The hypothesis of conquest and the millennial discussions of the origins of the Polish state

Abstract

In the years 1960–1966, communist Poland witnessed celebrations held to mark the thousandth anniversary of the rise of the Polish state. In organizing these events, the communist authorities hoped to neutralize the celebrations of the thousandth anniversary of the baptism of Poland, to be held in 1966, as announced by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński in 1957. For obvious reasons, the question of the role of Christianity and the church organization in the formation of the Polish state was fundamental to the ideological struggle which the communist state waged against the Church. The traditional and well-established interpretation of the creation of the Polish state was based on the opposition between the idea of the state’s ‘self-generated’ and gradual birth on one hand and that of its violent emergence as a result of a foreign invasion and conquest on the other. In approaching the issue from the perspective of the latter variant, the author characterizes the key elements of the millennial interpretation of the creation of the Polish state. Although his focus is essentially on the historiography of the Polish People’s Republic, some attention is also devoted to the Polish historiography in exile.