CHAPTER SIX
GOMUŁKA VERSUS STALIN
1944–1949
At first glance, Poland may well seem like an open-and-shut case to demonstrate Stalin’s brutal domination of what should have been a sovereign European country after World War II. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939, opened the door to a series of fierce attacks on Poland and the Polish people. In a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on October 31, Soviet foreign minister Molotov exulted, “One swift blow at Poland, first by the German army and followed by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty.”1 After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Stalin demanded at the Allied conferences at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam that Poland be “friendly” and “democratic” according to the Soviet definition of those terms, which meant that the rulers in Moscow would determine the character of Poland’s postwar government as well as its political leadership. In wartime meetings with potential partners in the postwar Polish government Stalin was frequently conciliatory.2 But in his own mind he was clear that the new Poland would serve Soviet aims and that no Polish government would compromise the security of the USSR’s western borders, which German armies—whom he expected to be ready to attack again in twenty years—had been able to cross in World Wars I and II. A high-level report from the British Joint Intelligence Service stated what all the Allies understood: “… a major Russian strategic interest [is] to ensure that Poland can never again become a base for hostile activities and operations.”3
In addition to his old-fashioned “realist” view that the Soviets needed to control Poland’s geostrategic position on the continent, Stalin quite simply mistrusted and disliked the Poles. From the time of the Polish-Soviet War in 1919–1921 through his anti-Polish “actions” and terror campaign of the 1930s, for Stalin the Polish nation was defined by what he considered the devious, effete Polish noblemen, the ubiquitous Polish “Pans,” and the ultramontane, conservative, and anti-Soviet stance of the Polish Catholic Church. The Polish military and intelligence services, he frequently complained in the 1930s, sought to undermine the Soviet Union by recruiting agents, fashioning a variety of underground conspiratorial organizations, and supporting Ukrainian separatism.4
In order to eliminate what he saw as the nefarious Polish threat, and thus to strengthen the Soviet state, Stalin insisted to the Allies that Poland’s borders be substantially redrawn. What had been interwar eastern Poland—in Soviet terms western Belorussia, western Ukraine, and parts of Lithuania, lands that included the major cities of Wilno (Vilnius) and Lwów (Lviv)—would become part of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s territorial claims were based on the 1919 Curzon Line, drawn in preliminary fashion after World War I to divide Poland from the Soviet Union roughly along the Bug River. Stalin cut a deal with Churchill (and eventually Roosevelt) that Poland would be compensated with German territory that bordered in the west on the Oder and Neisse Rivers and included the major cities of Breslau and Stettin, along with Silesia and parts of East Prussia. By shifting Polish territory westward in this fashion—which implied the forced deportation of Germans from Poland and Poles from the Soviet Union—Stalin increased the Poles’ dependency on the Soviet Union and thus put additional pressure on them to conform to his policies.5 Who, after all, would defend the integrity of their newly carved national territory from a likely revanchist Germany if not the mighty Soviet Union?
Stalin also ensured that Poland would conform to his wishes through his proven methods of violence and intimidation. This had begun already in the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when close to four hundred thousand Poles were deported from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to central Asia and many others were killed, including the twenty-two thousand Polish officers and administrators who were interned and then executed in the Katyń forest and elsewhere in NKVD camps in April and May 1940. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and a brief period of amnesty for those Poles deported to the Soviet Union, Stalin abrogated relations with the London government-in-exile in April 1943 in response to the questions it raised about the Polish officers who had disappeared at Katyń and its insistent claim on the eastern Polish territory demanded by the Soviets. Despite these Soviet actions and the murderous German occupation policies, the Polish government-in-exile and its underground organizations carried on a well-organized and extensive resistance movement dedicated to the struggle for Polish liberation. In August 1944, the London government and the powerful Polish underground Home Army, the Armia Krajowa (AK), instigated the Warsaw Uprising, which, it was hoped, would both throw off the Nazi yoke in Warsaw and prove the value of the Polish democratic movement to the Allies.6
7. Territorial Changes in Poland
The Germans eventually crushed the uprising, physically demolished most of Warsaw, and deported most of the surviving citizens of the city to concentration camps. The Soviets, whose armies had reached Praga on the other side of the Vistula in early August, stood idly by, offering the uprising no help and letting it fail, despite some last-minute attacks by units of the Soviet-supported Polish First Army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling.7 In the end, there were some twenty-two thousand military casualties on the Polish side and seventeen thousand on the German side—and 150,000 to 200,000 Polish civilians who had died from German massacres, artillery bombardments, fires, and collapsing buildings.8
The violence continued in the wake of the Soviet advance. As Red Army soldiers marched into Polish territory in early summer 1944, finally seized Warsaw on January 17, and crossed the Oder in mid-April 1945, they were accompanied by NKVD, SMERSH (military counterintelligence), and other Soviet security units. NKVD General Ivan Serov was put in charge of Soviet repressive policies behind the lines of the Red Army; his formal title, “NKVD advisor to the Ministry of Public Security in Poland,” belied his unlimited powers to chase down, imprison, torture, and ultimately eliminate enemies of the new order that was being imposed on Poland. His directives from Stalin and Beria were clear: eliminate the danger from the Home Army, which had fought the Nazis from the underground. Stalin and Serov shared a deep antipathy for these resistance fighters, who, on their part, were in their majority fervently anti-Soviet. In his memoir notes, Serov blustered, “These liars! These blackguards! We fight and they wait until they can seize power in Warsaw.”9
Aside from the regular military authorities, Serov proceeded to divide Poland into districts, each of which was overseen by NKVD units whose job it was to destroy the opponents of the Soviet Union. He himself led the effort to infiltrate AK units, arrest those members who refused to leave the underground and turn over their weapons, and torture and brutalize those captured, ferreting out information about other resistance members and their units. According to Soviet figures, by the end of the war, some twenty-five thousand Poles, mostly AK fighters, were in NKVD camps; thousands more had been killed in a series of coordinated “actions” or in outright battles between the Soviet police units and the AK.10
While Polish units were engaged in this desperate struggle with the Soviets, the London government, in a last-ditch effort to influence the development of postwar politics, tried to set up a provisional government in the underground led by its vice prime minister, Jan Stanisław Jankowski, and the commander of the AK forces, General Leopold Okulicki. Serov enticed them into “negotiations,” which ended in the arrest of sixteen underground Polish leaders and their abduction by airplane to Moscow.11 Once there, they were placed before a military tribunal, convicted of engaging in anti-Soviet disruptions in the rear of the Red Army, and sentenced to various prison terms. While most received relatively short terms, three never returned from Russia, including Okulicki, who was summarily “liquidated,” to use Serov’s words, while in the central NKVD prison and headquarters, the Lubianka.12
The Polish Communists and Gomułka
This dismal picture of the chances for any real Polish sovereignty after the war is made only bleaker by the history of Polish communism in the 1930s and 1940s. Accused of various forms of deviation, including the most dangerous, Trotskyism, the Polish Communist Party (KPP) was abolished by Stalin in 1938 and many of its leaders were executed or disappeared into the camps of the Gulag. Some Polish communists, the later party leaders Bolesław Bierut and Władysław Gomułka (comrade “Wiesław”) among them, survived the purges because they were in Polish prison at the time. Others, like Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc, spent the war years in Moscow, where they worked with small groups of Polish communists. One result of the murderous purges of the KPP was to make most of the survivors all the more subservient to Stalin and willing to do anything to earn his confidence. Those who stayed in Moscow during the war dutifully performed the assignments they received from the Comintern and, after its dissolution in June 1943, by the International Committee of the Central Committee, both of which were led by the famous Bulgarian communist activist Georgi Dimitrov, who enjoyed direct relations with Stalin. It was these Polish communist leaders in Soviet exile who formed the “Central Bureau of Communists in Poland.” With Berman as its “informal director,” the group eventually took control of Polish administrative and internal security functions after the war and ensured that Moscow’s injunctions would be followed to a tee.13
The group of Polish communists who remained in Poland during the war formed the core of the Polish Workers’ Party (the PPR), so named because Stalin, no doubt correctly, deemed that the name “communist” would alienate too many Poles. Nevertheless, the PPR was the legitimate “in-country” heir of the KPP, and some of its members continued to operate under the prewar communists’ maxim that following Moscow’s orders was the only road to success in Poland, where communism had such a terrible reputation. Some even believed that the only way to achieve their aims was for Poland to join the Soviet Union as the sixteenth republic.14 Others thought that a small revolutionary cadre, on the model of the Bolsheviks, should seize power in a violent revolution, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, and proceed to transform Poland’s social and economic life by force. But there were also communists and PPR members, Władysław Gomułka most prominent among them, who thought differently. They believed that the problem with the KPP had been its excessive reliance on the orders of the Comintern and its lack of understanding of the special character of the Polish people.
