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40 Years of Communism in Poland: Stalin's House on a

Soft Foundation
Eastside Kia

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Published: August 18, 1989

Calgary, AB
AMVIC licensed dealer

Stalin said that imposing Communism on Roman Catholic Poland

was as absurd as putting a saddle on a cow. But after World War II,
he went ahead and imposed it anyway, even though the roots of
Communism in Poland had never run very deep.

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The imposition of Communism was further complicated by Stalin's

prewar decision to disband the old Polish Communist Party and expel
it from the Communist International, presumably because of its
nationalist taint and as a gesture of good will toward Nazi Germany, a
sequence of events that led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the
division of Poland in the first weeks of the war.

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As the war was ending, the Polish Communists were weak and divided, with those who
fought as independent guerrillas being openly distrustful of the Polish operatives who
were returning from exile in Moscow. One such group arrived in the town of Chelm, where
on April 21, 1945, under protection of the advancing Red Army, they proclaimed a
provisional government. The date is celebrated as the official national day of the Polish
People's Republic.
The Chelm group was put in place by the Kremlin to challenge the claims to legitimacy of
Poland's Western-oriented exile government in London. As Soviet troops occupied Poland,
key leaders of the London-based government reluctantly returned to join in a government
of national unity for fear that if they did not, Soviet puppets would simply take all power.
Those fears were heightened by the Potsdam and Yalta agreements, in which the Western
powers acceded to the reality of the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Europe.
Consolidating Power
During two years of awkward coalition, Stalin's Polish satraps began moving to establish
Soviet-style control over the economy and social life of the country. In 1946, a national
referendum, now widely believed to have been rigged, called for the nationalization of
medium and heavy industry as well as granting the Communists a deciding role in national
affairs.
In this period anti-Communist bands took up arms in what Poles refer to as a partisan
war. Meantime, with the backing of the Soviet Army, the Communists moved to abolish
people and factions identified with the wartime government in London. Stanislaw
Mikolajczyk, the best-known politician of this group, was hounded into flight while his
closest aides were accused of treachery and imprisoned.
In December 1948, in what amounted to a shotgun wedding, the Communists forced a
merger with surviving elements of the prewar Polish Socialist Party to form the Polish
United Workers Party. This amalgam, which has held power ever since, sought to paper

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http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/18/world/40-years-of-communism-in-poland-stalin-s-house-on-a-soft-foundation.html

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40 Years of Communism in Poland - Stalin's House on a Soft Foundation - NYTimes.com

over many antagonistic factions, including prewar clandestine Communists who survived
Stalin's purges and even some followers of Poland's prewar national hero, Marshal Josef
Pilsudski, a nominal socialist who in 1920 led Poles to victory over Bolshevik troops.

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With the formation of this party the period of Stalinist consolidation and terror gained
momentum. The church came under increasing attack. After the apostasy of Tito in
Yugoslavia in the early 1950's, waves of purges and show trials shook the army and
bureaucracy. Education became patterned after the Soviet model, with pupils being
encouraged to join groups of Young Pioneers.
Real power was exercised largely through the security apparatus. Yet even this Stalinist
leadership refrained from fully nationalizing agriculture on the Soviet model in what was
one of the first deviations to appease Polish feelings and resentments. The First Round of
Protests
These resentments gained force and expression after Stalin's death in 1953. By the mid1950's, 100,000 political prisoners had been freed. But discontent mounted, leading to
worker protests in Poznan in 1956, two months before the uprising in Budapest, where
Imre Nagy and his associates raised similar calls for what has been called national
Communism.
In Poland, the surge was met by the appointment of Wladyslaw Gomulka, a man who eight
years earlier had been suspended from the party and jailed on Stalin's orders as ''a rightist
nationalist deviationist.'' He had spent the war as a guerrilla fighter and his re-emergence
as the party leader headed off unrest. In what was to become a recognizable cycle,
Gomulka admitted party mistakes of the past, pleaded for sacrifice from workers and
promised significant changes.
At first the crowds cheered. The church gained greater freedom and for a while there was
wider tolerance for diverse opinion. But in 1968, as a consequence of an intrigue by hardline opponents, Gomulka allowed a campaign against student activists that evolved into a
full-scale anti-Semitic campaign that sent most of Poland's remaining Jews into flight.
And in 1970, when another generation of workers took to the streets to protest food prices,
the police fired and killed scores. Gomulka's rule collapsed.
The new party leader, Edward Gierek, sought to appease and reassure an alienated nation
and rebuild a weakening party with consumerism. Vast amounts of money were borrowed
from the West in order to build factories that would produce exports and raise living
standards. But after a few years many of the factories lay unfinished and Poland suffered
under a mountain of debt.
The students who had protested in 1968 and the workers who had been shot at in 1970
were able to join forces in efforts that eventually gave birth to Solidarity as both a
movement and a union. After the selection of a Polish Pope in 1978, the emergence of an
autonomus union led millions of Poles to emerge from silence, caution and cynicism.
Nearly a third of the nation joined Solidarity and hundreds of thousands, mostly young
workers, were emboldened to quit the Communist Party. Walesa as a Symbol
In symbolic terms what happened was a nightmare for the party and its ideologues. Lech
Walesa, an electrician with callouses on his hands, came out of a shipyard named for Lenin
to challenge those who claimed to rule in the name of the working class. A Pole from a
peasant background was demanding greater freedom and an end to party monopolies.
In response, the party turned to Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. Communist generals are
supposed to serve rather than lead parties. Moreover, Jaruzelski's class origins as a
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40 Years of Communism in Poland - Stalin's House on a Soft Foundation - NYTimes.com

2016-04-28, 11:03 AM

member of the gentry were suspect. But here again, the party was following old Polish
traditions, not new Communist ones.
General Jaruzelski moved to crush Solidarity and in 1981 he declared martial law. After
that decision the party suffered massive defections, particularly from younger workers. In
some areas the only party members were the police officers and the soldiers.
A specialist in tactics, General Jaruzelski spent the early part of his term on a zig-zag
course, trying to hold off pro-Moscow hard-liners and Westernizing liberals in his party,
end an economic boycott by the West and preserve some role for the party.
With the emergence of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow, he moved toward reform,
deciding to reckon with the ideas and men of Solidarity, which he had not been able to
squelch. Under his leadership the party has accepted ''democratization,'' entering
discussions that it assumed might lead to power-sharing but which, its stalwarts are now
hoping, will stop short of a surrender of power.
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