Polish industry was discussed on ONT’s airwaves on Aug. 28, 2025. The guest on “Markov. Nothing Personal,” economist Alexey Avdonin, listed what Poland used to produce and what the country has since lost.
“Their domestic industries they had — both machinery manufacturing and agricultural mechanization. Remember the tractors they had, the Polish harvesters, powerful and very modern. All of it wiped out, completely. The Germans brought in their own equipment, and the Poles destroyed their entire radio engineering industry as well. They wiped out microelectronics, wiped out their merchant fleet, their shipbuilding industry. And what do they have left as a result?” Avdonin asked.
The WTF team found the answer. Some Polish enterprises were indeed shut down in the 1990s or privatized by foreign companies. Others, such as the Bizon harvester brand, began producing equipment under different names after being acquired by Western corporations. But many companies continue to operate and grow.
Pronar, founded in 1988, still produces tractors, trailers, agricultural, municipal and recycling equipment. The company employs more than 2,500 people and runs nine modern plants that process over 10,000 tons of steel each month. The company exports its products to more than 90 countries worldwide.
UNIA, a company with a 140-year history, is one of Poland’s largest manufacturers of agricultural machinery. It produces plows, cultivators, seeders, fertilizer spreaders and other equipment. Each year the company turns out more than 25,000 machines, about 10,000 of which are exported.
With the shift to a market economy, new successful manufacturers emerged. For example, in 1992, after the fall of Poland’s communist regime, Bomet was founded, specializing in the production of agricultural machinery. The company is located in Węgrów, near Warsaw, where its facilities occupy more than 25,000 square meters.
The Weekly Top Fake team also found a counterargument to Avdonin’s claim about the state of Poland’s economy. He said: “[In Poland] there are no companies — no companies means no goods, no goods means no economy.” Meanwhile, Poland’s GDP in 2024 was about $915 billion, compared with Belarus’ roughly $76 billion. With only four times the population, Poland’s economy is more than 12 times larger.