For a good part of the war, Gomułka and the PPR were cut off from any potential channels of communication with Moscow. During this time, they were absorbed with the everyday struggle of supporting their small army of anti-Nazi fighters, the Armia Ludowa (People’s Army, AL), issuing printed proclamations, dealing with Gestapo infiltrators and assaults, and combating the sometimes hostile actions of the AK and the right-wing underground. Even after December 1941, when the Soviets sent the Comintern-trained Polish communists Marceli Nowotko, Paweł Finder, and Małgorzata Fornalska into Nazi-occupied Poland to impose discipline on the PPR, communications with Moscow remained poor, and the problems of sheer survival lessened the pressure of ideological conformity.15 Nowotko was likely assassinated by a party comrade under mysterious circumstances in November 1942, and Finder and Fornalska were seized by the Gestapo in November 1943 and later shot. With the Comintern emissaries gone, the codes for communications with Moscow also disappeared. This left Gomułka without direct guidance from Moscow and ready and able to shape PPR policies in his own way. Dimitrov and the Kremlin leaders found out about Gomułka’s election as First Secretary of the PPR only in February 1944—and were none too pleased. Especially Dimitrov distrusted those Polish communists he did not personally know.16
Gomułka’s views from the beginning of his involvement with the PPR seem to have diverged from those of the more Moscow-oriented Polish communists, in part because he had little to do with Stalin or Dimitrov during the war. He sought ways to make the PPR program and communism more palatable to the Polish masses, and to workers in particular. Gomułka was an autodidact and prolific reader (Stalin derogatorily called him a “scholastic”17). He had risen through the ranks of the Polish trade union movement in the 1920s and 1930s and actively nurtured ties with Polish laborers in factories and workshops in Nazi-occupied Poland.18 He was also deeply influenced by the Comintern’s popular front thinking of the mid- and late 1930s, and he was less prone than the PPR leaders Bolesław Bierut and Franciszek Jóźwiak to seek Moscow’s advice on every action and thought. Despite the fact that the Soviets were valued allies, Gomułka wrote in his memoirs, he believed that the Poles understood their own conditions better than the comrades in Moscow.19 This related in particular to such Soviet programs as collectivization, which Gomułka accepted on ideological grounds—he was, after all, a Marxist-Leninist—but rejected nonetheless as alien to the Polish character.20 Gomułka had also personally witnessed the economic and moral effects of the horrible famine that had resulted from the collectivization drive during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1934–1935, and he worried about similar consequences if collectivization came to Poland.21 Moreover, he was more open to unconventional political alliances than most of his comrades. As part of his attempt to spread the influence of the PPR in Polish society, Gomułka even sought to establish contacts with AK units. But the AK both loathed and feared the Polish communists, and Gomułka learned that there was little chance of working with them as partners in the future government.
Some of Gomułka’s more Moscow-oriented comrades, Bolesław Bierut among them, frowned on his initiatives to broaden the PPR’s contacts in the underground. Bierut held considerable influence as head of the KRN (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, National State Council), the PPR-founded national liberation movement, which was meant to serve as the basis of the future government of Poland. On June 10, 1944, Bierut sent a report to Dimitrov in which he denounced Gomułka and his closest PPR comrades for their “zig-zag” politics, “from sectarianism to extreme opportunism,” and “lack of principles.”22 Gomułka reached out too far to other underground groups, Bierut complained, and needed to be disciplined. Meanwhile, Gomułka himself tried to convince the Soviets to turn over arms to the AL (People’s Army), suggesting that a more active struggle by the communists against the Nazis would win the KRN support among the Polish people. But he was faced with considerable mistrust from Moscow, something, he wrote later, that he found unjust and that “disturbed me a lot.”23
In fact, at this point the Soviets were more interested in building the reputation of the newly formed Lublin government (PKWN, the Polish Committee of National Liberation), which they had established in liberated Polish territory in July 1944, than in talks with the recalcitrant AK or even building up the communist dominated AL. Earlier, they had supported the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP), a group of Moscow-oriented communists, tied to Dimitrov, as the core of a future Polish leadership. Given the problems of the PPR and the lack of Soviet support, Gomułka’s comrades in the underground insisted that he go to Moscow and meet with Stalin and Dimitrov. He did so in the second week of August 1944, but to little avail. His meeting with Stalin was brief and unremarkable. The one with Dimitrov hardly went better; predisposed to dislike the Central Committee official because of his dismissiveness of the PPR, Gomułka took umbrage at what he perceived as Dimitrov’s “tone of superiority.”24 Yet the trip, which remained without tangible results, was only the first of nearly monthly pilgrimages to Moscow that Gomułka would undertake over the next several years, usually together with fellow PPR leaders, to meet with Stalin and the Soviet leadership.25
During one of these meetings with Stalin in March 1945, with Poland cleared of the Nazis and the Lublin provisional government, now with Gomułka’s participation, having moved to Warsaw, the PPR first secretary decided to raise a difficult issue.26 Gomułka was upset that Okulicki, Jankowski, and fourteen other representatives of the underground organization had just been arrested by “General Ivanov” (Serov), especially without any previous notice to the PPR.27 This was not a matter of their guilt or innocence, Gomułka argued, but of the sovereignty of the Polish Provisional Government. In general, he stated, the way Serov conducted NKVD operations in Poland had alienated Polish society and made it more difficult for the PPR to spread its influence. Serov, Gomułka added, “did more political harm to us than the entire activities of the Council of National Unity [the underground Polish government group] that was arrested.”28
These arrests would only encourage the AK to go further underground in opposition to the Polish Provisional Government and do even more damage. What Gomułka did not say, but Stalin surely knew, was that he and Serov did not get along at all. They constantly clashed about the extent of the danger of the AK and about Gomułka’s persistent desire to negotiate with the less violent groups within the scattered units of the underground army. Stalin was unhappy with both Gomułka’s tone and his words. “You are talking like you were the head of a great power, but you are the leader of a weak party in a weak country, which we liberated. They shot at our people, and we will hold them accountable to us.” “But they shoot at our people even more,” Gomułka parried. It might even be the case, he continued, that the Polish government would punish them more severely than the Soviets would. Stalin conceded that Serov, while being “a good Chekist,” showed “little subtlety” and promised to find him a new assignment.29 Six weeks later, Serov was indeed transferred to Germany, which Gomułka interpreted as “a great success for us.”30
Gomułka raised a second important issue during this meeting: his efforts to find common ground with Wincenty Witos’s Polish Peasant Party, the Stronnictwo Ludowe (SL). For Gomułka, this was another attempt to broaden the PPR’s influence in society and to create a “people’s democracy.”31 Stalin agreed with this approach and noted that the main bugaboo of the SL, collectivization, was essentially off the table for Poland. There was no need for it; in the Soviet Union it had taken years to accomplish and reflected different historical circumstances. As Gomułka understood Stalin’s remarks, Poland did not need to even think about collectivization for another fifteen or twenty years. Poland would also need alliances with France and Great Britain, and would need to maintain friendly relations with the United States, Stalin explained; the Soviet Union would not be Poland’s only ally.32 In the end, Gomułka was pleased with the “pragmatism” that, he thought, the Soviet leader had demonstrated at every stage of their discussions.33
Stalin’s articulated views about the future of Polish communism as Soviet troops cleared Poland of the Nazis and the war came to an end closely concurred with those of Gomułka and his closest comrades, Zenon Kliszko and Marian Spychalski among them. Stalin provided an outline for a new kind of democracy and a parliamentary government that would reflect the needs of the Polish people as a whole. There would be no reason for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as he repeatedly told the Polish communists. To a delegation of them, he explained in May 1946, “In Poland there is no dictatorship of the proletariat, and there is no need for it … the capitalists and large landowners have been overthrown in Poland with the help of the Red Army. This is why there is no basis for a dictatorship of the proletariat.”34 The bloodshed of the Russian Revolution was unnecessary in Poland; Moscow had already assured those social and political changes that were needed for forming a “new democracy,” sometimes called people’s democracy, a transitional form of government on the way to socialism, not a bourgeois, capitalist-dominated parliamentary state but one controlled by progressive, democratic, and anti-fascist forces. But neither Gomulka nor Stalin had a pluralist country in mind, one that would be controlled by non-communist forces. The “Polish road to socialism” would be one dominated by the PPR.35
