Poland was sort of occupied until 1989

Honestly, a lot of issues was that we needed to build up the necessary infrastructure in the first place.

And the transformation to market economy involved at least two periods of suicidal decisions in name of ideology that regressed the economy (by the same person, even)

We were. And “hard workers” is code for “easily exploited.”

Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.

Yes, but being occupied by Russia has not traditionally been a motor for growth

Motivation requires incentive. Probably hard to do when you're a communist bureaucrat offering an extra potato.