' t Fabian International Bureau GOMULKA'S POLAND LUCJAN BLIT FABIAN TRACT NO. 316 TWO SHILLINGS LUCJAN BLIT, a journalist, has lived in England since 1943. He was active in the pre-war Polish Labour movement, and re-visited Poland 1n . . ·.. ...December, 1956, .and March, 1959. •' TRACT ·; No. 316 -~ THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 11, Dartmouth Street. S.W.l. NOTE.-This pamphlet, like all publications of the FABIAN SOCIETY, represents not the collective view of the Society but only the view of the individual who prepared it. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving the publicationswhich it issues as worthy of consideration within the Labour Movement. March, 1959. GOMULKA'S POLAND LUCJAN BLIT L A N D Lubli~ .. . 400 . . 500· 600 Reproduced from An Atlas. of World Affairs by Andrew Boyd, by kind permission of the author and · of the publishers, Methuen and Co. Ltd. I. The Post-War Pattern ·T HERE was no popular revolution in July, 1Y44, when the basis of a Communist regime was laid in partly-liberated Poland. The so-called Lublin government, formally headed by a Socialist, but controlled by the Communists, was the political organ of the Soviet Army. The post-war revolution in Poland occurred as late as October, 1956. It was a full-scale, though bloodless, rebellion of a nation against the iniquities of the 1944 regime. It was led by a man, Comrade 'Wieslaw ', who, more than any other Pole, helped to e tablish the Communist regime after the war. 'Wieslaw' Gomulka had been the leader of the Polish Communist Party until 1948. He was soon afterwards expelled from the Party, whose general ecretary he had been, and from the government, which he had served as Deputy Prime Minister. He then spent three and a half years in the pri on of the Communist secret police. When, in the autumn of 1956, he became the symbol of the Polish ' October ', he was still a Communist. But hi experience of the previous twelve years had strengthened hi belief that no force in the world can make of Poland a simple duplicate of the Soviet Union. 1 A Country on Wheels' The-Poland which emerged in 1945 wa in many way a very different country from that which, on 1st September, 1939, sprang to arms to re ist ttie attack of Nazi Germany. Of the 150,000 quare miles which formed the Poli h Republic between 1919 and 1939, orne 70,000 square miles were incorporated into the U.S ..R. in 1945. On the other hand, the Pot dam Conference handed over to Poland ' until a final settlement at a peace conference' ·over 39,000 quare mile of former German territory. It had lo t some 6 million people as the result of the German and Soviet occupation. Most of them had been annihilated by the Nazi . Direct 'liquidation' (e pecially of the three and a half milhon Jew ), deportation and exchange, had reduced the population fron1 35 million in 1939 to a little over 23 million in 1945. By 1958 it had ri en to 29 million. In pre-war Poland nearly 40 per cent of the population belonged to the 'national minorities' (Ukrainians, Byeloru sian , Jews, German and orne smaller group ). Nearly all of them were al o non-catholics. Now 98 per cent of the population are Roman Catholics. The remnant of the Jew , Ukrainians, Byelorus ians and Germans amount to no more than 1 per cent of the population. he ' country on wheel ', a the Pole with mocking melancholy de" ribe their country, ha moved from the East into Central Europe. It GOMULKA'S POLAND has lost the rich soil of Wolyn and the boggy marshes of the river Pripet. Instead it has acquired the industrial basin of Lower Silesia. This, together with the policy of forced industrialisation since 1948, has largely changed the social character of the country. In pre-war Poland some 60 per cent of the population were occupied in agriculture. Now only 47 per cent are employed as peasants and farm labourers. At the same time the percentage of the population employed in industry, building trades and transport has risen from 17 per cent to 32 per cent. Political Aftermath of the War The Communist-controlled government, established in 1944 in Lublin, found a country in ruins. It is estimated that at least a third of the total capital stock in the form of buildings was lost through war destruction. Industry, transport and, to a slightly lesser extent, agriculture, were devastated to a degree never experienced by occupied countries in Western Europe. But the political problems facing the Communist government were even more intractable than the economic ones. During the great pre-war purges in Soviet Russia some 20,000 Polish Communists perished in Soviet prisons and camps. Only 5,000 survived Stalin's liquidation of the Polish Communist Party in 1938. They were naturally shaken by the fate of their comrades and by their sufferings at the hands of the Soviet leaders. Until 1941 there was no Communist organisation in German-occupied Poland. After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union the Polish Communist Party was resurrected. But the underground Polish political stage was not a vacuum waiting for the Communists. Quite the contrary. With the possible exception of Yugoslavia no other oc~upied country in Europe had such an extensive net of political and combat organisations fighting the enemy as did Poland from the end of 1939. When the Communists started their comeback in the summer of 1941 they were confronted by a well organi ed Polish ' underground state' which was in close material and political contact with the Polish Government established in London. The Communists, notwithstanding their treatment by Soviet Russia in the years 1931-38, still completely supported Soviet Russia's foreign policy. This fact prevented them from achieving any popularity with the overwhelming majority of the nation, which still vividly remembered Russia's role in the division of Poland in the autumn of 1939 and the brutal behaviour of the Soviet secret police in the Eastern parts of Poland. Later they remembered too the callous attitude of the Soviet leaders during the Warsaw uprising, in the late summer of 1944, when the Soviet Army stood