Gomułka and the Soviets
The new Polish Government of National Unity, which was formed under Soviet auspices in Lublin on January 1, 1945, and moved to Warsaw soon thereafter, was based on the previous, communist-dominated Lublin government. As a concession to the Western Allies, in June 1945 Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the former premier of the London government-in-exile, was included as minister of agriculture and second deputy prime minister. But neither Stalin nor the Polish communists, including Gomułka, who was first deputy prime minister, were going to allow Mikołajczyk and his political supporters from the newly established Polish Peasant Party (called Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, or PSL, to distinguish it from the now communist-dominated SL) to seize the initiative from the Democratic Front controlled by the PPR. After a series of arrests of anti-communist politicians and manipulated elections, including the cruical falsified “referendum” of October 1947, the widely admired Mikołajczyk fled the country in the same month.36 Despite considerable pressure on him, Mikołajczyk had done his best under life-threatening circumstances. As early as February 1946, the American ambassador had reported to the State Department that “Mikołajczyk’s life is in danger,” and in January 1947 he had warned again that Mikołajczyk could be tried for treason and executed, given shrill public statements by Bierut and Gomułka.37
Along with the other PPR leaders, Bolesław Bierut, the new president of Poland, Finance Minister Hilary Minc, and Jakub Berman, the head of public security, Gomułka became an important member of the new government leadership. He continued as first secretary of the PPR but assumed government duties as first deputy prime minister and, against Stalin’s advice, as minister of the Recovered Territories (Ziemie Odzyskane). In the latter position, Gomułka oversaw the flight and sometimes brutal removal of some six million Germans from the lands in the west and south of the new Poland.38 In his orders to party officials, he stated, “We must expel all the Germans because countries are built on national lines and not on multinational ones.”39 At the same time, he oversaw the resettlement of millions of Poles both from the Soviet Union and, more haphazardly, from central Poland, to these same areas.
In this function, he crossed swords with the Soviets once again. The Recovered Territories were justifiably described as Poland’s “Wild West,” and for the first years after the war, Gomułka was busy trying to bring order to chaos. Both Red Army occupation units and Soviet reparations teams tied to economic ministries in Moscow wreaked havoc on the ground. Soviet army commanders in the Recovered Territories seized formerly German agricultural stores, housing, and even some workshops and factories to support their troops, often paying little or no attention to the needs of the incoming Polish administration. And while the Poles also had legitimate claims to reparations from the Germans, the economic ministries in Moscow had independent authorization from the Soviet government to seize German factories and materials and send them back to the Soviet Union. Gomułka did what he could to stem the flow of these assets and to impose some limits on the plundering Red Army units, yet his complaints found little resonance in his own government and among the more Moscow-oriented PPR leadership, let alone in Moscow itself.40
6.1 Polish president Bolesław Bierut speaks at a National Youth Rally, July 21–22, 1946. Vice Premier and First Secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party Władysław Gomułka is on the right. POLISH PRESS AGENCY.
The behavior of Soviet troops on Polish territory, and especially in the Recovered Territories, also drove Gomułka to distraction. In a memorandum to the Soviet politburo from September 11, 1945, a copy of which with Gomułka’s handwritten edits can be found in the Polish archives, the Polish leadership complained about the frequent cases of murder and robbery committed by drunken groups of “soldiers-marauders,” who plagued the roads and railways with their depredations. “The rape of women is a constant phenomenon,” stated the memorandum. Combined with other immoral and illegal behavior, this played into the hands of “anti-Soviet agitation” and damaged the popularity of the PPR as well. “There is nothing easier [for our opponents] than to create among the masses the impression that the PPR is also responsible for all the marauding of the soldiers of the Red Army in Poland.…”41 When Gomułka confronted Stalin about this problem at one of their meetings in the summer of 1945, the Soviet leader admitted that during the war the Red Army had learned to plunder. But just as he did when dealing with other East European communist leaders with similar complaints, Stalin downplayed his soldiers’ illicit behavior, responding to Gomułka with the story that in Berlin two hundred thousand watches had been stolen and that demobilization would soon bring the issue to an end anyway.42
Negative Soviet actions in Poland, whether it was the confiscation of food for the occupation troops, the dismantling and removal of industrial plants in the Recovered Territories, the seizure of already scarce housing, or the drunken and criminal depredations of Soviet troops, indeed caused serious problems for the PPR and the Polish communists. The populace perceived the PPR as Moscow’s party. Its members could not complain publicly about Soviet behavior and show solidarity with the population because that would have alienated the Soviet partners and, in some cases, fellow Polish communists. Among the PPR leaders, Gomułka stood out by trying everything he could to deal with these problems. He even went so far as to give orders to shoot Red Army soldiers in the Recovered Territories who removed assets from the region without official approval.43
Of still greater significance, especially in the long term, was that Gomułka also developed the ideology of what became known as the “Polish road to socialism,” though he himself rarely used the phrase.44 Many of Gomułka’s ideas were already set out during the war. At least initially, they dovetailed neatly with Stalin’s efforts to convince the Poles and the West that he had no intention of taking over Poland. There seemed to be full agreement between Gomułka and Stalin that there would be no “dictatorship of the proletariat,” no collectivization, and no “socialization” of large industries, only some limited nationalization. The Peasant Party (SL) and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) would be allowed to operate within the Democratic Front of parties, led by the PPR. There would be normal contacts with both the East and the West, though Soviet influence would predominate. As Stalin told Gomułka in a 1945 meeting, the PPR should, above all, “maintain its ties with the Polish people” and also “continue its relations with the British and the Americans,” since “otherwise the Polish people would not understand it.”45
Despite Gomułka’s episodic complaints about Moscow’s heavy hand in Poland, the policies of the Polish road to socialism took hold in the immediate postwar period. There was general agreement between the PPR leadership and Moscow, though, that any developments that might lead to an anti-Soviet government would not be tolerated. Moreover, the Polish communist-dominated Security Service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, or UB) worked closely with NKVD units in eliminating underground opposition and anti-Soviet activities, which were defined very broadly. Yet, as everywhere in Europe immediately after the war, Moscow enjoined the communists to drop their revolutionary rhetoric and seek broad coalitions with left and bourgeois parties to stimulate the formation of anti-fascist “people’s democracies.”
Gomułka’s efforts to increase the PPR’s popularity frequently led him to clash with more orthodox Polish communists. At the February and May–June 1945 Central Committee plenums, for example, he inveighed against “sectarians” among party members who did not share “the spirit of the Polish people” and were not open to the “honorable people” in the “pro-London” camp, who were ready to join the struggle for a new Poland. He also criticized the security forces of the UB for pursuing their own radical ends as if they were “a second government.” They were prone, he charged, to working in tandem with NKVD and Red Army units, which gave the appearance of the dependence of the new Poland on the Soviet Union and of the PPR on the Soviet party. “The masses should consider us a Polish party,” Gomułka stated. “Let [our opponents] attack us as Polish communists, but not as ‘agents’ [of Moscow].”46 No doubt Gomułka felt empowered to give voice to his opinions by the success of his policies; Polish politics and government were indeed controlled by the PPR and undergirded by Stalin’s apparent approval and direct Soviet support.
