Abstract
The communist regime, which consolidated its hold on power between July 1944 and the beginning of 1947, never succeeded in establishing its legitimacy in the eyes of the bulk of Polish society. As a result its history was punctuated by a series of crises, which ultimately led to the negotiated end of communism in the summer of 1989. Some of these crises, most notably the events which brought Gomułka to power in 1956, the workers’ revolt which caused his fall in December 1981, and the period from the establishment of the Solidarity movement in the late summer of 1980 to the introduction of martial law in December 1981, have given rise to a large literature.