The Centre for Eastern Studies was established by the Tadeusz Mazowiecki government in 1990 as a body funded by the state budget and subordinated to the minister for economic affairs. The initiative to create the Centre had come from Marek Karp who became the first Director of OSW and held the post for many years. In 2006, two years after Marek Karp died, the OSW was named after its founder. Between 2004 and 2007, OSW was led by Jacek Cichocki. The current Director of OSW is Jolanta Darczewska.

About the origins of OSW:
[...] Stanisław Swianiewicz had been a soldier of the Polish Military Organisation (POW) in 1919 and had fought in the wars of 1920 and September 1939, but such biographies were not uncommon among the other prisoners of the Soviet camps in Kozelsk, Starobilsk and Ostashkov. What really interested the NKVD officers was the research done by Prof. Swianiewicz at the Institute for Eastern European Research in Vilnius. The Institute had done pioneering work in many areas, including a comparative study of the economies of totalitarian states, i.e. fascist Germany and the Soviet Union (Swianiewicz) or research into the Soviet Union’s internal evolution (Wiktor Sukiennicki), and most importantly, had developed an innovative methodology which consisted in thoroughly analysing the propaganda and official data in order to observe, over longer periods, the changes revealing the processes actually taking place in totalitarian states separated from the rest of the world by secret police, censorship and the propaganda apparatus.

[...] Released in 1941 under amnesty (the Anders army was being created at that time), Swianiewicz was soon taken back to the camp. It was only thanks to ambassador Stanisław Kot’s dramatic effort that the professor was released and was able to leave the Soviet Union. After the war, he settled in London where he continued his research; he also lectured in the United States, Canada and other countries.

[...] In the 1980s, a young man started to visit Prof. Swianiewicz. It was Marek Karp, a descendant of a distinguished noble family of Lithuania and an assistant researcher at the Warsaw University fascinated with the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, who was dividing his time in London between visits to libraries and work on construction sites. He became Swianiewicz’s frequent interlocutor. As Karp himself recalled, his meetings with Swianiewicz, either in London parks or at the old professor’s apartment, were a unique ‘private seminar”. Neither of the men expected at that time that the course of history was to accelerate very soon.
The room in Koszykowa Street

It was back in 1991. A few people were gathered in a room on the fourth floor of a tenement house formerly owned by RSW “Ruch” (the media company of Communist Poland) in 6a Koszykowa Street. The more the May sunshine got into the room, the sadder the dirty, flaking walls and the dilapidated floor looked. The people sitting in the room (or rather standing or squatting down there, as there was no furniture) were Marek Karp, Wojciech Zajączkowski, Jan Jarco, Barbara Polak, Magdalena Hen, Jacek Borkowicz, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, Włodzimierz Zieleniec, Stanisław Zapaśnik. Perhaps even someone else whom we do not recall at this moment? The meeting was the inauguration of the Centre for Eastern Studies and, at the same time, the conclusion of a long campaign. Marek Karp had struggled since the autumn of 1990 to break the wall of bureaucratic inertia and get through the chaos in which the new, free Poland was taking shape, in order to create the Centre. Finally, when he met his future collaborators for the first time, he was holding in his hand the three key documents: the Council of Ministers’ resolution of 22 December 1990 establishing the Centre, the order of the Minister for Foreign Economic Co-operation of 31 December which provided the Centre would be part of that Ministry’s organisational structure, and his own appointment as the Director of OSW.

[...] In that initial period there was no expertise or experience that could be used in creating an analytic institution within the state administration. The few people who did have the necessary skills had already been engaged elsewhere. Therefore, in the early days the Centre developed based on intuition and a certain vision of what an analytic institution should be, which was to be tested in practice later on, as we gathered experience. This refers both to the staff and the organisation and to methodology. Meanwhile, we had very little time. There were ever more urgent questions to be answered. Poland had found itself at the focal point of the change that was shaking the world at that time, i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new states. This was an asset which Marek Karp readily used. He would demonstrate various threat scenarios, or even resort to moral blackmail by invoking the responsibility for the state, in order to overcome, one by one, the obstacles on the way towards the creation of the OSW. Everyone who was involved in the formation of the Centre remembers the natural impulse of understanding when the reasons for the creation of OSW were presented. It may be argued that if the initiative to create the Centre had been taken several years later, OSW would never have materialised. It is not common that the right man and the right idea meet so precisely at the right moment, as was the case with OSW. That May, the time devoted by professor Swianiewicz to the young assistant from Poland was bearing fruit.

Written by: Jacek Cichocki, Jolanta Darczewska, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz

"Welcome aboard!" that's how Director Marek Karp used to greet new staff members of the Centre for Eastern Studies on Koszykowa Street in Warsaw. Many of us realised only a couple of years later that these words were more than simply a nice gesture, and in fact there was a deeper meaning to them. We were joining the crew of one of the most interesting institutions established in independent Poland after the fall of communism. It was a battleship rather than a cruise liner, where, irrespective of the changing political circumstances, we were to fulfil a long-term mission to support Poland's foreign policy, especially with regard to the East, with information and analyses."

(edited by J. Borkowicz, J. Cichocki, K. Pełczyńska-Nałęcz; published by PWN, Warsaw 2007)

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