6.2 Poles visit the Kremlin, March 5, 1947. From left to right: unknown; Józef Cyrankiewicz; Joseph Stalin, Władysław Gomułka, Hilary Minc, Viacheslav Molotov. EAST NEWS (POLAND).
Gomułka and the Cominform
During his vacation and health cure in the Soviet Union in June 1947, Gomułka met with Stalin in Moscow and discussed with the Soviet dictator the development of the people’s democracies in Europe. It was on this occasion that Stalin first broached the idea of holding a meeting of European Communist Party leaders in Poland for an “exchange of experiences” and for founding a journal to explore the theoretical and practical implications of this new, transitional form of government.47 When Jakub Berman met with Stalin and several other Soviet leaders on August 20, 1947, possible places in Poland for such a meeting of representatives of the communist parties were discussed. As he had told Gomułka, Stalin described the proposed get-together to Berman as a “private, informational consultation.” When Berman inquired whether the meeting was to pass a resolution, Molotov answered only that there would be a communiqué that would adumbrate the creation of “a newspaper, which would be a common organ of the parties.”48 Later Gomułka claimed that he had been “hoodwinked” by Stalin into hosting what became the first meeting of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in September 1947, whose agenda, set by Moscow, went much beyond Gomułka’s expectations of general discussions and a new socialist publication.49
It may well be, as Gomułka later indicated, that Stalin had had right from the beginning far more radical aims in mind for the Cominform meeting than he had initially disclosed to Gomułka. But it is also true that tensions between the Soviet Union and its former Western Allies increased over this same period, and that Stalin’s attitudes hardened over the summer of 1947, after the U.S. secretary of state General George C. Marshall announced the Recovery Plan for Europe (the so-called Marshall Plan) at the Harvard commencement in June 1947.50 Initially, there were signs that the Soviets might participate in the Paris meeting where Marshall Plan aid would be discussed. But Stalin and Molotov quickly concluded that the Americans would not agree to Moscow’s conditions for loans, and in turn not very subtly instructed the Poles and the Czechoslovaks, who were desperate to receive Marshall Plan credits, to denounce the plan as an American plot to exploit their economies.
At the meeting of the Cominform, held in the Silesian resort of Szklarska Poręba on September 22–23, 1947, Stalin’s representative, Andrei Zhdanov, turned the proceedings into an effort to establish firmer control over the East European parties’ approaches to their political tasks and to force the French and Italian parties to radicalize their tactics for achieving power within their respective countries.51 While the attacks on the Western parties, spearheaded by the militant Yugoslavs, violated Gomułka’s understanding of individual roads to socialism, the Polish communist leader also worried that Zhdanov’s “two-camp” speech, which raised the temperature of the ideological struggle between East and West, would cause his own party problems at home, given the still powerful attraction of the Western Allies. He later wrote that he tried to convince his Polish comrades and others at the meeting to resist the radicalizing tenor of the discussions but was rebuffed in no uncertain terms.52 When he turned to Minc for support, for example, the Moscow-true PPR leader declined, saying, “I’m not so stupid.”53
Yet even after the meeting dispersed, Gomułka continued to work to limit the damage he felt that the notion of the Cominform as a potential new Comintern would cause the PPR’s image in Poland by calling into question the sovereignty of the European communist parties. He also rebuffed the suggestion that the Cominform headquarters should be located in Poland.54 Gomułka’s long-time confederate, Marian Spychalski, stated in an interrogation protocol in December 1950 that Gomułka had invited him to his home to talk about the Cominform meeting after his return to Warsaw from Szklarska Poręba. Reportedly, the “furious” Gomułka told him that he understood better than the other comrades “the nationalist character of Polish society, which is very sensitive to the issue of sovereignty vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.…” Polish reactionaries would denounce Polish communists’ participation in the Cominform as a blow to Poland’s independence; using this argument, Gomułka told Spychalski, he would convince the politburo that the Cominform headquarters should be located somewhere else.55
In contrast to Gomułka, the other members of the PPR leadership, Bierut, Berman, Minc, and Zambrowski, understood that Zhdanov’s position at Szklarska Poręba reflected Stalin’s demands for ideological conformity to the Soviet model across the East European parties. The Yugoslavs, led by wartime leader Josip Broz Tito, initially cheered this new, more radical line. But they quickly found out that it also entailed the subordination of their own brand of Stalinist socialism to Moscow’s desires and control, something they were unwilling to do.56 When Soviet ambassador Viktor Lebedev showed Gomułka the March 27, 1948, letter in which the Soviet leadership denounced the Yugoslavs and insisted that Gomułka present it to the PPR politburo, Gomułka apparently assented, although not without calling the Soviet action “premature” and stating his unhappiness about the pernicious influence of the Yugoslav affair on the rest of the East European communist parties.57 After Gomułka had shared the letter as well as his own critical comments with the politburo, Minc warned him that “he should proceed very carefully.” When asked years later why he had seemed so ready to take on both Stalin and his fellow PPR leaders, Gomułka answered that he had wanted to take no responsibility for the new “line” and that he had been ready to resign his positions if he failed to convince his comrades of the correctness of his position.58
By June 1948, the conflict between Stalin and Tito had escalated to the point that the Yugoslavs were expelled from the Cominform meeting, which took place in Bucharest. To no avail, Gomułka had appealed to the Central Committee of the Yugoslav party to take part in the meeting. “Non-attendance at the conference,” he wrote, would “inevitably lead” to “breaking away from the world revolutionary movement, with all the consequences entailed.”59 But even after the meeting, Gomułka was still reluctant to criticize the Yugoslavs; he understood that their expulsion meant that his own brand of socialism, which deviated from the Soviet model even more significantly than the Yugoslav version, was seriously endangered. He even offered to mediate between Moscow and Belgrade, but Tito rejected his offer, and his proposed visit to Belgrade never took place.60
Meanwhile, Gomułka’s stance on the Yugoslav issue was drawing increasing criticism from his more Moscow-friendly comrades in the party leadership.61 Eventually the tensions around his position in the PPR exploded into a series of events that led to his being purged from the party, removal from the government, and eventual imprisonment and interrogation. It seemed, then, that Gomułka’s fears about the ramifications of the Yugoslav case had been justified. At the same time, the story of his downfall was also entangled with another major issue: his attitude toward the Jews.
Gomułka, the Jews, and His Fight with Stalin
From the very beginning of the Polish Communist Party (KPP) in the 1890s, when Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, among others, organized the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), Jews had played a disproportionately central leadership role in it. When Stalin destroyed the KPP in summer 1938, it included a very large number of Poles of Jewish background.62 In its successor organizations, the Union of Polish Patriots, formed in the Soviet Union in 1941, and in the PPR, though less so in the underground, Jews also played a prominent role. This high Jewish participation was not only well known but also, significantly, almost always exaggerated both by the party’s adherents and opponents. Soviet lists of leading Polish party members from the time of the war onward identified everyone by their nationality—Pole or Jew (or sometimes Polish Jew). Stalin was very aware of the perceived problem of a large Jewish presence in the Polish (as well as Romanian, Hungarian, and Czech) communist leaderships.