by across the Vistula while Warsaw and its patriotic population were ruthlessly destroyed by the Germans. The ,Lublin government was generally thought of as advocating ideas which were incompatible with the conceptions of a highly patriotic, proudly independent and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation. The pattern of the regime established in Poland with Soviet help and under its strong guidance took a few years fully to develop. The first stage GOMULKA'S POLAND was characterised by the abandonment of any pretence of an independent foreign policy which would deviate even in the smallest detail from that of Moscow. A little later, in 1947, came the destruction of the independent Peasant Party by direct police terror. Incessant moral and material pressure was used on the weakened Socialist party to bring about its liquidation as an independent political force. Thus were removed the last obstacles to the introduction of the monopolistic rule of one party-the Communists. Finally came the destruction of the Gomulka trend inside the Party. Only then was it possible for the orthodox Stalinists openly to proclaim their aim of building in Poland an economic system akin to that existing in Soviet Russia, with the state as the sole proprietor of all means of production and distribution in the towns, and the peasant forced to give up his independence as a producer and join a collective farm or become a labourer on a state farm. The Compromise During the first 2-3 years of the new regime it looked as though Poland was destined to live for a long time in a state of actual civil war, and that the Communists and their fellow-travellers would rule the country from behind a barricade, dependent exclusively on the physical power of the Soviet Army stationed in Poland. But very soon it became obvious to many non-communist Poles that the outcome of the second world war had changed the balance of power in Europe. The Soviet Union had emerged as a mighty military state. As a result of war operations, Soviet Russia established an absolute domination over Eastern and a large part of Central Europe, which the inhabitants of this region were physically unable to challenge. The western allies of Russia, and especially Britain and the United States, were not ready to question this state of affairs during the closing months of the war, let alone to risk a new, grave conflict amid the ruins of the European continent. Of course, even now it is true that some Poles are still ready ' to fight geography', but the vast majority of the nation has suffered too much since September, 1939, not to have learned something of the bitter realities of power relations in European and world politics. Stalin's determination to obtain full adherence to Soviet foreign policy had to be accepted as a condition of Poland's existence as a semi-separate state. The first to · acquiesce in the realities of the Yalta agreement was the leadership of the Peasant Party, followed by most of the Socialists. It is now generally, if reluctantly, accepted by nearly the whole nation, including the politically minded hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. The second goal of Russian policy in Poland, the establishment of a Communist economic system, met with much more open opposition. Neither the peasants, comprising in 1945 the majority of the nation, nor many townspeople, were attracted by a regime based on the wholesale abolition of private enterprise and rigid economic planning. The system of state and collective farming in Soviet Russia has always been most passionately GOMULKA'S POLAND rejected by the Polish peasants. Even among workers with a strong Socialist and trade union tradition an economic system similar to that in existence in Soviet Russia was very unpopular. But what united the whole nation, including the 'overwhelming majority even of the members of the Communist Polish United Workers Party, was resistance to the other major objectives of Soviet policy in Poland: the subordination of the country's economy to the needs of Soviet Russia and the imposition on the Poles of the cultural pattern of their Eastern neighbour. No compromise was possible here. ' Forcing the P,ace In 1948 the short period of emergency reconstruction after the war was over. Stalin was not content to have the neighbouring countries ir;t Eastern Europe sympathetically supporting Soviet foreign policy. They had to become full satellites working for the interests of Russia, obedient in every detail. Tito, who refused to conform, was condemned to live in dangerous isolation. Stalin knew that the system he decreed for the satellite nations could be imposed on the Poles only by terror, and the triumvirate of Bierut-Minc-Berman was appointed to do this job. No compromise was permitted between Soviet political or economic interests and the needs of the Poles. _. The nation paid a very high price for the years 1949-55. I~t paid first in material well-being. Until Stalin's death Russia directly exploited the Polish economy by paying only a fraction of the world market price for its Polish imports, particularly for coal, and by making the Poles pay exorbitant prices for goods bought in Russia. The pace of industrialisation forced upon Poland, the lack of co-ordination in spite of paper-plans, the heavy armament burden, the beginning of forcible collectivisation of farming, all resulted in a catastrophic reduction of the standard of living in Poland to approximately two-thirds of what it was in 1938. The uprising of the Poznan workers in June, 1956, was a direct reaction to the misery brought upon the people by the economic policy of the preceding years. Not much better were the moral and political consequences of the period of terror. The population regarded the ruling group as nothing more than the proconsuls of a powerful and highly unpopular neighbour. During the period of the Nazi occupation pilfering and even stealing were looked upon as patriotic acts. Embezzlement and theft have grown in Communist Poland to a degree which was, and still is, destroying the morale of the nation. The Polish