ABSTRACT
A country of some 38 million people located in central Europe, Poland through most of the twentieth Century was bounded by Germany to the west, Czechoslovakia to the south and the Soviet Union to the east and found itself regu larly subject to the political pulls of both its eastern and western neighbours. By 1993, Poland still found itself bounded on the west by Germany but its Southern border was now split between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, and to the north and east by several different republics of the former Soviet Union - Russia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. A Slavic country itself with a history going back to the tenth Century, Poland in 1993 had a land area of 311,700 square kilometres (120,300 square miles).
