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Student Politics in Communist Poland tackles the topic of student political activity under a communist regime during the Cold War.It discusses both the communist student organizations as well as oppositional, independent, and apolitical student activism during the forty-five-year period of Poland's existence as a Soviet satellite state.

This article discusses the relation between state violence and public disorder under authoritarian rule in Poland. Focusing on the major crises and protests of the communist era, it examines regime violence through a double perspective – on the one hand, the way the regime resorted to physical violence to uphold its survival and, on the other hand, as a generational experience of those who suffered from it. Despite the state's use of physical violence until 1989 becoming more rationalised, modernised and efficient, it also turned less effective over time. This evolution contributed to a decreasing risk factor for protesters vis-à-vis the state. Since the bulk of those who participated in protests and riots were young people, the focus lies on the youthful dimension of public disorder and in particular the activity and experience of then students and young workers.

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union's capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Even after so many years, the most striking fact about the demise of communism in Poland remains that it happened through a peaceful and negotiated process. Having seemingly unfolded quite suddenly, it was the result of several inter-playing factors over a longer period of time than the actual events of the spring and summer of 1989. Changes in the international geopolitical context, a disastrous economic situation, efforts towards reform from within by the regime’s elite and persistent oppositional activity all contributed to set in place a scenario that resulted in a soft transition through semi-free elections to the appointment of

[...]history and memory had already been returning from the 1970s onwards through the practice of \"counter-history\" as a discourse of dissidence in the region. Poland's opposition was able to instrumentalize a much less ambiguous \"counter-history,\" as it could invoke the example of the Polish non-communist resistance whereas their East German counterparts had a more complex narrative to navigate vis-ￃ -vis the anti-fascist foundation myth of the East German state. [...]the strong identification of the Polish opposition with the wartime resistance and the romantic myth of the Warsaw Uprising evolved to transcend its \"counter-historical\" framework and materialize into one of the foundations upon which a new official post-1989 historical narrative came to be based. Not only does the volume shed more light on this usually somewhat ignored undertaking of opposition movements under communism, but it also serves to enrich our contextual understanding of the problems in east central Europe related to the sometimes controversial \"politics of history and memory\" in the countries of the region after the demise of communism in 1989. Since it is possible to trace some of the fault lines of present-day memory and history politics' contentious aspects in the region to the erstwhile \"counter-history\" under state socialism, one can see this volume's collection of case studies as a valuable contribution to broaden the scope of today's ongoing debates.

There have been many journalistic accounts and academic studies of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, which poses the question whether another book could bring something new to the relatively vast amount of literature on the topic. (3) Using material from 150 interviews he conducted with workers, opposition activists, party and even security apparatus functionaries, he has reconstructed the history of Solidarity in an easily readable and richly narrated way. Travelling to Poland in 1986 with only a handful of initial leads, Bloom found that his scholarly expertise on the U.S. civil rights movement opened doors that led him into the heart of the Polish democratic and workers' struggle. Instead of outlining a totalitarian framework he underlines the networks of patronage developed under the nomenklatura system of Communist Party rule - referring to a list of names of people deemed to be loyal and politically reliable, from which the privileged elite was constituted. All the more so, as Bloom wrote a seminal book Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement, the story of Solidarity in Poland could have benefitted greatly from possible comparative insights based on the author's expertise on the U.S. movement. (The latter is just an afterthought, a consideration in case the author is thinking of such a future project.) In all, Bloom's book provides the reader with a rich story told from the grassroots about one of the 20th century's most important social movements.