intelligentsia had been, since the middle of the 19th century, the leading group of the nation. After 1945 they were ready to accept a compromise between their patriotic traditions and the existing realities of power relations in Eastern and Central Europe. Yet they were unable to follow the Byzantine-Stalinist tradition of Moscow, or to accept the cutting of the nation's traditional ties with Latin cultural patterns and with its own past. 7 GOMULK.A' S POLAND During the eight years of the Bierut-Mine-Berman regime the Roman Catholic Church was a target for persecution. The head of the Church, Cardinal Wyszynski, seven bishops and a host of more humble clergy were locked up in prisons and places of isolation. A few morally corrupted or unrepresentative individuals were appointed by the government as church leaders. But, as had happened in the time of the Nazi occupation and many times before, the persecution of the Church made its influence even mo!fe all-embracing. In times of past national disasters the Church has always been the spiritual home of the overwhelming majority of the Poles. The Communist dictatorship prior to 1956 again achieved just that. Before the Storm Until Stalin's death in 1953 the regime in Poland kept itself in existence not only by suppressing every expression of free opinion in the nation as a whole, but by terrorising even the members of its own party. The rebellion against the system came directly from dissidents within the party. Two groups were in the vanguard of the rebellion. One was the writers, poets, artists and journalists. Applying the Soviet prescription for art, known as Socialist Realism, the ruling political group demanded that Polish writers, painters and sculptors should become party propagandists. To most of them, party members or not, nothing could be more abhorrent. The journalists were expected to lie about facts which were known to every member of the public. The other group, which played such an important role in the Polish .'October' of 1956, was the youth, and especially the students. Their number had increased more than threefold compared with pre-war times (in 1937/38, 43,238; in 1956/57, 139,244). The vast majority of them came from homes of workers, peasants and 'working intelligentsia'. The Communist Union of Polish Youth had a complete monopoly in organising all so.cial and political activity among the youth. Large sums of government money were spent and much propaganda energy used to make the youth the Praetorian Guard of the regime. Yet it was this youth which formed the active vanguard of the forces which brought down the old regime during the Polish 'October'. (Until now all the considerable effort to regain an organised Communist foothold, even in its Gomulka form, among the students, has ended in failure. ·At the moment of writing there are only a few dozen members of the Party's Union of Socialist Youth among the 20,000 Warsaw students. The situation is similar in Cracow and other provincial universities.) In spite of the Party's control of every printed word and in the face of official censorship, the voice of revolt was breaking through even in 1955. Adam Wazyk's 'Poem for Adults' which appeared in August, 1955, on the first page of the Warsaw weekly Nowa Kultura, which was then the official organ of the Union of Polish writers, became the manifesto of the revolt. G0.\1ULKA'S POLAND The demoralisation of the Bierut-Minc-Berman regime had begun some time before Krushchev's famous speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, held in Moscow in February, 1956. But there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Moscow revelations about the Stalin regime gave the death blow to the ruling triumvirate in Warsaw. One of them, Bierut, symbolically died in Moscow during the Twentieth Congress, where he was representing the Polish leadership. His two other colleagues were soon afterwards removed from any position of influence. With the personal participation of Krushchev, who rushed to Warsaw as soon as the Moscow congress wa over, a slightly changed leadership with Ochab as First Secretary was established with the aim of assuring the satellite character of Poland in relation to Soviet Russia. But the disintegration of the old regime could not be checked by small manoeuvres in the Warsaw party secretariat. Whatever moral authority the Communist leaders retained among their followers was fast disappearing as a result of the blow administered unwittingly by Krushchev. Losing its morale, the regime'could no longer stabilise the faltering state administnition and party machine. Re voLutionary Situatton In the summer of 1956 the Stalinist faction in the Party's Central Committee started to disintegrate. Ochab himself deserted them. Cyrankiewicz, the Prime Minister, moved away even earlier. The vi it paid to Mao-Tse-tung by Ochab and Lange in September, 1956, reas ured them of powerful Chinese support in case of a conflict with the Soviet party. This was the atmosphere which made possible the uprising of the Poznan workers, which lasted for three full days and was paid for with the loss of some hundreds of lives and even more wounded. In spite of advice to the contrary coming from Moscow, the Warsaw leaders decided not to fight but to appease the enraged masses of their people. The workers' uprising as well as the spiritual rebellion of the writers evoked a strong response among the professional classes and the university youth, and brought to a peak the disarray of the former party leadership. lbe administration, and especially the police, were disintegrating. The country was on the verge of complete anarchy. The Communists had only one person whom they could ask to save them from utter collapse. This was Gomulka. He had for some time been living in political retirement after being released from prison in 1954. In the middle of 1956 he was approached by the party leaders and asked to rejoin them. He agreed to do so, but on his own terms. This meant their moral and political capitulation. It meant, too, the removal of the direct Russian representatives from the Polish