The destruction of the European Jews—the Shoah—only seemed to exacerbate the Jewish “problem,” as Stalin and the Soviets saw it. Already in 1946, officials in Moscow expressed serious concern that there were too many Soviet Jews in the occupation administration in Germany, and that this might offend the Germans.63 The assertion of Jewish national identity among Soviet Jewish activists and veterans after the war and Holocaust alienated Stalin and increased his suspicions of their motivations.64 Moreover, there were tensions between the Moscow-based Jewish Antifascist Committee and the Soviet government about identifying the special losses suffered by the Jews during the “Great Patriotic War.” This conflict eventually resulted in the banning of the organization, the NKVD’s brutal murder in January 1948 of its leader, the famous Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, and the arrests of many of its members. These domestic events were accompanied by a shift in the Soviet stance toward Jews in the international arena. Until early 1948, the Soviets had been crucial supporters of the UN-sponsored creation of a Jewish state, mainly in order to bring to an end the British mandate in Palestine, and with it British influence in the Middle East more generally. Yet after the founding of the state of Israel in May 1948, Soviet backing quickly turned into antagonism, which further radicalized into official anti-Zionism, “anti-cosmopolitanism,” and anti-Semitism in 1949 and 1950.
Soviet attitudes toward leading Jewish members in the PPR, which was merged with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in December 1948 to form the Polish United Workers’ Party, or PZPR, similarly soured in this period. In March 1948, the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw, Viktor Lebedev, wrote to Soviet foreign minister Molotov that there were two wings of the Polish party, the nationalist “Gomułka group” and the so-called “Minc group” (after Hilary Minc), which constituted in his view a virtual Jewish lobby. Lebedev’s central point was that despite being valuable party members, Minc and other Jews were vulnerable to intimidation and attacks from the right because of their Jewish backgrounds. Polish chauvinists in the PPR could “very easily” vilify Minc as a representative of Poland’s “eternal enemy,” the Jews, or even as a “Jewish beast.” There was a “fierce hatred of Jews in Poland,” Lebedev wrote, and the anti-Semitic attitudes of the Polish Socialist Party and of the Vatican made matters only worse. At the same time, stated the ambassador, the more Minc tried to combat Polish anti-Semitism in the PPR, the more the Poles viewed him as a Jewish leader.65
Lebedev and the Soviets faced a difficult question in formulating their policy toward this growing split in the Polish party. On the one hand, they were worried about the overrepresentation of Jews in the leadership: Berman, Minc, and Zambrowski, most notably. On the other, they were suspicious of what they considered Gomułka’s nationalist proclivities, which had become especially unacceptable at the Cominform meeting and after. Stalin’s moves to create homogeneity among and control over his East European “allies” during the winter of 1947–1948 meant that Gomułka’s open advocacy of the distinctiveness of the Polish road to socialism had to be suppressed. The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June 1948 for alleged Trotskyism, nationalism, and anti-Sovietism was very much a public affair and widely reported in the international press. The attack against Gomułka was less open, though already in April 1948 the Foreign Department of the Soviet Central Committee had prepared a document entitled “On the Anti-Marxist Ideological Tendencies in the Leadership of the PPR,” which listed Gomułka’s alleged sins, most prominently his “rightist-nationalist deviation.”66
Gomułka himself soon added to them with a provocative speech at the June 3, 1948, plenum of the PPR Central Committee in which he stated publicly that in the history of Polish socialism the PPS had represented the wishes of the Polish working-class movement better than the SDKPiL and the KPP, both of which—no one could miss the connection in that speech—were closely associated with “the Jews” and their supposed indifference to legitimate Polish patriotic causes. It is also significant that Gomułka’s speech was timed to coincide with the intense campaign to join the PPS with the PPR, which culminated in the unification congress in December 1948. The PPS was growing in popularity, and many of its leaders considered the PPR, in the words of Józef Cyrankiewicz, “Russian agents.”67 The time had come, in Gomułka’s view, to force a merger. In the face of the increasing “internationalist” dogmatism of both the majority of the PPR’s leadership and the Soviets, Gomułka sought to lay out a more thoroughly “Polish” line for the new united party by “harnessing” the patriotic traditions of the PPS and its followers to the Marxism-Leninism of the PPR.68
Gomułka’s pro-Moscow comrades in the PPR leadership were incensed by his June 3 speech and especially by his depiction of the history of Polish socialism. They accused him of making a “grave concession to the cause of the nationalist-bourgeois and reformist traditions represented by the PPS” and demanded that he engage in a round of self-criticism.69 At the second Cominform meeting in Bucharest where the Yugoslavs were expelled (June 19–23, 1948), Berman, representing the Polish communists, denounced the “serious danger of right-wing opportunist, nationalist character.” Without mentioning Gomułka by name, he called for a cleansing of the united party of all such “elements.”70
At the August–September plenum of the party’s Central Committee, Berman made himself clearer: while making many references to “Wiesław’s” services to the party, he took Gomułka to task for his “stiffening” to the Soviet Union, his “mistrust” of Moscow, and his unwillingness to participate in the “Bolshevization of our party.”71 Mieczysław Moczar, Gomułka’s later partner in the expelling of thousands of Jews from Poland in 1968, dwelled on the fact that the Soviet Union “is our fatherland” and “the good fortune of our people.”72 Meanwhile, Ambassador Lebedev had already reported to Moscow that Gomułka exhibited “sharply anti-Soviet outbursts on different issues” and pursued a “ ‘shameful’ line in relation to propaganda about getting closer to the Soviet Union.”73
Gomułka engaged in a battle he could not win. But he was obdurate and committed to his views. Pressure from Lebedev and the Polish party leadership to engage in self-criticism only seemed to strengthen his resolve to defend his vision of a distinct Polish road to socialism. Though ostensibly performing the ritual act of admitting his “mistakes” at the Central Committee plenums, he carefully avoided core issues and remarked periodically that “he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t right.”74 At one point in his frustrated attempts to get Gomułka to admit his sins, Bierut tried to convince him to go to Moscow to see Stalin. But Gomułka replied, “[W]hy should I go? I am now [nothing but a] corpse.”75 Already in July 1948, Gomułka had withdrawn from active participation in Central Committee meetings, claiming health problems; he speculated that his political life might well be finished.76
Differences between Gomułka and the Soviets that dated from the period of the war came to the surface again.77 He was repeatedly attacked for his alleged lack of vigilance as PPR leader in the underground; questions were raised about his responsibility for the killing of Marceli Nowotko and Paweł Finder and about his contacts with the anti-communist AK resistance. These and other wartime issues were to emerge again and again during his interrogations in 1951. Bierut, who was advised by the Soviets and appropriately called by one historian “a stool pigeon of the most obvious ilk,” led the campaign of removing Gomułka from his posts.78
On August 16 Bierut flew to Moscow for a meeting with Stalin and Molotov. There he accused Gomułka of “serious rightist-nationalist tendencies,” which, he asserted, had revealed themselves already in the spring of 1944. Bierut asked Soviet Central Committee official Mikhail Suslov for a copy of the letter he had written to Dimitrov in June 1944. In it, he had denounced Gomułka’s leadership of the wartime PPR as “dictatorial” and “insufficiently collective” and characterized Gomułka as following no consistent political line but “zigzagging from sectarianism to extreme opportunism and back again.” Especially pertinent for the growing case that was being assembled against Gomułka in 1948 and 1949 was Bierut’s criticism in the same letter that Gomułka had been in contact with “reactionary groups who supported the London government.”79
