Polish Communist Elites, “Recycled” Legal Personnel and the Construction of Collaboration, 1944-1946

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Abstract

In July 1944, Polish communist elites who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union returned to Poland to launch a socialist state-building project. Although committed to enacting far-reaching transformation of all aspects of political, social, and economic life, one of their first acts was to reactivate the pre-war “bourgeois” civilian criminal justice system along with its legal personnel. This pre-war legal infrastructure was to provide the institutional framework in which new Polish elites would simultaneously “democratize” pre-war legal practices and punish “German war criminals, collaborators, and traitors to the Polish nation.” How was this process of punishment as well as the larger legal transformation in which it was embedded shaped by patterns of conflict and consensus between new socialist political elites and pre-war legal personnel? Drawing on a sample of 260 investigations conducted between 1944-1946 by the Łódź, Lublin and Warsaw Prosecutors’ Offices for the special criminal courts, I analyze how these intertwined processes were forged by two groups of actors whose “legal imaginations” were informed by competing ideological frames and whose abilities to realize distinct visions of punishment were influenced by vastly different “resources”—understood as patterns of informal/formal institutional practices, network ties, and policy outcomes forged under the auspices of a prior regime. In this paper, I use approaches from transitology’s study of “legacies” as well as insights from institutional and organizational analysis to generate expectations about institutional durability and change during moments of wide-scale political transformation.

Author

• Louisa M. McClintock, University of Chicago