From East to West. Modernization in the Western and Northern Territories of Poland (1944–1989)

At the end of World War II (1943–1945), the Soviet Union appropriated the eastern parts of Poland, while part of Germany was incorporated into the remaining Polish territory. This was a revolutionary transformation. The German population of Silesia, Pomerania, and Eastern Prussia was replaced by Poles mainly from the Polish eastern territories. This initiated a process of organizing a new social and economic reality in a socialist way: settlement, reconstruction of towns and villages, industry, administration, education, and encounters of different social groups, regional cultures, and mentalities. Till the end of the 1970s, these regions were seen by Polish sociologists as social laboratory in which the process of “Soviet-inspired modernization” took place at high speed.