Kate Korycki, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Western University in Canada, wrote an engaging, informative, and provoking book highly recommendable to everyone interested in contemporary Polish politics and culture. Korycki shows how the Polish elites “use and manipulate the past for present-day political payoffs” and explains “this generalized preoccupation with the past—or more specifically for the story at hand, with the communist past—and its connection to national identity construction” (2). She groups the major Polish political parties and milieus into four clusters and analyzes their ideologies, programs, historical interpretations (particularly their attitudes toward the communist past), and strategies.

Korycki opens the book with an extensive theoretical part (one-third of the text). She presents her impressive methodological framework, based on the conclusions of other scholars active in the field of memory studies, and describes her “tools.” She relies on the concept of collective memory, is “less interested in the “factuality” of history and more on its “actuality” (13), formulates an “interdisciplinary politicized memory framework” (4), and operates with a notion of “mnemonic capital”—a useful political resource of those who were on the right side of history, won a moral victory, and use their narrative of the past for present-day purposes. Korycki argues that, after the fall of communism, “the transition winner compensates for its lack of material and cultural resources by developing and deploying a symbolic capital rooted in memory” (27). A skillful memory-talk helps to establish an identity or brand attractive to voters and shapes the field of political competition.

Korycki calls the first of her clusters the “Patriots.” These are the Law and Justice Party (PiS) and its minor partners. They focus on the past more than their programmatic identity and claim that communists still rule Poland. They conflate communism with Jewishness, assume the image of the saviors of Poland, and present political enemies as enemies of the nation, defined along ethnic and religious (Catholic) lines. According to the “Patriots,” communism, a foreign system imposed on Poland by the Soviets, was equal to or worse than Nazism. Surprisingly, Korycki claims that “the PiS is explicitly not a welfarist party” (45).

The “Managers,” the second cluster, are grouped around the Civic Platform (PO). They condemn communism and use mnemonic capital, too. They emphasize communism’s backwardness and inefficiency more than its oppressive character. They are more pragmatic and present-day-oriented, focus on market freedom, and enthusiastically participate in the European Union (EU). In the “Managers’” neoliberal world, the state operates as the classic night watchman.

Korycki calls the third cluster the “Liberals.” It can be confusing because, in the previous chapter, she portrays the “Managers” as archetypal neo-liberals. The “Liberals” are grouped around the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), their allies, splinter formations, and successors. They prefer to see themselves as social democrats, while their enemies call them post-communists. The “Liberals” “had little access to mnemonic capital” (124), and they “skillfully repudiated communism” (125), condemning Stalinism and claiming lineage with the early Polish Workers’ movement and the pre-war Polish Socialist Party (PPS). They focus on the present and the future and value integration with the EU. “[T]hey advocated legal partnership for homosexual and heterosexual couples, they wanted to reinstate abortion and fund in vitro fertilizations, and they were vocal in promotion of equality between people of different genders, sexual orientations, religious, races, and abilities” (126).

The fourth cluster, the “Objectors,” is disproportionally tiny. It consists of several microscopic and meteoric parties, calling themselves social-democratic and socialist, and several groups of leftist intellectuals from publishing houses and institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). “The Objectors’ cluster,” claims Korycki, “does not condemn communism—and in this, it creates a categorical distinction between itself and other clusters” (151).

Korycki’s text is dense and tackles numerous complex and debatable subjects. It is Warsaw-centered and, chronologically, concentrates on the last ten or fifteen years before 2023. The author discusses populism in Poland and abroad, collective memory, migrations, national identity issues, “communist authoritarianism,” and (too?) many others. The Jewish issue is prominently portrayed in the book. Korycki claims repeatedly that all major Polish political parties “conflated” communism with Jewishness (3, 6, and 177). It is a debatable argument. How about the Democratic Union (UD) or the Freedom Union (UW), for example? Weaponizing the Past is a valuable contribution to studying the global phenomenon of mnemonic wars.