Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy, SDKPiL) party and the publicist Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911) were important early Polish Marxists.
In post-World War II Poland, the communists initially enjoyed popular support due to the land reform, a mass scale rebuilding program, and progressive social policies.
Near the end of World War 2 in 1944, the PPR under the command of the USSR started its program of Polonization with approval from the United States and UK due to changes in its borders; ceding territories in its east in exchange for formerly German lands in the west.
The then-Primate of Poland August Hlond actively worked to push Germans out of positions within the church and the newly acquired land in tandem with the Party, but asserted its autonomy when it held a Mass in 1945 attracting up to four million people.
After the 1947 Polish parliamentary election, the PPR felt secure enough to begin targeting its only major rival for control within the country, imprisoning eighty-one priests in 1948 and seizing church properties two years later.
[2] With Krushchev now serving as leader of the USSR, having delivered his secret speech in 1956, anti-Stalinist ideas began to spread as resentment boiled over into the first of several protests in Poznań at the Stalin Factory (ZiSPO).
Beginning in Warsaw, John Paul II made frequent connections to Polish identity and the Catholic faith which had been intertwined for essentially all of the country's history, reminding Poles that they were, at their core, a very spiritual people.
[6] Though it signed the Gdansk Agreement with the PPR, legalizing its status as an independent trade union, and reached 10 million members by 1981, the government imposed martial law that same year on December 12 in an attempt to crush the rapidly growing anti-communist movement.
It was students like these who helped revive Solidarity, and by 1988 the PPR was willing to compromise with its leadership with Wałęsa by entering discussions rather than utilizing the armed forces in order to stop the strikes.
This would eventually result in the Round Table talks in February 1989, where after two months a compromise was hammered out, re-legalizing Solidarity, creating a new free senate, and opening 35% of the seats in the Sejm to outside parties.