In the first decade after World War II, Yugoslavia and Poland experienced the whole
range of bilateral relations between amity and enmity. The Soviet Union dictated the
fundamental dynamics of their contacts, while the intensity of these contacts depended on
numerous domestic-political and socio-historical factors. Based on the Yugoslav, Polish, and
other sources, this doctoral thesis provides an insight into the Yugoslav-Polish relations
between 1945 and 1956. It is not limited merely to the political contacts but also strives to
encompass the broadest possible array of mutual cooperation. To this end, the thesis also
examines the concept of friendship in international relations, as the research into friendly
practices provides an additional methodological tool for analysing the nature and intensity of
the Yugoslav-Polish relations. The dissertation thus contributes to a better understanding of the
Soviet Bloc’s foreign-political situation and the diversity of the Eastern European communist
regimes in the first decade after the war.
In the first three post-war years, Yugoslavia and Poland successfully developed extensive
cooperation, especially if we take into account that due to the lack of pre-existing connections
and the enormous war damage, the starting points of these two states were relatively modest.
Just as the cooperation between the two states started to yield concrete results, stemming from
the newly-signed agreements and established institutional ties, the Yugoslav dispute with the
Cominform occurred. In the following years, the Yugoslav-Polish relations dwindled to a
minimum, while both sides attempted to establish new identities and assert new truths by
distorting one another’s images. Nevertheless, during the Cominform dispute, Poland’s anti-Yugoslav politics was less hostile than that of the other Eastern Bloc countries. After Stalin’s
death, Poland was, rather paradoxically, the most hesitant to start normalising its relations with
Yugoslavia, which was initially dictated by the foreign-political developments and later by the
Polish domestic-political crisis that culminated in October 1956 when Poland managed to
restore a part of its sovereignty. Yugoslavia and Poland were thus the two Eastern European
communist countries that achieved the greatest independence regarding their relations with the
Soviet Union (Poland within the Bloc, while Yugoslavia remained non-aligned). They also
found additional common ground due to their search for their own paths towards socialism.
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