The Russian Empire's first socialist party, the Polish Proletariat, established a political prisoner culture and tradition in Congress Poland, and used their imprisonment as a terrain of struggle.
[2] Polish political prisoners played a major role in the course of the Revolutions of 1848 in the Grand Duchy of Posen, a part of the Kingdom of Prussia.
After a series of protests, many party members were imprisoned in the 10th Pavilon [pl] of the Warsaw Citadel, where they were allowed certain privileges and liberties not experienced by regular prisoners.
[2] Russian administration in the late 19th and early 20th century Warsaw explicitly accepted the category of a political prisoner, mostly used to contain socialists.
It was in that period that political prisoners created a unique identity, culture and tradition that was mostly associated with the Polish Socialist Party.
[12] The ruling Sanacja regime of Poland started with the activists of the fascist National Radical Camp (ONR), as well as Ukrainians from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), although they formed only a tiny faction of the interwar Polish political prisoners; more than the half of the inmates categorized as such were Polish communists.
Those included not just open or clandestine dissidents such as cursed soldiers, but also pre-war politicians, landowners, clergy, as well as members of the factions of the communist party itself who lost the internal power struggle.
Many individuals were arrested on faked or trumped-up charges, with one of the most widely used and infamous laws being Paragraph 18 of the Decree of 13 June 1946 "on crimes particularly dangerous during the reconstruction of the State", which criminalized "not having informed of a crime or offence"; the clause was colloquially referred to as "knew well, didn't tell" and used to imprison individuals against whom the only evidence was an association with a controversial party (such as having left abroad or having talked to foreigners, which was often enough to have one convicted of spying for foreign powers).
For example, Adam Michnik, imprisoned by the Polish communist government in the 1960s and 1980s, has been called "one of Poland's most famous political prisoners".
[21] Even after the fall of communism and transition of the Polish government to a democratic one, for the next several years, Amnesty International recognized a number of conscientious objectors to military service, imprisoned in Poland, as prisoners of conscience, noting that every year, several people are sentenced to one-year imprisonment for refusing to serve in the military.
Their unofficial organizations were more frequently tolerated, and in some cases, they even were able to successfully demand the right to education or to be exempted from heavy labour.
Particularly the ones who refused to cooperate with the authorities and show remorse were subject to "hardly bearable isolation, brutal oppression, and permanent ideological pressure".
[5] An NGO, the Association of Political Prisoners of the Stalinist Era (Związek Więźniów Politycznych Okresu Stalinowskiego), was founded in Poland in 1990.