Polish Kingdom and Polish People’s Republic in the Historical-Legal Perspective

Abstract

The paper is an attempt at a comparison between the legal-state situation of the Polish Kingdom, established by virtue of the Vienna Congress in 1815, and Polish People’s Republic, established by the Soviet Union in 1944, and confirmed by the United State and Great Britain in 1945. In both cases we dealt with states of limited sovereignty, in which the dominating role was played by Russia, and then by the Soviet Union. In the text we compare the range of internal liberties in both forms of statehood, and the degree of their subjectivity in external relations.

At the same time the above comparison points at the fact that the Polish Kingdom, until the fall of the 1830 rising, was the state with a much larger range of internal liberty than the statehood dominated by communists. Accordingly, that period should occupy in the political history of Poland a place comparable with that of Polish People’s Republic.