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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9

Then, in 1795, when all that was left of Poland was divided up and occupied by the Germans, Russians, and Austrians, the Polish church survived intact and became the chief unifying force contributing to the rebirth of the nation in the wake of World War I.

Although societal change generated by modernization and industrialization added a new dimension to the problems faced by the leaders of the Polish state which emerged in 1918, the traditional factors of geographic locations and national character continued to play a key role in shaping the country's fortunes and course. The nationalism which was later to find such heroic expression during World War II contributed to the mounting of a successful military campaign against a strife-torn Russia in the early 1920s. However satisfying to the Poles, this action resulted in the inclusion of sizable new - and potentially dissident - minorities within their country's eastern frontiers and laid the basis for the collaboration between Moscow and an equally irredentist and expansionist Berlin which brought devastation and dismemberment to Poland in 1939. At the same time, the Polish population proved to be, in the words of one Western observer, "charmingly impossible to govern." Interwar Polish politics were characterized by a succession of weak parliamentary coalitions which finally gave way - in 1926 - to semidictatorial government, first under Marshal Pilsudski and later under a collection of military leaders called the "colonels regime."

World War II greatly altered the face of Poland. Above and beyond its bitter legacy of material destruction, it resulted in boundary shifts by which Poland lost nearly 69,000 square miles to the Soviet Union in the east and gained about 40,000 square miles from Germany in the west. The effective wartime extermination of Poland's sizable Jewish minority by the Germans and the massive transfers of people which accompanied the postwar border adjustments produced an ethnically and religiously homogenous population about 98% Polish and 95% Roman Catholic. Full sovereignty remained a thing of the past as German occupation gave way to Soviet domination. The Marxist regime imposed upon the country by Moscow soon completed the destruction of old social patterns and of the prewar political and economic elite which had been begun under Nazi rule.

But despite radical changes in class distinctions and relationships, the fundamental attitudes and character of the Polish people remained as before. Polish individualism and resistance to imposed authority proved impervious to efforts to imbue the population with a new and ideologically determined set of values. If anything, the cumulative effect of all the traumatic changes in Poland's internal and external circumstances was to reinforce the linkage between Polish nationalism and the Roman Catholic faith. Hence Gierek, just as his predecessors, must cope with the fact that his countrymen are just about the most unnatural Communists in the world.

In its present configuration, Poland is a rectangular country slightly larger than Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky combined. Its population at the end of 1972 was estimated at a little over 33 million. With its southern boundary at approximately the same latitude as the US-Canadian border west of the Great Lakes, it lies in a transitional weather zone between the continental extremes of the USSR and the milder marine climate of northwestern Europe. Thus despite the moderating influence of the Baltic Sea, bitter cold winters and long summer hot spells are not uncommon.

The Baltic Sea forms the major portion of Poland's northern frontier. The sandy and low-lying Polish coastline - 305 miles long - is bereft of good natural harbor, but hooks of land enclosing shallow lagoons and bays have permitted the development of major ports at Szczecin (Stettin), Gdynia, and Gdansk. To the south and southwest, the Carpathian and Sudeten mountain ranges - separated by the strategically important 20-mile wide lowland area known as the Moravian Gate - form a natural boundary with Czechoslovakia and provide the Poles with a year-round resort area. Most of Poland is flat or gently rolling, however, and its flanks remain as vulnerable as ever to overland attack. In the west, its border with the German Democratic Republic generally follows the course of the Oder and Neisse rivers. On the opposite side of the country, the Polish-Soviet frontier is anchored on segments of the Bug and San rivers, but much of it was drawn with little regard for natural terrain features.

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9