Publishing house
Through the publication of books on the history of Eastern Europe and Poland’s relations with its eastern neighbours, authored by renowned scholars from Poland and other countries, our Centre contributes to dialogue and better understanding between Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and other nations of Eastern Europe, thus fulfilling the goal presumed by the legislator.
Our Centre publishes essays, literary publications as well as scholarly works in history, international law and economics, with a strong focus on historical books devoted to important issues that may be of interest not only to professional historians but also to the general public. Moreover, our Centre attaches great importance to quality editing, graphic design and the promotion of its publications. Our publishing house is held in high regard by the scholarly community thanks to our status (an institution established and operating under an act of law), the quality of our publications, as well as the reputation of the authors who have published at the Mieroszewski Centre, including historians Andrzej Walicki, Andrzej Nowak, Jerzy Borejsza, Nikita Petrov, Grzegorz Motyka, Robert Frost or Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, to name just a few.
In its publishing activities, the Mieroszewski Centre aims to disseminate the oeuvre of Polish scholars on the international scene. One example is the volume prepared by our Centre (under its previous statutory name) and released by Routledge, one of the largest Anglo-Saxon publishing houses: Circles of the Russian Revolution: Internal and International Consequences of the Year 1917 in Russia (ed. by Łukasz Adamski and Bartłomiej Gajos). In turn, The Case of Crimea’s Annexation under International Law is an innovative and important contribution to global science, written by a group of eminent international lawyers from a number of European countries as well as Russia. The work is used by Polish and Ukrainian diplomats as a useful source of expertise proving the absurdity of Russian claims about the legality of the annexation of Crimea. Another publication in the field of international affairs was the translation of a book by Estonian scholar Lauri Mälksoo Russian Approaches to International Law, originally published by Oxford University Press.
The Mieroszewski Centre has also published the 2022 Klio Prize-winning multi-volume series Documents for the History of Polish-Soviet Relations 1918–1945 (lead editor: Mariusz Wołos), with unknown or previously unused documents of Polish and Soviet provenance edited by eminent Polish historians of diplomacy. In 2019, the Mieroszewski Centre published another series of source documents related to the 20th-century history of Poland and Eastern Europe, dedicated to the struggle of the Polish independence underground against the Soviets. These are: Stalin’s Broom. North-Eastern Poland and its Borderland during the Augustów Roundup in 1945, discussing the preparations for and course of the Augustów Roundup (ed. by Grzegorz Motyka, Grzegorz Hryciuk and Łukasz Adamski), Volhynia and Eastern Galicia under German occupation 1943–1944 (ed. by Łukasz Adamski and Grzegorz Hryciuk), or Volhynia and Eastern Galicia under the second Soviet authority (ed. by Łukasz Adamski and Grzegorz Hryciuk), showing how the Polish underground movement was exposed by the Soviets and its agent network.
Also worth mentioning is the volume of documents edited by Rev. Roman Dzwonkowski and Andrzej Szabaciuk, Bolsheviks in the Fight against Religion, which is the first publication of this kind on the Polish market enabling readers to trace the fate of the Catholic Church in the Soviet Union during the interwar period through the lens of Polish diplomatic documents.
Other highly significant volumes of source materials are devoted to the NKVD’s ‘Polish operation’ of 1937–1938: one of the largest, and yet least researched, crimes in the history of twentieth-century Europe. The volumes have been published under a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland (project leader: Sławomir Dębski).
Nikita Petrov’s Gallery of Katyn Executioners is a pioneering study of the biographies of NKVD employees responsible for crimes against Polish prisoners of war. The Mieroszewski Centre has also undertaken an attempt to reconstruct the so-called Belarusian Katyn list, which resulted in Maciej Wyrwa’s study Lost Victims of Katyn? List of persons who perished on the north-eastern territories of Poland’s 2nd Republic from 17 Sept 1939 to June 1940. The issues surrounding the Katyn massacre are reflected, among others, in the post-conference publication entitled Katyn Pro Memoria (ed. by Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska) and a volume in Polish, Russian and English by Jadwiga Rogoża and Maciej Wyrwa: Katyn: In the Footsteps of the Crime.
