Rewolucja

The revolution of 1905 in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland marked the consolidation of major new influences on the political scene. As he examines the emergence of a mass political culture in Poland, Robert E. Blobaum offers the first history in any Western language of this watershed period. Drawing on extensive archival research to explore the history of Poland's revolutionary upheavals, Blobaum departs from traditional interpretations of these events as peripheral to an essentially Russian movement that reached a climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He demonstrates that, although Polish independence was not formally recognized until after World War I, the social and political conditions necessary for nationhood were established in the years around 1905.

Rewolucja will undoubtedly remain the standard work on the Polish experience of the 1905 Revolution for years to come. It is one of the most firmly grounded and carefully researched English-language books on Polish history to appear in recent years., Blobaum's work is based on an exhaustive reading of recent Polish- and English-language historiography, but, most importantly, on a thorough-going use of archives. It is this solid archival base that makes Rewolucja a truly important and pioneering work.

Robert Blobaum is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at West Virginia University. He is the editor of Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, also from Cornell, and author of Feliks Dzierzynski and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism.