Deliberate youth-organization recruitment produced Poland’s entire postcommunist elite.

Evidence

As a result of the party’s recruitment policies, the new party leadership in 1990 consisted almost exclusively of youth organization alumni. … The first leader of the Polish successor party, Aleksander Kwa´sniewski, graduated from the youth organization to become the government’s minister of youth in the 1980s. Kwa´sniewski’s career path was typical of his cohort. As a college student, he joined the youth organization. In 1976, he was elected the youth organization’s leader at the University of Gdan´sk and joined the party a year later. He was then elected to successive ranks of the SZSP leadership, becoming part of the national leadership (1977–82). After the SZSP was dissolved, Kwa´sniewski became the editor of the youth organization’s weekly and then its daily newspaper. He was picked to become the new minister of youth in the government of Zbigniew Messner (1985–7), where he was also a member of the Olympic Committee. Kwa´sniewski continued in the government, becoming a member of the government leadership until September 1989, during the biggest period of unrest and policy pressures. As a government representative in the Round Table negotiations, he chaired the Social and Political Committee. He was thirty-five when he assumed power in the party. … Similarly, Leszek Ja´skiewicz and Jerzy Szmajdzin´ski, two other SZSP leaders, were both elected in secret and direct ballots in 1981 and the late 1980s, respectively. Several postcommunist leaders in Poland, including two prime ministers and the president, were also members, as were numerous ministers, ambassadors, and other leading politicians after 1989. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 352

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete mechanism of elite regeneration for the comparative question about communist successor parties surviving 1989 — Polish SdRP leaders came from one recruited cohort, distinct from e.g. Czech or Hungarian paths.