At the August–September 1948 plenum of the Central Committee, Gomułka was accused of holding to “a system of rightist and nationalistic views for a period of nearly five years.” Bierut denounced him for Titoism and Rajkism, while Minc insinuated that he was responsible for the deaths of Nowotko and Finder. The plenum’s final resolution stated that “increased national solidarity with the CPSU” was the only way to assure Poland’s sovereignty and independence, which marked a clear repudiation of Gomułka’s course.80 The Soviets demanded that this kind of language be included when they approved the draft resolution on “Comrade Wiesław.”81 Gomułka himself was ousted as general secretary of the PPR at the plenum and replaced by Bierut. In January 1949, he also lost his position as minister for the Recovered Territories (in fact, the entire ministry was shut down). In November 1949, Gomułka was expelled from the Central Committee of the newly formed PZPR, together with his close confederates Marian Spychalski and Zenon Kliszko.82
In most circumstances in communist-controlled Eastern Europe, Stalin would have given the party leadership the go-ahead to imprison, interrogate, put on trial, and likely even execute Gomułka for the “nationalist” and “rightist” deviations of which he was accused. There is little doubt the other Polish communist leaders would have complied. They were rock-solid Stalin enthusiasts who followed the Soviet dictator’s orders unquestioningly, even seeking to anticipate them.83 But in this instance, the Soviets faced several problems. First of all, Gomułka was well known in Polish society for having resisted the German occupiers in the underground and for having overseen, as minister of the Recovered Territories, the expulsion of the German populations from the lands that had now become Poland—which was enthusiastically greeted by the vast majority of Poles. He had given well-attended speeches all over the country and was lauded for his modest lifestyle and lack of pretensions.84
Compared to the other communist leaders, Gomułka enjoyed at least a modicum of popularity in the country. He was also known in government and party circles for his opposition to the return of the several hundred thousand Polish Jews who had managed to escape or were deported from occupied Poland to the Soviet Union during the war, as well as for his advocacy—along with many other PPR leaders—of their immediate emigration once they had returned.85 Gomułka was an outspoken proponent of a mono-ethnic Poland—Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews should all leave—a vision that was popular both within the party and among the general population. Moreover, except for Boleslaw Bierut, a man of notably modest abilities, Gomułka was the only non-Jew remotely capable of exerting leadership in the Polish communist movement. From Moscow’s point of view, the Jews Berman, Minc, and Zambrowski could not be allowed to run the Polish party themselves.86
No doubt with these considerations in mind, Stalin tried to woo Gomułka back to party work at the end of 1948. The Moscow leadership did not like Gomułka at all. (Andrei Vyshinskii once said that he was no better than Władysław Sikorski, the Polish general and leader of the Polish government-in-exile until his tragic death on July 4, 1943, in a mysterious airplane crash.) But they felt they needed him to complete the upcoming unity Congress of the PPR with the PPS.87 Therefore, Stalin summoned Gomułka to a personal meeting at his Kuntsevo dacha on December 9, 1948. Gomułka understood that he was in an extremely difficult position and expected nothing good from the meeting, but he had no choice but to go.88 At the meeting, attended at times by NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria and perhaps Molotov, Stalin asked him to stand for elections to the newly formed politburo of the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR). Gomułka replied that there was no way he could work with Bierut, Minc, and Berman. Beria showed his annoyance: “How can you turn down something Stalin proposes to you,” he barked, but Stalin promptly chided Beria, “You prosecutor,” and asked him to leave the meeting.89 When Gomułka departed Stalin’s dacha, he had agreed to consider joining the Central Committee of the new party.
Yet only five days later, on December 14, Gomułka wrote to Stalin and rejected the idea of assuming any significant role in the PZPR. In this startling letter, he placed much of the blame for the woes of the Polish party and his own fate directly on “the Jews.” Claiming that most rank-and-file party members knew that he had done everything he could to limit the influx of Jews into elevated positions in the party and the security services, he wrote that the sheer number of visible Jews encumbered party work “among the intelligentsia, also in the countryside, but, most importantly, among the working class.” Part of the responsibility for the overrepresentation of Jews in the leading party and state organizations Gomułka took on himself, having been the leader of the party. But primarily, he asserted, his Jewish comrades were to blame. They ignored his admonitions to limit the number of Jews they recruited and did what they wanted in the realm of cadre policy. Not only had they thwarted his attempts to deal with the problem of too many Jews at various junctures of party history since the war, but they had even threatened to “end” his party activities if he persisted. One of the major reasons he did not want to go back to the politburo, Gomułka wrote Stalin, was the problem of the Jewish leadership; they would again employ all their devious methods to defeat him on this important issue.90
Gomułka pointedly explained to Stalin in the letter that the problem with the Jews in the party was not just their numbers and the popular perception of their ubiquity. Years of observation, he wrote, had convinced him that at least a very large number of Jewish comrades “do not feel tied to our Polish people” and did not have particularly warm feelings for the Polish working class. Gomułka did not accuse the Jews of “cosmopolitanism,” a denunciation that was only just beginning to become widely used in Soviet official discourse, but rather of “national nihilism.” Everyone understood this issue, he claimed, but no one had the courage to talk about it openly. Especially now that he was under attack for supposed “nationalism,” it would have been hard for non-Jewish Polish party members to criticize Jewish comrades for recruiting so many of their own in the leadership. “I believe it is necessary not only to curtail the further percentage growth of Jews in the party and state apparatus,” Gomułka asserted, “but also gradually to decrease this percentage, especially in the ranks of the apparatus.”91
Gomułka’s rhetoric about Jewish difference and the Jews’ inability to conform to the norms of Polish nationhood echoed a powerful theme in the history of Polish nationalism both in and outside the socialist movement. Though his wife, Zofia Gomułka (Szoken), came from an Orthodox Jewish family (and was a devoted communist), and his son, Ryszard Strzelecki-Gomułka, was forced to hide from the Nazis during the war, Gomułka was nevertheless unrelenting in criticizing his Jewish comrades. Was Gomułka an anti-Semite? Perhaps. As one Polish expert writes, “It’s hard not to recognize Gomułka’s views as a form of capitulation to anti-Semitism or even as anti-Semitic themselves.”92 Another notes that except for the immediate postwar period and in 1968, Gomułka actually seemed to get along well with his Jewish comrades and shared important decisions with them.93 But there is no question at the time that he saw the Jews as a liability for Poland as a whole, as well as for the Polish party.
Gomułka put Stalin and the PZPR leadership in a difficult position. Stalin’s goal in insisting that he rejoin the party leadership had no doubt been to balance its heavily Jewish contingent, of which the Soviet leader himself had grown increasingly suspicious. Now Gomułka sought to link his return to a leading position with a purge, or at least demotion, of his rivals of Jewish descent—Berman, Minc, and Zambrowski. From the Soviet point of view, however, this would isolate Bierut and permit Gomułka to reshape the party according to the “Polish” agenda he sought to pursue. Essentially, Gomułka pitted his own patriotism and close ties with the Polish working people against the alleged “national nihilism” of his party rivals. As Stalin and the Soviet leadership raised the flag of the struggle against “cosmopolitanism,” barely concealing its anti-Semitic essence, the other leaders of the Polish party were forced to walk a precarious tightrope between denouncing cosmopolitanism in the spirit of the international class struggle and countering Gomułka’s brand of Polish patriotism and exclusive nationalism. For Berman, Zambrowski, Minc, and others, these acrobatics required considerable skill, strong nerves, and patience.94
For his part, Stalin was not at all pleased with the response he received from Gomułka. In a note to Bierut of December 16, 1948, he and Molotov suggested that Gomułka was hiding something and that his activities should be carefully monitored.95 Gomułka had miscalculated; giving in to the Polish leader’s “road to socialism” would be far more dangerous in Stalin’s view than dealing with Jews—well-proven and extremely loyal ones at that—in the Polish party leadership.
