Sławomir Łotysz

In 1928, when the Bureau for the Project of Amelioration of Polesie (a large marshy area in the eastern part of interwar Poland) began its field studies, environmental concerns were low on the list of its priorities. A year later, this brought the Bureau into serious conflict with the State Council for Nature Protection. When both institutions eventually came to terms with their contradictory ambitions and vaguely-defined competences to enter into substantial cooperation, the idea of reserving a large area of marshlands as a natural park came into being. In 1932, Stanisław Kulczyński, a botanist leading the Bureau’s peat bog research team and also a Council member, proposed protecting an area of roughly 100,000 hectares between the Lwa and Stwiga rivers. The future park would encompass most types of landscape typical of Polesie and, fortunately, most of its swamps, forests, dunes, and peat bogs were barely touched by human activity. The hydrogeological feature of the selected area safeguarded its immunity to the potential consequences of the amelioration works, if such were undertaken in any of the surrounding areas. This paper explores how the location and extent of the protection of the park were negotiated within the entangled networks of social, economic, and political agendas of national policy in inter-war Poland. The efforts to coordinate the pro-nature policy in Polesie with similar actions undertaken by the Soviets beyond the nearby border are also covered.

The reclamation of the Pinsk marshes, as envisaged in interwar Poland, was one of the most ambitious national investment projects of the era. The plan was closely linked with the concept of a trans-European waterway running through Polesie, that was also being contemplated around that time. The latter project was embedded in a larger discussion about Poland’s inland navigation. Eventually, neither of these projects were finalized or even begun, before the second world war broke out. This paper analyses the discourse that took place on both issues, with a particular focus on their inevitable intersection. While describing the political background of this discourse, the article reconsiders the role of the engineers as the principal, sometimes overlooked, players in these processes. 

In 1946, at the request of the Polish government, UNRRA sent in two British experts in vocational rehabilitation to help establish the national framework of helping people with disabilities. During numerous meetings with government representatives, medical doctors, and social workers, as well as by trainings, lectures, and screenings of instructional films, they tried to familiarise Poles with the British model of rehabilitation. The model assumed close integration of medical and vocational rehabilitation and aimed at placing the disabled workers in the industry alongside those without disabilities. Initially, officials from the Polish Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare seemed to be keen to adopt such an approach, but in 1949, they turned toward the Soviet solutions. One of the main effects of this shift was moving away from employing the disabled in the industry. They were encouraged to join cooperatives instead, which, in the end, proved to be unfavorable to their social rehabilitation.

The article reconstructs the activity of the British experts in Poland and analyses their observations from the encounters. By situating these events in a broader context of political and social conditions, I argue that replacing the progressive British model with Soviet solutions stemmed from the ongoing process of the Sovietization of Poland.