Politbureau. Of these, the Soviet Marshal Konstanty Rokossovsky was the most conspicuous. This they refused to do. But the Poznan uprising left the leaders without much room for manoeuvring and they hurried to restore to Gomulka his rights as party member in July, 1956. GOMULKA'S POLAND But the wave of rebellion would not recede. People started assembling to discuss the situation, to hold meetings, to adopt resolutions which wer?: neither prepared nor censored by the party apparatus. Workers demonstrated and struck. The police was helpless. In the army, and especially among the 80,000 strong 'corps of internal security ', the demand was to get rid of 'our friends' (as the Russians are ironically called in Poland) fr8m among the higher command of the Polish forces. The press censorship had partly broken down, and some very outspoken criticism of the regime of terror, fear and economic misery appeared in the press. In September Pdand was ready for a national revolution. 2. The Polish 'October' G G OMULKA had been a Communist all his adult life. The son of an oil worker in the south-eastern part of Poland, he was at heart as much a patriot as a revolutionary. The brutal treatment which his party received from the Soviet leaders just before the war and his experiences of Soviet practice between 1939 and 1941 in Lwow, where he worked as a minor trade union official, bad, by all accounts, only strengthened his patriotic sentiments. When, therefore, the bankrupt leadership of the Party asked him in the early autumn of 1956, to save what could still be saved for Communism in Poland, the 95 per cent of the nation who are not Communists saw in him only the Polish patriot who had greatly suffered at the bands of the Russians and their political plenipotentiaries in Warsaw. In October he symbolised the refusal of the Poles-all the Poles-to be docile subjects of the Soviet empire. The Soviet leaders saw the situation in a very similar way. They ordered, as Gomulka recounted a fortnight later at a conference of the Warsaw Party cadre, ' movements of Soviet military units stationed in Poland's western territories'. Soviet tanks took up strategic positions in the suburbs of Warsaw, Lodz, Poznan and many other large centres of population. Without much warning a plane from Moscow brought a heavy load of top Soviet leaders, among whom were Khrushchev, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovitch and Marshal Koniev. Twelve hours later the Soviet plane returned to Moscow with all its passengers, except Marshall Koniev who, in the presence of the Poles, was given instructions by Khrushchev to supervise the immediate withdrawal of the Soviet units to their normal bases. The Poles were left free to make any personal changes in the leadership of the party and government they wanted. That meant they were free to dismiss Marshal Rokossovsky from all his positions, which included a seat in the Warsaw Politbureau, the vice- premiership of the Government, and, what was more important, the posts GOMULKA'S POLAND of the Minister of National Defence and of Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces. This right the new Warsaw leadership exercised at once. Rokossovsky was only the most prominent among the many Soviet ' experts' who were, in the course of days, dismissed from their high positions in the Polish Army, security organs and other key sectors of the state machine and war industry, and sent home to Russia. At that time both the Poles and foreign observers in Warsaw were convinced that, because of their bad intelligence in Poland, the Soviet leaders had completely misunderstood the situation, and had therefore thought that the presence of Soviet tanks in the suburbs of Warsaw and Lodz would suffice to save the former regime, whose only virtue was absolute servility towards Moscow. They were trying to stop the heretic Gomulka from returning to power. They chose to descend on Warsaw on the very day when the members of the Central Committee of the Party assembled for its Eighth Plenary meeting. The rude behaviour of some of the Soviet leaders, and especially of Khrushchev, towards Gomulka, who only some hours later was formally elected the Party's leader, strengthened the impression that Moscow was seized with panic about the developments in satellite Poland, but, losing its head, it lost also a battle. Confronted with the determination to resist direct Soviet interference in Polish affairs, it had to accept defeat from the hands of the same Gomulka. There was much truth in all that. Some crack units of the Polish Army, workers and students of the capital and other big cities were ready to fight against a Soviet armed intervention. But the fact that the same Soviet leaders, only a fortnight later, were using guns and tanks against the population of Hungary is a persuasive proof that however unexpected their behaviour in Warsaw on October 19th, they were ready to retreat only on some important conditions. The two decisive ones were: that political power in Poland should not be shared with anybody outside the Communist Party; and that the Warsaw Pact, which assures Moscow the c.ontrol of Polish foreign policy, should remain in force.1 In October Gomulka could still promise the fulfilment of these conditions, with a fair chance of success. In November Nagy was no longer able to pacify his Hungarian compatriots with a Soviet pledge of autonomy. The restricted Polish ' October' was possible because the Poles saw in Gomulka the man who had refused to be an agent of Soviet Russia in the days of Stalin's unrestricted reign of terror. A majority of the Polish Communist Committee was prepared to accept the solution, while the Soviet leaders were ready to swallow a moral and personal defeat on October 19th, and to ac·cept, at least for the time being, a heresy inside their church. Both these elements were lacking in the Hungarian tragedy. Wladyslaw Gomulka has very few political or even personal friends. Neither his natural inclinations nor his intellectual training are such as to make him an onginal thinker. His knowledge of the outside world, and 1 Which implied