Between the War and Consolidation of Communist Power: The Forgotten Social Research in Poland in the Second Half of the 1940s

Opinion commonly held has it that empirical social research in Communist Europe resurfaced only as late as in the second half of the 1950s, during the post-Stalinism ‘thaw’. However, in some countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, social research was possible immediately following the WWII. It did not last long though. Consolidation of Communist power delivered blow to this research in the late 1940s.

In this paper I discuss how in the years 1946 – ca. 1950 sociologists in Poland took an advantage of opportunity to study the society in which they lived. Polish society has just came out from the war and was about to enter a process of political ‘reconstruction’ under the leadership of the Soviet-style Communist party. Following the war sociologists immediately started to investigate social and psychological effects of the war, post-war migrations, new communities in the former German territories, ethnic relations (especially Polish-Jewish), and social mobility as a result of the war and the political changes. Fieldwork and questionnaire were methods of these studies. However, politically sensitive issues, e.g. mechanisms of political power and public opinion were banned by the authorities as topics of sociological inquiry. Later in the 20^th century the post-war social research was almost forgotten and only now is being rediscovered by social historians.