Poland is a country which sporadically hits the headlines of the Anglo-Saxon world It has suffered the dubious distinction of being wiped off the political map in 1795, to be resurrected after the First World War, only to suffer apparent annihilation during the Second and reduction to satellite status of the Soviet Union, to emerge in the van of resistance ожхдь to Soviet domination during the 1980s Yet the history of Poland remains comparatively little known This book offers a primarily political outline of its turbulent and complex past, from medieval times to the present day, and is the only brief history of the country available in English The pre-1795 Polish state had become a byword for political weakness before its erasure from the map; yet from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century it was one of the dominant forces of central and eastern Europe It was also the scene of a remarkable experiment in consensual, constitutional politics, in an area embracing much of not only what is present-day Poland, but also Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus Under foreign rule in the nineteenth century, different patterns of political, economic and social development accentuated regional differences, and the emergence of several mutually antagonistic ethnic and linguistic nationalisms undermined the traditions of the pre-partition Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth The book traces Poland's painful rebirth after the First World War, the achievements and failings of the inter-war Polish state, and the traumatic ordeal of the Second World War Finally, it describes how Polish society was altered by - and how it responded to - forty-five years of communism The book ends with a review of Poland's emergence from that experience and its search for a new direction Формат: 13,5 см x 21,5 cм Авторы Hubert Zawadzki Jerzy Lukowski.  IntelleИздательство: Cambridge University Press, 2004 г Мягкая обложка, 318 стр ISBN 0-521-55917-0 Язык: Английский.