ISBN: 978-83-66091-93-1

Number of pages: xli + 419

Editor: Piotr Długołęcki

The present publication, consisting of 112 archival documents, was made possible by the collaboration of historians, archivists and publishers of diplomatic documents from several countries. They selected documents from their national archival resources and prepared them for publication. The documents concern the situation in Poland in the years 1980–1982.

The archival material included in this collection illustrates the so-called Polish crisis – a series of events that were crucial for the situation within Poland, and yet were also a highly important aspect of international relations at that time.

The aim of this publication is to show the Polish Crisis from the viewpoint of countries which were part of the Western Bloc, in the then bi-polar world. The addition of documents from the NATO Archive showing the policy of the North Atlantic Alliance made it possible to provide a fuller image of western countries’ reaction to events in Poland.

Adopting such selection criteria has led to the preparation of a collection of documents that show the common features and divergent elements of Western countries’ policies with regard to the crisis in Poland. It has also made it possible to present the specific nature of the individual countries’ relations with Poland, as well as to illustrate the counter-measures taken by the Polish communist authorities in response to Western actions.

Making this collection available to the reader on the 40^th anniversary of the events concerned, we hope that it will be a unique source showing events such as the creation of Solidarity, the threat of Soviet intervention and the imposition of martial law in Poland from an international perspective.

All the documents (along with their scholarly apparatus) are published in English, thus making documents drawn up in the national language of various countries accessible to a wide range of researchers. The entire publication (the introduction, the documents themselves, the personal index and the list of abbreviations) is available in book form and can be downloaded for free online.

This publication contains archival material from Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, NATO, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The vast majority of these documents have not been published before. Some of the British, German and Polish documents have already appeared in print, while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization documents are available in the form of scans on the NATO Archives website.