crowned king of Poland in 1384. Under the Union of Krewo of 1385, she married Jogaila, grand duke of pagan Lithuania, who was baptised and crowned in 1386 as Władysław II Jagiełło. The union joined Poland to a vast state stretching across modern Belarus and Ukraine, and Lithuania's conversion followed. In 1410 the allied armies crushed the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald, one of the largest battles of medieval Europe. After the Thirteen Years' War, the Second Peace of Toruń in 1466 returned Gdańsk Pomerania to Poland and made the knights' remaining lands in East Prussia a Polish fief. Control of the Vistula made Gdańsk the great grain port of the Baltic.

The Jagiellonian dynasty also ruled Bohemia and Hungary for a time, and the sixteenth century became Poland's golden age. Kraków was a centre of the Renaissance, where Italian architects rebuilt the Wawel castle, and Nicolaus Copernicus, educated at the Kraków academy, set out the heliocentric system in 1543. Nobles, the szlachta, who made up perhaps a tenth of the population, won extensive privileges: from 1505 no new law could be passed without the consent of the Sejm, the parliament dominated by them. The export of grain enriched the nobility but tied peasants ever more tightly to the land as serfs. Poland also became a haven: by the sixteenth century it was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, with its own self-governing Council of Four Lands, and the Protestant Reformation spread among nobles and townspeople without religious war.

With the last Jagiellonian king, Sigismund II Augustus, childless, the Union of Lublin of 1569 turned the personal union into a single state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a common Sejm and an elected king. In 1573 the nobility agreed the Warsaw Confederation, guaranteeing peace between faiths, and elected kings had to swear to the nobles' rights. Sigismund III Vasa, also heir to Sweden, moved the royal court to Warsaw around 1596. At its height in the early seventeenth century the Commonwealth was one of the largest states in Europe; its armies occupied Moscow during Russia's Time of Troubles, and in 1610 a Polish prince was briefly elected tsar.

The middle of the century brought catastrophe. In 1648 the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Ukraine was accompanied by massacres of Jews and Polish nobles. The Swedish invasion of 1655, remembered as the Deluge, overran much of the country, while the Tsardom of Russia seized the east. The Commonwealth survived but lost Kyiv and left-bank Ukraine to Russia in 1667, and around a quarter of its population or more died in the wars. From 1652 the liberum veto allowed any single deputy to break up the Sejm, paralysing government. A last great victory came in 1683, when John III Sobieski led the cavalry charge that broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna, ending the Ottoman Empire's advance into central Europe.

Under the Saxon kings Augustus II and Augustus III in the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth became a battleground and then a client of Russia, especially after Peter the Great's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War. When Stanisław August Poniatowski, a former lover of Catherine the Great, was elected king in 1764, he and a group of reformers tried to strengthen the state. In 1773 they founded the Commission of National Education, often called the first ministry of education in Europe.

Reform alarmed the neighbours. In 1772 Russia, the Kingdom of Prussia under Frederick the Great and Austria under Maria Theresa annexed about a third of the Commonwealth's territory in the first partition. The Great Sejm of 1788 to 1792 replied with the Constitution of 3 May 1791, which abolished the liberum veto, made the monarchy hereditary, strengthened townspeople and placed peasants under the protection of the law. It was the first modern written constitution in Europe and the second in the world after the American one. Conservative magnates called in Russia, whose army overthrew it, and Russia and Prussia carried out a second partition in 1793. An uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a veteran of the American Revolution, was crushed in 1794, and the third partition of 1795 divided what remained among Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy.

Polish legions fought for Napoleon, who created the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 as a French client state. After his defeat, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 set up a Kingdom of Poland, known as Congress Poland, with the Russian tsar as king. Its autonomy was gradually eroded. The November Uprising of 1830 to 1831 was defeated, and thousands of soldiers, politicians and artists left in the Great Emigration, among them the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the composer Frédéric Chopin, who sustained a Romantic national culture in exile. The January Uprising of 1863 to 1864 was a guerrilla war that lasted more than a year before it too was crushed, followed by executions, deportations to Siberia and an intense campaign of Russification.

In the second half of the nineteenth century many Poles turned from insurrection to "organic work": building schools, cooperatives and industry. Łódź grew into a great textile city, and the coal and steel of Silesia drew workers. Prussia, and from 1871 the German Empire, pressed Germanisation on its Polish provinces and banned Polish in schools. In Austrian Galicia, Poles won autonomy after 1867, with Polish universities in Kraków and Lwów. Mass emigration took millions of Poles to America and the industrial cities of western Europe, while Marie Curie, born in Warsaw under Russian rule, went to Paris and became a pioneer of research on radioactivity.

The First World War set the three partitioning empires against one another and brought down all three. Józef Piłsudski's Polish Legions fought first alongside Austria, while the nationalist Roman Dmowski lobbied the western Allies. Poland proclaimed its independence on 11 November 1918, the day of the armistice, with Piłsudski as head of state. Its borders were settled by fighting as much as by treaty: the Greater Poland Uprising against Germany, the Treaty of Versailles, which gave Poland a corridor to the sea but made Danzig a free city, plebiscites and uprisings in Upper Silesia, and wars with Ukrainians in Galicia and with Lithuania over Vilnius. In the Polish-Soviet War, the Red Army reached the outskirts of Warsaw before Piłsudski's counter-offensive in August 1920 drove it back, and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 fixed the eastern border.