Gomułka’s comrades warned him of Stalin’s displeasure and urged him to conform to party norms. “Do you know what you are risking?” Hilary Minc asked him. He answered, “I know.”96 Nevertheless Gomułka kept up his attack on the Jews in his address to the unity congress of the PPR and PPS (December 15–21, 1948). “We internationalists have fought and will fight not only with nationalism [a concession to his critics] but also with cosmopolitanism [now this term had entered his political lexicon as well] and national nihilism. We hold in contempt those who do not respect our people, [who] do not value its greatness and its capabilities, those who diminish our contributions to international culture over its thousand-year history.”97
The Soviet ambassador Lebedev watched the infighting in the Polish party leadership with a jaundiced eye. His reports back to Vyshinskii and Molotov in Moscow, which were often passed on to Stalin as well, were foundational for Soviet policy.98 Lebedev was pleased that Bierut and his comrades had beaten back the “right wing nationalist” tendencies represented, in his view, by Gomułka, Spychalski, and others in their camp. But he continued to express his dissatisfaction that in the leadership group, only Bierut was of Polish nationality. Lebedev admired Bierut and thought of him as an able and competent leader. He was therefore all the more annoyed that, after the removal of Gomułka, the Jewish party leaders acted as if they had saved Bierut’s position and seemed even more full of themselves than before. In a letter to Soviet foreign minister Vyshinskii from July 10, 1949, he complained that the Jews would not let any other non-Jews into the party leadership.99 He pointed in particular to the case of Władysław Wolski (A. Piwowarczyk), a Polish party member (and NKVD informant), whom Lebedev sought to promote within the Polish state hierarchy.100 Berman and Zambrowski, claimed Lebedev, were suspicious of Wolski’s close ties with the Soviets and therefore kept him away from Bierut. Even worse, in the ambassador’s view, they justified his isolation from the party leadership with the fact that he was often seen at the Soviet embassy.101
Lebedev also expressed annoyance that the Jewish politburo member Jakub Berman was not just an important leader of the Polish party but also responsible for the Polish security services. It was Berman’s fault, Lebedev alleged, that the “notorious” Jewish organization “Joint” (Joint Distribution Service) of the American Jewish Congress continued to operate in Poland until 1950, even though Moscow had advised that its offices be liquidated as outposts for spies and saboteurs.102 Furthermore, Lebedev leveled the charge that “the apparatus of the Ministry of Public Security, beginning with the deputy minister and including all the heads of departments, are not led by a single Pole.” He added, “All are Jews. It is only Jews who work in the department of intelligence.” From the viewpoint of those who were not opposed to the worldwide influence of the Jews, namely the Jewish communists, the investigation of foreign agents in Poland was therefore “in welcome hands”; materials about such agents were “cooked” even before they reached Bierut. To make matters worse, Lebedev continued, the Jew Roman Zambrowski was in charge of the Central Committee’s administrative apparatus. Like Jakub Berman (whose brother, Adolf, was a famous Zionist activist), Zambrowski constantly made concessions to Zionist Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel, as well as to Zionist delegations from Palestine, who were seeking recruits in Poland, Lebedev asserted.103
Given his undisguised anti-Semitic views, Lebedev’s conclusions were not surprising. The Jewish leaders suffered in his eyes from “Jewish nationalism” and should, their services to the party notwithstanding, be cleared out of the party and state hierarchy.104 Berman’s Ministry of Public Security required special attention. Lebedev suggested that a Polish confidant of Bierut replace Berman and deal with the problem of cadres. Although he did not mention him explicitly in this context, Lebedev clearly had Wolski in mind, whom he considered a good Pole and loyal friend of Moscow. The problem with this scheming was that, these qualities aside, Wolski had nowhere near Berman’s political savvy, not to mention connections with Stalin and Molotov. (In an interview in the early 1980s with the Polish journalist Teresa Torańska, Berman described how he had danced with Molotov during an evening at Stalin’s dacha: “Molotov led; I wouldn’t have known how,” while Berman whispered party business in his ear.105) Meanwhile, Wolski’s own attempts to draw the new Polish defense minister, Soviet-born Konstantin Rokossovskii, into his careerist anti-Jewish machinations also remained fruitless.106
In the end, Lebedev’s Wolski gambit did not work out as he had hoped. The embassy-sponsored upstart was expelled from the Polish party on May 13, 1950. Several days later Stalin put an end to the affair when he wrote to Bierut that he had Wolski checked out with “the appropriate authorities” (that is, the secret police), the conclusion being that “Wolski did not deserve political trust.”107 Apparently, Wolski had criticized the “Jewish” party leadership publicly, something even Gomułka had avoided doing. Most likely, he had misjudged both Lebedev’s power and Stalin’s unwillingness to sacrifice the leaders of the Polish party just because of their Jewishness—something that Gomułka had had to learn as well.108
Bierut ended up charging Wolski with following in Gomułka’s footsteps: “Wolski accused the leadership of the party of not believing in the strength of the working class. This serious accusation … is completely unfounded. For the TsK [Central Committee] of the party, this is not new. Gomułka also tried to undermine the authority of the leadership of the party. Wolski is proceeding along the same lines [analogichno].”109 Within a year of Wolski’s fall and subsequent relegation to an obscure position in the provinces, the Soviet ambassador Lebedev was removed from Warsaw and called back to Moscow.110 Bierut had successfully defended his Jewish comrades by discrediting Wolski’s attack as a case of Gomułka-style Polish right-wing nationalism. Now he could not only expect support and loyalty from them, but also, precisely because they were Jews, he did not have to fear that they would be rivals for his top position in the party.111
Trials and Internment
Anti-Semitism would continue to figure prominently in the political struggle within the Polish leadership. The case of Marian Spychalski, one of Gomułka’s closest allies, is instructive in this regard. Spychalski and Gomułka had worked together in the underground and shared a common understanding of the need for a Polish road to socialism. Consequently, both were accused of “rightist nationalist deviations.” Since the PZPR leadership was not ready to put Gomułka on trial in 1948–49, they ordered security officials to open a case against Spychalski first. As deputy minister of defense, Spychalski was charged with complicity in a “military conspiracy” to turn the Polish military into a haven for anti-communist attitudes. Ironically, simultaneously to being removed from the party Central Committee for his “nationalist” leanings, he was also denounced as being of Jewish background—falsely, as it turned out. Gomułka understood very well that what became the “Trial of the Generals,” which implicated Spychalski, also constituted an important stage in bringing him, Gomułka, “before a tribunal at a later date.”112 Some of Spychalski’s accusers even suggested that Gomułka had been doing Spychalski’s bidding rather than vice versa. In the fall of 1949, the leading politburo members personally subjected Spychalski to intense “conversations;” later on he was imprisoned, tortured, and interrogated by the secret police. Gomułka was left pretty much alone during this period. He continued to work in the insurance administration and recuperated from some health problems, while being constantly watched by the secret police.113
Spychalski’s interrogators forced him daily to write long, detailed descriptions of his party activities going back to the war, no doubt with the intention of using him as the central witness in a wide-ranging investigation of Gomułka’s ties with the Home Army and the London government during that period. Among the accusations against Spychalski was that he had carried out a nationalist program, the “so-called special path to the building of socialism in Poland,” as head of the Polish People’s Army during and after the war. Moreover, Marshal Rokossovskii, the new Polish minister of defense, complained that Spychalski had withheld funds and materials from the army, and one Soviet military-judicial advisor accused him of packing the military justice system “with reactionary elements from the ranks of prewar jurists, primarily Jews, and of getting rid of Soviet officer-jurists under various pretenses.”114 In fact, both Gomułka and Spychalski had inveighed on Moscow to remove the hundreds of leading Soviet officers in the Polish army in order to build its legitimacy as a Polish institution among the population.
