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Censorship in Communist Poland was primarily performed by the Polish Main Office of Control of Press, Publications and Shows (Główny Urząd Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk), a governmental institution created in 1946 by the pro-Soviet Provisional Government of National Unity with Stalin's approval and backing, and renamed in 1981 as the Główny Urząd Kontroli Publikacji i Widowisk (GUKPiW). The bureau was liquidated after the fall of communism in Poland, in April 1990.[1]
Library collections were systematically cleansed, the majority of the books destroyed, some isolated in Party or academic libraries. A list of prohibited publications and black-listed writers was created in 1950 during the darkest years of Stalinism in Poland with some 1,682 items, and subsequently modified many times by the communist authorities in the Polish People's Republic. Some writers popular before World War II, for example Wacław Kostek-Biernacki who was sentenced to death as an enemy of the state in 1953, had their books not only removed from libraries, but also meticulously destroyed.[2] In addition to the censorship of the publications, the state also jammed foreign radio stations, such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The decades of relentless censorship fed the underground press and publications in Poland (called bibuła in Polish).
After the rise of Solidarity movement in 1980, independent editors were allowed to indicate, with a sequence [----], that a fragment had been censored, instead of hiding such deletions or withdrawing their entire publications. Publishers demanded the right to leave a white space to indicate how much of the text was cut, but that was rejected. Nevertheless the change spelled a setback for GUKPiW and interventions were less common: an article with dozens of cuts might have a greater impact on the readers' minds than the words missing.
The censorship law was eliminated after the fall of communism in Poland, by the Polish Sejm on 11 April 1990 and the GUKPiW was closed two months later.[3][4]
- ^ "Cenzura". Zapytaj.onet.pl - (in Polish). Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2019-09-18.
- ^ "Wacław Kostek-Biernacki". Polskie Radio (in Polish). Retrieved 2019-09-18.
- ^ Antoni Dudek (7 January 2020). Od Mazowieckiego do Suchockiej. Otwarte. p. 337. ISBN 978-83-240-5659-0.
- ^ "Cenzura". dzieje.pl (in Polish). Archived from the original on 2020-10-01. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
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