also the maintenance of Soviet military bases on Polish territory. GOMULKA'S POLAND 11 especially of Western Europe, which he has never visited, is very limited. On matters which he does not know from his personal experience he will follow his Marxist dogma. But he knows his people. Commonsense is to him more important than any Marxist~Leninist doctrine. As he said at the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party on 20th October, 1956: 'Even a theory of. socialism evolved in the best possible way at any given conditions cannot embrace all the details of life which is richer than theory '. THE BACKGROUND OF GOMULKA-ISM The Polish Communist Party, which was constituted in December, 1'918, was very different from most other Communist parties. It had a respectable past. Its father was the orthodox Marxist Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, led by a group of very able intellectuals of whom Rosa Luxembourg was the best known internationally. Its mother was the Left faction of the Polish Socialist Party which, while disagreeing with the more nationalist Pilsudski wing in 1905, yet still was loyal to the traditions of revolutionary Polish patriotism, and this, much more than Marxism, inspired the Polish working class movements. The Marxists in the Polish Communist Party considered themselves the peers of Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin appeared to them as a barbarian. The growing Russian pressure, especially with the ascendance of Stalin, on Polish Communism, to consider Soviet interest as the ultimate criterion for the policies of the international workers' movement, made the Polish Communist Party a hotbed of anti-Moscow sentiment. The party officially protested against the persecution of Trotsky in the early 'twenties, and later on showed much sympathy for the right-wing heresy of Bukharin. Stalin, who never forgave or forgot, officially liquidated the Polish Communist Party in 1938, and physically annihilated most of the activist cadre, among them all the leaders. The liquidation of the Polish Communist Party was heralded by the Soviet ruler as a blow against ' Polish Fascism ', which had supposedly penetrated the Polish Communist leadership with their agents-provocateurs. Gomulka survived the massacre of his comrades in Soviet Russia because at the time he was serving a sentence in a Polish prison. When the Soviet Army occupied Lwow in 1939 as agreed with Nazi Germany, Gomulka got a job as a minor trade union official. In June, 1941, when the Soviet-Nazi friendship was broken by Hitler, and Lwow fell to the Nazi armies, Gomulka did not go east with the retreating Red Army, but, instead, went to Warsaw to live, and later to fight, under Nazi occupation. His speedy rise to the position of General Secretary of the newly founded Party was never the result of Moscow's instructions.! From the beginning of the Lublin regime a conflict developed between those Polish Communists like Bierut, Berman and Mine, who were ready 1 The Russians made it known recently in Volume 51 (Supplement) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, April, 1958, that 'Gomulka studied at the International Lenin School in Moscow in 1934-35.' This evidently did not mah~ him a zealous admirer of Soviet Russia. GOMULKA'S POLAND to accept without protest the role of Moscow's pro-consuls, and the group round Gomulka, who detested many features of the Soviet police system, were frightened by its brutality and would have liked to avoid the more disappointing results of its economic policy, especially in agriculture. It was not a coincidence that practically all the leaders of the Soviet faction in Poland had spent the war years in Soviet Russia and were brought back to Poland by the Soviet Army's Political Administration. Economic Collapse It would be wrong to imagine iliat the collapse of the Soviet regime in Poland, which occurred finally in 1956, and which culminated in the Poznan uprising and the October (VIII) Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist (United Polish Workers') Party, was the result only of the resentment at being ruled by Moscow. Of equal importance was the economic misery of the country. The Stalinist practice of compulsory collectivisation of farming was introduced into Poland, giving, as in Russia, catastrophic economic and political results. In his speech at the Eighth Plenum (20th October, 1956) Gomulka said that the result of the eight years of collectivisation policy presented a 'sad picture'. He illustrated his pessimistic opinion by quoting the following figures (they concern the year 1955): state farms percentage of land owned 12.6 percentage of total production contributed 8.4 collective farms 8.6 7.7 private farms 78.8 83.1 state farms collective farms private farms percentage of livestock production5 4 91 value of output perhectare (in zlotys) 393 517 621 He estimated the value of production lost by Polish state and collective farms in 1955 as 755 million zlotys, and this despite the large government subsidies to 'socialised farming'. This was by way of being his preliminary announcement, as the de facto ruler of the country, that all subsidies to collective farms were to be cut off immediately. He added that, 'if, as a result . . . the development of collectivised farming is slowed down, then in my opinion we shall lose nothing from either the economic or political point of view'. He ridiculed the orthodox Communist idea that 'socialism in the countryside can be built on the basis of misery and the decline of peasants' holdings'. Before 1956 was over 80 per cent of the collective tarms went into liquidation. In industry the guiding principle was that the present generation must suffer for the sake of building heavy industry. No less than 40 per cent of the national income went into investments and stock. With the exception GOMULKA'S POLAND of Warsaw, very little wa devoted to the building of accommodation for the millions who either went from the villages into the towns or who were moved from the lost eastern territories into the newly won western parts of Poland. The