As his close associates were arrested and interrogated, and bits and pieces of the case that was being built against him appeared in the party press, Gomułka fervently defended himself. In multiple letters he wrote to Bierut and Berman, he insisted on his and his comrades’ innocence.115 He should have known that this would be of no help in the least. After having him followed closely for months, the party leadership had Gomułka arrested on August 2, 1951. Stalin, who was immediately informed by telephone of Gomułka’s arrest, apparently expressed his doubts about the wisdom of doing so.116 Col. Józef Światło of the Xth Section of the Ministry of Public Security—and later a renowned defector to the United States—supervised Gomułka’s arrest, which was a meticulously planned operation. Gomułka was transferred to a special compound in Miedzeszyn, in the southeast of Warsaw, where he lived in spartan circumstances and complete isolation, separated from his wife, who was also interned in the same compound, and allowed no communication with the outside world or with her. He was not subjected to torture and was able to read widely in the classics of world literature in Polish translation. Yet for all practical purposes, Gomułka was imprisoned.117 In a letter to the Central Committee of June 1952, Gomułka complained that he had no idea why he was being held in isolation, with no access to newspapers, and noted that his health was deteriorating and that he needed medical care, in particular for his leg.118
Gomułka also had to endure endless interrogations. Again and again, he was forced to recapitulate one and the same story, told from only slightly different angles depending on the questions, but always in impossibly dense and boring detail. The central issues were his wartime work in underground Warsaw, his relations with Nowotko and Finder and their deaths, his contacts with the Home Army and the representatives of the London government, and his ties to Włodzimierz Lechowicz, who, despite his questionable interwar background, had worked with Spychalski in the AL and joined Gomułka in the Ministry of Recovered Territories after the war.119
Gomułka stubbornly held to his version of events, was absolutely consistent in his presentation of the facts, and the interrogators made little progress in extracting any compromising information from him. He emphatically rejected some of the evidence presented to him as “lies of SPYCHALSKI,” with whose “enemy activities” he claimed to have “had nothing in common.”120 When confronted with Spychalski’s testimony that Gomułka had urged the Polonization of the army and its officers corps, including the acceptance of prewar officers as a way to reduce the numbers of Soviets officers, especially those who could not speak Polish, Gomułka accepted full responsibility, noting not only that the idea of this policy was to take the wind out the reactionaries’ claims about Polish dependence on Moscow, but that he shared all of this with the PPR politburo at the time.121 What he wisely did not mention was that Stalin had told him in a meeting of November 14, 1945: “You should Polonize the army all the way through. You can let go of the Red Army generals and officers whenever you want, as soon as possible.”122
Gomułka’s arrest and interrogation were supervised by Józef Światło, who may or may not have been working for Western intelligence services at the time. During a visit to East Berlin in December 1953, Światło defected to the West, turning over vast troves of information to the CIA during his depositions and broadcasting back to Poland about the excesses of the Security Police’s repressive policies.123 Gomułka was never brought to trial; Lebedev’s observation to Stalin was that the Ministry of Public Security had made a “fiasco” of the investigation.124 Stalin died in March 1953, though Gomułka remained under house arrest until the end of 1954, when Bierut, who continued to conduct business along Stalinist lines, decided he could keep him imprisoned no longer. It is important to remember that not only had Gomułka been interned for three and a half years but that several hundred other party members shared his fate, generally under much more trying circumstances. Moreover, the Stalinist system of terror introduced into Poland by Bierut and his comrades took a huge toll on the population as a whole. In 1952, some fifty thousand political prisoners were held throughout Poland. Between 1949 and 1954, at least fifteen thousand people died as a result of judicial actions, meaning execution or perishing while in prison. Some sixty thousand peasants faced interrogations, prosecutions, and internment in labor camps as a result of having allegedly withheld grain from the state during Bierut’s fruitless attempt to collectivize Polish agriculture.125
How was it that Gomułka survived the coordinated attacks of Stalin and his Polish allies, when similar cases against László Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia ended in show trials and executions? It did seem, as an American embassy official commented in July 1948, that by his actions and statements Gomułka had “probably signed his own death warrant.”126 We also know that Bierut sent Światło and other Polish agents to Hungary to explore evidence from the Rajk case in Hungary and the Slánský case in Czechoslovakia to use against Gomułka, Spychalski, and others.127 Moreover, there was great pressure on officials in the Polish Ministry of Public Security from their Soviet and East European comrades to construct a case against Gomułka. Clearly the preparations were in motion; Światło, among others, attested to that.128
Gomułka himself wavered in his views on this question, sometimes arguing that he was safe: “I am convinced that they will not subject me to any kind of trial. They know me well. A trial would mean that I would say what they want, and I would not do that.”129 But at other times, and especially when hearing about the executions in Hungary, he worried that although he continued to live in palatable conditions and was not physically mistreated, Bierut might still do him in.130 Berman attributed Gomułka’s survival to the fact that the Polish leadership itself resisted Stalin’s injunctions to prosecute him. Berman stated, somewhat disingenuously, “We … refused to allow Gomułka to be put on trial. We rejected all the charges against him. In this sense we were an exception, because we were the only ones who didn’t allow leading figures to be wrested out of the party leadership.”131 But Gomułka rejected any notion that he was saved because of “scruples” on the part of the party leadership.132 Rather, he thought that if he were put on trial, Berman would soon follow and Bierut could not accept that, for security chief Berman might reveal compromising material about Bierut.133
An equally plausible way of thinking about Gomułka’s survival is that he was not Jewish while his accusers, for the most part, were. Slánský in Czechoslovakia, in contrast, was of Jewish background, as were almost all of Rajk’s close associates and co-defendants in Hungary, though not Rajk himself. They were therefore susceptible to the accusation of being “cosmopolitans” and agents of Zionism. In Gomułka’s case, this was an impossible accusation, given his consistent fight against the Jewish presence in the party and in Poland in general since the war. The “deviation” he represented was more akin to “Titoism,” which, by the early 1950s had faded in salience to the Kremlin in comparison to the perceived threats of Zionism and American imperialism.134 At the time of the gathering storm of the “Doctors’ Plot” in the Soviet Union in 1952, how would it have looked for a party led by the trusted “Moscow Jews” Berman, Minc, and Zambrowski, not to mention the many prominent Jews in the Ministry for Public Security, including Gomułka’s chief warder, Józef Światło, to put on trial and execute the unabashedly anti-Jewish defender of Polish “home communism,” Gomułka?
Even after Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Soviet leadership, most of whom had been in Stalin’s closest circle, did not forget the Jewish question as it related to the Polish party or, for that matter, to the Soviet system. True, they dropped immediately the charges of Zionism and anti-Soviet activities against the Kremlin Doctors, almost all of Jewish origin, whom Stalin had had arrested before his death. But the anti-Semitism of the Soviet elite did not fade so quickly. On December 23, 1953, Nikita Khrushchev, Viacheslav Molotov, Georgii Malenkov, and Nikolai Bulganin met with Bierut in Moscow and ordered that Berman be removed as minister of public security, though they allowed him to retain his position in the politburo and the Council of Ministers. Similarly, Minc was to be relieved of his position as head of Polish State Planning, while retaining his membership in the politburo and Council of Ministers. In some sense, the new Soviet leadership even adopted the program and prejudices of Gomułka, insisting that the Polish party “deal seriously with the promotion of leading cadres from the ranks of advanced and loyal party comrades of Polish nationality.”135
Ultimately, Gomułka can be seen as having won his struggle with Stalin, over what he saw as the related issues of the Jews in the Polish party and the distinct Polish road to socialism. When Gomułka was again selected as first secretary of the PZPR in 1956, Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership were not initially ready to accept this and tried to bully the Poles into forming a more Soviet-oriented government. But Gomułka managed to convince Moscow that Poland would remain a loyal member of the Soviet bloc under his leadership, while pursuing a socialist agenda according to specific needs of the Polish nation—something Stalin would not have allowed. When Gomułka did return to power in 1956, riding the wave of popular protest in the “Polish October,” he began a process of weeding out Polish Jews from the upper ranks of the party. Anti-Jewish riots and scattered violence accompanied the upheavals of that fateful year.136 Then, in the aftermath of the 1967 war in the Middle East, Gomułka bared his teeth when he learned that many PZPR comrades of Jewish origin sympathized with the Israelis, undermining the pro-Arab and anti-Zionist propaganda being cranked out by the Soviet bloc.137 Gomułka’s long and consistent effort to purge the Jews from the party was completed in 1968, when he conspired with anti-Semitic allies in the PZPR and in the Polish veterans’ association to expel some fifteen thousand Jews from party and state positions, which led to the forced emigration of some eleven to twelve thousand Jews from Poland.138
Poland had been the lynchpin of the victorious Grand Alliance; sharp differences over its fate disrupted the postwar settlement and helped bring on the Cold War. Yet even in Poland, where the stakes were so high for Stalin and the Soviet Union, Gomułka managed to lead a political struggle within the Communist Party for the integrity of the Polish road to socialism, even after the program no longer conformed to Moscow’s interests. The boundaries of the struggle were limited—Gomułka was, after all, a dedicated communist, just like his more notable rebel comrade Josef Broz Tito. Like Tito, he thought he was doing the right thing for the victory of socialism and the interests of the Soviet Union in his country. But the outcome of his resistance to Stalin’s injunctions was inevitable. There would be no Finnish or Austrian solutions for Poland. Stalin would not compromise.