Our publishing house has also issued collective monographs analysing topics such as selected aspects of the Riga Treaty (ed. by Sławomir Dębski), the fates of Soviet POWs in German camps located in occupied Poland (ed. by Jakub Wojtkowiak, in Polish and Russian), connections between Polish and Russian political thought (ed. by Sławomir Dębski and Łukasz Adamski), international aspects of Polish uprisings (ed. by Sławomir Dębski and Łukasz Adamski), nation-building processes in Eastern Europe (ed. by Łukasz Adamski), the impact of the 1917 Revolution on the 20th history (ed. by Łukasz Adamski and Bartłomiej Gajos), relations between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the 20th and 21st centuries (ed. by Andrzej Grajewski and Paweł Skibiński) and the NKVD’s suppression of the Polish underground (ed. by Grzegorz Motyka, Grzegorz Hryciuk and Łukasz Adamski).
Jakub Wojtkowiak’s biographical dictionary of Polish- and Lithuanian-born officers in the Red Army is a pioneering study published by our Centre.
The Mieroszewski Centre releases some of its publications as co-editions with other publishing houses. One example is The Case of Crimea’s Annexation under International Law, co-published with the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Scholar Publishing House. Another book published in co‑edition with the prestigious Russian publishing house ROSPEN was Sławomir Dębski’s monograph: Mezhdu Berlinom i Moskvoi: Germano-Sovetskiye Otnosheniya v 1939–1941 gg [Between Berlin and Moscow: German-Soviet Relations in 1939–1941], published as a translation from the Polish edition adapted for Russian readers and illustrating—at an unprecedented level of detail—the cooperation between the USSR and the Third Reich after 23 August 1939, challenging the stereotypes devised by Soviet propaganda and still disseminated in Putin’s Russia. In turn, Empires, Nations and Societies of Central and Eastern Europe on the Threshold of the First World War (edited by Andrzej Nowak, in co‑edition with the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences) paints a panorama of problems affecting our part of the continent in 1913–1914.
In 2014–2018, in cooperation with SEDNO Academic Publishers and the College of Eastern Europe, our Centre published two series of translations of the most interesting Russian non-fiction publications. An outcome of an open competition for Polish publishers, they included books dedicated to prominent figures of Russian culture such as Anna Akhmatova, Dmitry Likhachev, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Eisenstein and Mikhail Bulgakov.
In its efforts to reach a wide audience, the Mieroszewski Centre also decided to publish popular science books, jointly with the KARTA Centre. The following have been released so far: Anna Artemyeva, Yelena Racheva, Not requisitioned. Stories of people who survived what we fear most; Interrupted biographies. Accounts of those deported from Poland into the USSR in 1940–1941 (selected by Ewa Kołodziejska-Fuentes) and Rebellions in Soviet camps. Accounts of Polish Gulag Prisoners (selected and compiled by Agnieszka Knyt).
The Mieroszewski Centre supports independent Belarusian historiography, also through publishing activities. A volume of source documents has been published in Belarus (in the Belarusian language), entitled Vyzvaleniya i zniavoleniya: Polska-belaruskaye pamiezhzha 1939–1941 hh. u dakumentakh belaruskikh archivau (ed. by Aleksander Smalianchuk) and the testimonies Za pershimi savyetami: Polska-belaruskaye pamiezhzha 1939–1941 hh. u vusnai historykau Belarusi (ed. by Volha Ivanova, Aleksander Smalianchuk). These books have been also published in Polish.
Contact:
Mieroszewski Centre
ul. Jasna 14/16a
00-041 Warsaw, Poland
T: + 48 22 295 00 30
F: + 48 22 295 00 31
E: wydawnictwo@mieroszewski.pl