consumer goods indu try was left last in the queue. After 1948 it was the Communist policy in Poland to destroy even the small arti an unit which for centuries had played an important role in providing the people with many products for personal use. The result wa to make even worse the poverty of the population, especially in the rapidly growing towns. After 1950 the situation got still worse because of a large re-armament programme imposed on Poland by the Soviet planners. As in matters of external relations, so in economic affairs, the Polish Communists, at least after 1948, were completely dependent on Moscow's wishes. The Council for Mutual Economic A i tance (the economic Comintern, whose headquarter are in Mo cow) supervised and guided the Polish economy in Russia' interest. The Poles had not only to sell cheaply and buy dearly from Rus ia, but had to gear their weak economy to the needs of the much more powerful Soviet one. Large industrial combines were built for which Poland had neither the raw materials nor the skilled labour nor the home market. They could work only as part of the Soviet industrial machine. They became useless as soon a Soviet industry found a better and cheaper way of satisfying this particular need. Unbalanced Planning The Polish Communists were bad and expensive planners. They not only over-estimated the power of endurance of the people, and especially of the workers, in a situation where the most elementary technical means were refu ed to them (especially in the coal-mining industry), they were also not able to construct a balanced economic plan for Poland, as part of the overall Soviet plans. Gomulka described thus the results of the last six-year plan (1949-55): 'The practice in implementing the six-year plan was that on certain selected sectors a maximum of investment outlays were concentrated without taking into consideration other fields of economic life. And yet the national economy constitutes an integral whole. It is impossible to favour excessively certain branches of the economy at the expense of others, for the loss of proper proportion bring harm to the economy as a whole.' During the five years 1951-55 investment in the armament industry amounted to 11 per cent of total industrial investment, or more than the investments allocated to the light industries during the whole period. In spite of the fact that official statistics were reporting an annual rate of growth of about 13 per cent of gross industrial output (and since 1955, 9 per cent) the situation of the workers was getting worse and worse. Their standard of life, low even before this, was evidently falling rapidly, spreading a general demoralisation, which took the form of bad work, absenteei m and stealing. According to the Economic Bulletin for Europe, published by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe (Vol. 9, No. 3, GOMULKA'S POLAND November, 1957): 'To maintain a family (in Poland) on slightly more than. a bare subsistence standard an income ·Of about 600 zlotys per adult member of the family per month is needed, so that a family of two adults and two children would need some 1,800 to 2,000 zlotys. However, statistics of wages for 1956 show that the share of employees earning more than 2,000· zlotys per month was only 6.4 per cent of the total.' 3. After 'October'· ALREADY in 1955 the prestige of the Party was crumbling. (The government became the executive organ of the Politbureau in 1947 when the genuine Peasant and Socialist parties were destroyed or castrated.) The dreaded secret police started disintegrating because of the defection of some of its chiefs to the West. The editors of many papers and their most important contributors, although Party members, lost all faith in the officiai party line. But the shock given by Krushchev's revelations of the tyranny established by Stalin in Soviet Russia was repeated even more strongly when Gomulka and his closest friends lifted the curtain hiding the more grisly side of the regime which had persisted in Poland until1956. The greatest political achievement of the 'October' events in Poland was the emergence of a vociferous public opinion. The secret police has never since recovered or been rebuilt to the extent of being able to terrorise the people out of expressing their frank opinions about any action contemplated or taken by the Party, the Government, or even Soviet Russia. There are now virtually no Poles imprisoned for their opinions. As some· 85-90 per cent of the population can be classified as opponents of Communism, and as the Poles are not known as exceptionally meek people, the opinions expressed freely and loudly in Polish towns and villages are, by the nature of things, often more violently anti-Communist than one hears. in a Western country. This is the only political liberty which exists in Gomulka's Poland, but it is an important freedom. Setting the Limits Soon after Gomulka's return to power in the autumn of 1956, it looked as if Poland would be the only country in Europe ruled by Communists where the sphere of freedom would embrace to a great extent the printed word, and to a lesser extent the freedom to hold meetings at which non- communist opinions could be freely expressed. This was not to be. In the autumn of 1957 some freedoms won in 1956 were curtailed. The censorship of the press and books has recently become more ,stringent" Some magazines which had a great influence (like Po Prostu, the students• organ) were suppressed. In others (like Nowa Kultura) the editors and important members of the staff were removed and sometimes even banned from journalism altogether. A projected monthly magazine (Europa) which was to be devoted to reporting and discussing literary and philosophical developments in the West, was in 1958 prohibited from appearing. (In GOMULKA' S POLAND protest against this suppression a group of the most talented Communist poet and writers broke publicly with the Party.) A few dozen books, approved for publication and already printed, were withheld from circulation. But even so, writers in Poland have still a much better chance of expressing