Talk:Wojciech Roszkowski

Behr

[B]etween 1983 and 1987, [Roszkowski] published a history of Poland in four volumes titled Contemporary History of Poland (1918-1980) under the pseudonym Andrzej Albert [..]

[While Krystyna Kersten] took advantage of the uncensored editorial outlets to publish a scholarly work intended to uphold high academic standards and exemplify “neutral” history writing, [..] [Roszkowski] used history to join the political struggle and take sides with the anti–communist-patriotic camp [..]

Born in Warsaw in 1947, he graduated in international trade at the Szkoła Główna Planowania i Statystyki (SGPiS), the main training school for economists and statisticians. In 1978, he received a PhD in economics from SGPiS, where he researched the economic policy of the Polish Second Republic (1918–1939). He was then tenured as professor at SGPiS. The bulk of his academic career thus took place at a university that was rather peripheral to the field of history. In 1990, he joined the Institute of Political Studies of the Academy of Sciences (ISP PAN) as head of the research team on Central and Eastern Europe. His bibliography does not include any monographs on the political history of twentieth-century Poland, let alone of communist Poland. He published almost only textbooks and syntheses, rarely drawing on primary sources. In fact, Roszkowski was almost unknown in the small world of contemporary history scholarship until he revealed himself as the author of Contemporary History of Poland [..]

In the preface to his book, he described himself as a “Christian” and a “Polish patriot.”[..]

The conditions in which Roszkowski wrote his own book were also quite different. Contemporary History of Poland did not benefit from any real editing work. The volume was the work of one man from start to finish. In fact, Roszkowski indicated that the book was sent to print without proofreading, both for its initial clandestine editions and for its first reprint (Polonia Book Fund). It was not until the 1991 reprint by the Puls publishing house that the text went through a basic editing process [..]

Kersten includes lengthy developments on the Katyń massacre and the Warsaw Uprising, but her writing remains analytical and avoids lyricism, whereas an emphasis on martyrdom and heroism characterizes Roszkowski’s narrative. What distinguished the two authors was a posture [..]These two books, published thanks to the 1980s underground movement, reflect two attitudes towards the political constraint: one consisting in striving to stick to the agenda of an academic and objective history; the other in following a value system based on a conception of history as a tool of political struggle.
— https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08883254211018777

TrangaBellam (talk) 10:06, 20 March 2023 (UTC)