The new republic had to unify three legal systems, currencies and railway networks. About a third of its population belonged to minorities, chiefly Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans, and relations with them were often tense. Parliamentary governments were short-lived, and the first president, Gabriel Narutowicz, was assassinated days after taking office in 1922. In May 1926 Piłsudski seized power in a coup and led an authoritarian regime, the Sanation, until his death in 1935. His successors grew more nationalist, and discrimination against Jews increased in the late 1930s, including quotas and segregated seating at universities. Poland signed non-aggression pacts with both the Soviet Union and Germany, and in 1938 took the Zaolzie district from Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement. In 1939 it refused German demands over Danzig and received guarantees from Britain and France.

On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War in Europe. On 17 September the Soviet Union invaded from the east under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the country was divided. Germany annexed its western regions and ruled the centre as the General Government, where Adolf Hitler's regime treated Poles as a slave population, closing universities and murdering members of the elite. The Soviets deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to the interior, and in spring 1940 the NKVD, on orders approved by Joseph Stalin, shot about 22,000 Polish officers, police and professionals at Katyn and other sites. Moscow blamed the Germans until 1990.

Poland never formally surrendered. A government in exile in France and then London commanded Polish forces that fought in the Battle of Britain, at Monte Cassino and in Normandy, and a vast underground state at home, with its own courts and schools, directed the Home Army. Occupied Poland became the centre of the Holocaust. The Germans forced Jews into ghettos and then, from 1941 and 1942, murdered them in shooting operations and in the death camps they built at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Jews from across Europe were deported there. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April and May 1943 was the largest Jewish revolt of the war. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 3 million Polish Jews, about nine in ten, were murdered, along with at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians. Some Poles risked death to hide Jews, and Poles form the largest national group among those Yad Vashem recognises as Righteous Among the Nations; others denounced or killed Jews, as in the massacre at Jedwabne in 1941. In Volhynia in 1943 and 1944, Ukrainian nationalist forces massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians, and reprisals killed thousands of Ukrainians.

As the Red Army approached in 1944, the Home Army rose in Warsaw on 1 August, hoping to liberate the capital before the Soviets arrived. Soviet forces halted across the Vistula, and after 63 days of fighting the insurgents surrendered on 2 October. Some 150,000 to 200,000 civilians were killed, and German troops then systematically destroyed the city. At Tehran and Yalta the Allies agreed to move Poland westward. Poland lost its eastern lands, including Lwów and Vilnius, to the Soviet Union and gained German territory up to the Oder-Neisse line, including Wrocław, Szczecin and Gdańsk. Millions of Germans fled or were expelled, Poles from the east were resettled in the west, and in 1947 Operation Vistula forcibly scattered the remaining Ukrainians and Lemkos of the southeast across the new western territories.

With Soviet backing, communists took control through arrests, terror against the anti-communist underground and the rigged elections of 1947. Pogroms, including the killing of 42 Jews at Kielce in 1946, pushed most Holocaust survivors to leave. Under Bolesław Bierut, Poland was remade on the Stalinist model with forced industrialisation, a secret police and attempts at collectivisation, joining the Warsaw Pact in 1955 during the Cold War. Warsaw's old town was meticulously rebuilt from the rubble.

Workers' protests recurred. In Poznań in June 1956 troops killed dozens of striking workers, and the crisis brought Władysław Gomułka to power in the "Polish October", promising a Polish road to socialism; collectivisation was abandoned and the Catholic Church kept unusual independence. In March 1968 the regime crushed student protests and launched an "anti-Zionist" campaign that drove most of Poland's remaining Jews, about 15,000 people, to emigrate. In December 1970 security forces killed dozens of protesting shipyard workers on the Baltic coast, and Edward Gierek replaced Gomułka, borrowing heavily from the West to fund consumption and industry until the debts led to new price rises and strikes in 1976. In 1978 the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, was elected Pope John Paul II, and his visit in 1979 drew millions.

In August 1980 strikes spread from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, led by the electrician Lech Wałęsa, and the government agreed to recognise Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, which soon claimed around ten million members. On 13 December 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law, interned thousands of activists and banned the union, which survived underground. By the late 1980s, with the economy in crisis and Mikhail Gorbachev unwilling to intervene, the regime opened Round Table talks with the opposition. In partly free elections on 4 June 1989, Solidarity won 160 of the 161 Sejm seats open to free contest and 99 of the 100 Senate seats, and in August Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist prime minister in the Eastern bloc, setting off the Revolutions of 1989.

The finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz introduced "shock therapy" in 1990, freeing prices and opening the economy. The transition brought hyperinflation, unemployment and hardship before rapid growth, and Poland was the only European Union economy to avoid recession in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Wałęsa was elected president in 1990, the last Soviet troops left in 1993, and a new constitution was adopted in 1997. Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union on 1 May 2004, and more than a million Poles moved to work in Britain, Ireland and other member states. In April 2010 President Lech Kaczyński and dozens of senior officials died when their plane crashed near Smolensk on the way to a Katyn commemoration.

Politics came to be dominated by two parties born of Solidarity: Donald Tusk's liberal Civic Platform, which governed from 2007 to 2015, and Jarosław Kaczyński's national-conservative Law and Justice, which won the elections of 2015 and 2019. Law and Justice's changes to the courts and public media brought prolonged conflict with the European Union over the rule of law. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of Ukrainian refugees crossed into Poland, which became a main hub for military aid to Ukraine and raised defence spending to more than 4 percent of national income by 2024.

In the election of 15 October 2023, on a record turnout, Law and Justice came first but lost its majority, and Tusk returned as prime minister in December at the head of a coalition of the Civic Coalition, Third Way and the Left. The presidential election of June 2025 was won narrowly by Karol Nawrocki, a historian backed by Law and Justice, who defeated Warsaw's mayor Rafał Trzaskowski with 50.9 percent of the vote, the closest result in Polish history, setting up an uneasy cohabitation between president and government.