their ideas than in ~ny other existing Communist country, YugosJavia included. The hopes of many people in Poland, among them some leading Party members, that the Sejm (Parliament) would be able to act as a rep11esentative of national opinion, and thus influence the regime's policy, have not been fulfilled. But a small independent group of M.P.s, mainly progressive Catholics, and the Committees of the Sejm which meet in private, have some influence on the government's administration, though none on its policies. RELATIONS WITH THE CHURCH The expatriation of the Polish Ukrainians and Byelorussians to the · Soviet Union, of the Germans to the West, and the massacre of the Jews (less than ·one hund:red thousand of the pre-war three and a half million are still living in Poland) bas immensely increased the influence of the Roman Catholic Church among the present population of 29 million. Its 5,952 parishes, served ,by 12,000 priests, the 3,000 monasteries and convents and the two higher theological colleges are the most potent and effective national organisation in Poland. Strictly hierarchical by its nature, it is ably led by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, a man of the same age as Gomulka and, like him, of humble origin. The Roman Catholic Church in Poland has achieved an unrivalled position in the life of the people as the most trusted national organisation while linking the Poles with the West, at least with the Latin part. The years first of Nazi and then Communist persecution have not only not weakened but have mightily strengthened the hold of the Church and clergy on the nation. There can be no doubt that even in the cities, where the influence of religion has been waning in this century under the impact of rationalist ideas, the Church has in the last 20 years won back many lo t positions. Achieving .a Modus Vivendi When Gomulka returned triumphantly to power in October, 1956, he knew that to be able to stabilise the situation he needed help from the piritual leaders of the nation. One of his first acts was to free Cardinal Wyszynski from his place of detention and to hand back his official residence in Warsaw. But this was not enough to move the Church from an attitude of hostility to one of friendly neutrality. In November, 1956, a special commission was formed on the initiative of the Party, which was composed of the representatives of the Government (these were nearly all P1arty members of high standing), and the episcopate, with the aim of achieving a modus viverndi between the political rulers and the religious guides of the nation. On 15th December, 1956. the agreement was signed GOMULKA'S POLAND and published. Its most significant part was the introduction of religious training into all state schools in Poland. It is true that the teaching of religion is on a ' voluntary basis ' dependent on the wish of the parents. But in practice it means the religious training of 98 per cent of the nation's children. The religious instruction is given by priests or nuns. The Government pays their salaries and covers all other costs connected with it. As a quid pro quo Cardinal Wyszynski called on Roman Catholics to, vote in January, 1957, for the list of the National Front, which automatically secured for the Communist Party a majority in the Sejm which was then elected. Since then relations between the Communist government and the Church have had their ups and downs. The attempts of the Church to ignore the press censorship for some of its publications were suppressed-not without some police brutality. On the other hand, some more fanatical prieststespecially in smaller parishes, are using their authority to ostracise nonbelievers. Recently a few Roman Catholic priests were sentenced to prison terms of up to four years for being too outspoken against the regime in their sermons. The truce between a regime which is committed to a materialistic,. anti-religious W eltanschaung, and the most dogmatic of all Christian churches is not easy to keep. Yet it is a fact that the new and unique situation in which a Communist government hands over the nation's children to the Church, and a Prince of the Roman Catholic Church publicly supports a Communist dictator, has better survived all the changes which Poland bas undergone since 1956 than almost any other achievement of that upheaval. There are no signs that either partner to the agreement is contemplating repudiating it in the near future. THE PEASANTS No less than 45 per cent of the Polish population works in agriculture. Of the approximately 12 million so employed only between 3 and 4 per cent (all figures include the dependent members of their families) are labourers. At least 96 per cent are property-owning peasants, and most of them have very small farms. (In 1954, 61.5 per cent of all farms in Poland had less than five hectares, and a further 28.9 per cent had between five and ten hec~ares.1 Since then the situation in this respect has probably changed very little.) The Polish peasants, conservative by temperament and in politics, have always shown a grim determination to stick to their farms. On Sunday morning they go, men, women and children, to church. For the rest, they live with their crops, their hogs and their cows. The most fanatical Communist planner was unable in the years of intimidation and terror to induce more than a handful of them to change their status as independent producers into that of ' kolchozniks '. The economic measures undertaken by the Bierut regime, aimed at breaking the resistance of the peasants to the 1 One hectare=2t acres approximately. GOMULKA'S POLA D prescribed forms of 'collectivisation ', resulted in such a fall in agricultural production that the towns were permanently half-hungry and the government was forced to i•mport foodstuffs for the population. The figures which Gomulka made public in October, 1956 (quoted on page 12), show finally that not only politically and socially but also economically the ' collective ' and state farms were a very costly failure. As the Economic Bulletin for Ew1ope (Vol. 9, No. 3, November, 1957) says: 'It is