Providing archival resource in the archives of the Communist Party on the example of the Archive of the Voivodeship Committee of PZPR in Lublin

Abstract

The exploration of the research topic of the access to archival holdings collected by the communist party in Poland results from the need to capture the party’s approach to this task, considered today as one of the most important functions of historical archives. The direct reason for initiating research in this area was a complete lack of literature on the implementation of this function by the Archive of the Voivodeship Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in Lublin and the poor state of research on the same issue with regard to the PZPR archives from other centres and on a national scale.

In the course of the research proceedings, questions were asked about the reasons, practices, extent and recipients of this task at the AKW in Lublin. The research employed deductive, inductive and statistical methods. The following types of sources were used to analyse the issue: internal standards of the leadership of the PZPR regulating the area of making the resources available in its archives, minutes from the meetings of the heads of the archives of the PZPR voivodeship committees taking into account the problems of making the documents available and cyclical reports prepared by the heads of the AKW in Lublin.

Making the resources available evolved from a restrictive approach to relative liberalisation within several decades of the existence of AKW in Lublin. The manifestation of the liberalisation was that over time, users also included members of other parties and non-partisans in addition to the dominant number of party members (employees of the party apparatus and activists). In terms of numbers, the second place was taken by students of various universities and the third place was taken by researchers. The AKW in Lublin was visited on average by twenty to sixty users per year. The increased frequency of their visits to this archive was often associated with important anniversaries of the party for which the celebrations were being prepared. On the other hand, it is possible that the decrease in the number of visits in some cases was related to the social and political crises in the country, such as December 1970 and the introduction of martial law in Poland. Making archival materials available to external users throughout the entire existence of the AKW in Lublin, i.e. from the 1950s to the 1980s, was subject to rationing. Access to documents was granted by the secretary of the Voivodeship Committee responsible for the propaganda sector. This was meant to prevent unauthorised persons from being provided with information that could jeopardise the image of the PZPR and its current policy. The majority of the research topics carried out by the users of the AKW resources in Lublin were those that directly or indirectly affirmed the activities of the party and the communist government, for example the history of youth organisations, the activities of the UB, MO and ORMO, and the consolidation of the communist government in Poland.

The general conclusion of the findings is that the archives of the AKW of the PZPR in Lublin served primarily the needs of the party. They contributed in particular to the development of a propaganda useful version of its own history and the history of other socio-political organisations, institutions and circles, which in the period of the People’s Republic of Poland were heavily influenced by the party.