Documenting Activity of the Party’s History Voievodeship Commission and Archive of the Voievodeship Committee of the Polish Worker’s Party in Lublin in the Years 1946–1948

Abstract

After the Second World War, the Polish Worker’s Party gained absolute political dominance in Poland thanks to the support of the Soviet Union. However, it undertook various tasks which had the power to strengthen and legitimize it in the eyes of the Polish society. It aimed at obtaining support from at least part of Poles and consolidating its ranks, thanks to documenting and popularizing its results. The purpose of the first was to gather a large source database, demonstrating PPR’s tradition of defending the “people” against capitalist oppression and its achievements as a force fighting for the liberation of the Polish people from the German occupation. This activity consisted in collecting dispersed and “evocative” non-existent documents (relations) related to the functioning of the communist underground between 1944 and 1945 and illustrating the earlier development of the so-called revolutionary movement on the Polish territory. In order to carry out these tasks in the party apparatus at central and provincial level, appropriate structures were created. These included the Voivodeship Committee for the History of the Party and the Provincial Committee of the PPR Archive in Lublin. The latter also had a separate range of tasks: the collection and processing of the PPR-generated files. As a result of documentation activities of the historical and archival sector of the Lublin PPR, hundreds of documents produced mainly by the PPR and guerilla formation of the People’s Guard and the People’s Army and some other parties, like SDKPiL, KPP and PPS, were collected. Beneficiary of many effects of this activity was the archive of the Department of History of the Party at the PPR Central Committee, in which according to the decisions of the party leadership there were concentrated the original documents, also from the provincial level, created in the period up to 1944.