a noticeable feature of developments during the years since 1950 that, for practically every crop, yields on state farms have fallen despite the preference given to them in supplies of materials, chemical fertilisers, etc., while yields on private farms rose even though they were subjected to various forms of adverse discrimination' (page 28). The Gomulka regime not only benevolently approved of the disbanding of 80 per cent of the collective farms, but directly encouraged the peasant~ to increase the size of their farms by deciding to sell at once half a million hectares of land belonging to the state. The government's official aim is to help to build up private farms to the size of 15 to 20 hectares and thus make them more efficient and profitable. Obligatory deliveries of milk have been abolished, and other deliveries greatly diminished. While investmeni in • socialist economy ' is kept at the level of 1956, investment in agriculture wac; planned to be increa ed by 20 per cent, and the whole of the increase until 1960 is expected to go into private farms. Recently Gomulka has spoken several times about the time when agriculture in Poland will also join the ' Socialist sector ' of the country's economy. But there is no sign that he contemplates a practical change in the situation which has obtained since 1956. The price of land is constantly rising and in the southern districts (Cracow, Kielce, Katowice) has reached the figure of 55,000 zlotys (£900 at the official rate of exchange) per hectare of good land. The laws of a partly free market are permitted to operate among half the population. There can also be no doubt that the standard of living of the peasant population has appreciably risen since the beginning of 1957. It is true to say that this is the only social group in Poland which has substantially improved its material position thanks to the political changes which occurred in Warsaw in October, 1956. THE WORKERS The upnsmg in Poznan was the most dramatic demonstration which the Polish workers staged against the pre-Gomulka regime in Poland. It was a protest which matured on the soil of extremely low wages but which was set off by the contempt shown by the rulers to the practical needs of the working classes. The trade unions, as in every other Communist country, were a part of the government machine and their official purpose was to extract from the workers the highest possible productivity and to discourage them from making any moves in defence of their rights and needs. The trade unions had also been given the function of providing some social security and of looking after the leisure activities of their members. But GOMULKA' S POLAND these, too, were used as rewards or punishments according to the docility or otherwise of the workers vis-a-vis the managers, the Party and the state. The workers usually protested against this state of affairs by absenteeism,. slackness at work and strikes. They still do so. A few days after ·Gomulka's return to power in the Party, the former leaders of the trade unions were physically removed from their offices by Warsaw workers. N·ew leaders wer~e installed. But the fact that the oountry's economy at that time was in a state of complete exhaustion and that the new regime had at once to announce a c-omplete wages freeze, killed any reforming zeal which the new trade union leaders may have brought with them. They had again to accept the role of the Party's and Government's representatives on the shop floor. But now they sometimes. bring to the notice ·of the political leadership the more worrying aspects of their members' expenence. Workem' Councils The more revolutionary elements among the workers, who played a very important role during the October events in Warsaw (the lead.ers of the Zeran automobile factory were their spearhead), spontaneously \developed a movement for Workers' Councils, which would introduc~democratic control into production. These were rejected by Gomulka as soon as he felt that his position was stabilised. In May, 1957, Gomulka publicly put these severe limits to their activities: 'The Workers' Councils. are not organs of political power of the working class . . . They are not a form of collective ownership of an industrial establishment. We (the Party) have rejected as unrealistic the idea of constructing some sort of hierarchic pyramid over the Councils. [At that time half of all industrial undertakings. in Poland had their Workers' Councils.-L. B.] The Workers' Councils do not and should not have any funds to cover their activities. The Councils do not and should not have any state positions.' The obvious lack of sympathy expressed by Gomulka for this form of working-class organisation was mostly political in origin. The new Communist leaders saw in it, and rightly, an autonomous revolutionary movement, which might one day challenge the Party's claim to be the only representative and leader of the Polish working classes. The existence of Workers' Councils, functioning in the way they had done in October, 1956, when they armed the factory crews, organised political meetings and demonstrations (in support of the same G·omulka) and generally acted outside the normal political framework of a Communist state, was full of dangers for the monopolistic position of the Party. When ·Gomulka attacked them (in May, 1957) he accused them of being a 'favourable ground for the infiltration into its ranks of influences alien to the working class, and frequently even hostile to it '. If one accepts the Leninist conception that the Communist Party is the only legitimate working-class organisation, then any deviation from it can be described in the way Gomulka has done here. The fact is that the Workers' Councils were generally led by Party members, mostly of the younger generation. But it is also true that many of these GOMULKA'S POLAND working-class leaders were deeply disillusioned with the Party and were looking to other forms of political organisation which would help Poland towards a democratic socialist transformation. In 1958 the Workers' Councils were merged by Party and government