The announcement of Stalin’s death, on 5 March 1953, stunned more than it relieved, and the degree to which his system had been implanted in Poland can be gauged from the fact that many Poles actually wept. Katowice was promptly renamed Stalinogród as a mark of respect and subservience while the Party waited nervously to see which way the wind would blow. After a few months, the signals from Moscow were that a general ‘thaw’ could take place. As a result, writers who had not published for years appeared in print, journalists discussed taboo subjects and economists went so far as to question Marxist-Leninist theories.
A few months later, Colonel Józef Światło, deputy chief of the UB’s Tenth Department, in charge of keeping tabs on the Party itself, defected and began a series of broadcasts on Western radio. Even senior Party members were astonished to hear to what extent every aspect of Polish life had been dictated by Moscow. Gomułka and others were quietly released from prison, the Ministry of Public Safety was abolished, and the security services lowered their profile. Party Secretary Bierut admitted that ‘mistakes’ had been made and that there had been a ‘tendency to widen the field of activity of the security services’, but he wavered.
He was in the unenviable position of having to gauge which way Moscow would move next and he therefore zig-zagged between thaw and repression, personally favouring the latter. There were many traditional Stalinists like him in the Party. Their reaction to the Światło revelations was not that the system had to be cleaned up, but that security ought to be tightened in such a manner as to prevent a repetition of the scandal. They were comforted when, partly as a reaction to West Germany’s accession to NATO in the previous year, the Warsaw Pact, signed on 14 May 1955, bound all the Soviet satellites to Moscow more firmly than ever.
In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev made his famous speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing Stalin’s rule. Bierut, who was in attendance, died, purportedly of a heart attack. The Party was in disarray. Khrushchev came to Warsaw to attend the plenary session of the Party’s Central Committee, which was to elect a new First Secretary, and he suggested Edward Ochab, who was duly chosen. Ochab proceeded to announce a programme of liberalisation, a partial amnesty for political prisoners, and the arrest of the chief procurator and several high-ranking persons in the UB. He committed the Party to rectifying recent ‘errors and distortions’. But this was a dangerous course, as the summer months were to show.
Back in December 1955 the 15,000 workers of the former Cegielski and now Stalin works in Poznań had discovered that bureaucratic venality had cheated them of a percentage of their salary. They remonstrated with their management, took the matter up at District Party level, and finally sent delegates to Warsaw, without effect. On 28 June 1956, during the International Trade Fair in Poznań, they staged a demonstration. They demanded that Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz come to talk to them. When he refused, they attacked a police station in which they seized arms, and went on to demolish a radio-jamming station and the Poznań headquarters of the UB. The authorities responded by sending in tanks, and the riots came to a bloody end two days later. The civilian death toll stood at seventy.
‘Imperialist agents’ were blamed, and reactionaries within the Party argued that such outbreaks were the inevitable consequence of relaxing discipline. While the Party continued its programme of decentralising the economy and democratising itself, a faction of Stalinist diehards, the so-called Natolin group, called on their allies in Moscow. As the Eighth Plenary Session of the Party opened on 19 October 1956, a delegation headed by Khrushchev flew in unannounced and Russian troops stationed in Poland began to move on Warsaw. Crisis loomed as the government called out the army, and even distributed arms to the car workers ers of Żeranń. The situation was assuming international dimensions.
Although the Polish armed forces in the West had been gradually disbanded after 1946, despite efforts to keep at least a skeleton Polish Legion in existence, the London government still upheld its claim. It was supported by a highly active emigration, which constituted a kind of Polish state in exile. As the Cold War set in, the United States began to show an interest in Polish affairs once again. In 1952 the CIA founded Radio Free Europe to broadcast straight news and cultural programmes to the whole Soviet-dominated region. It cooperated with the London Poles, and parachuted agents into Poland to liaise with people on the ground. While the fighting underground had been defeated by 1948, many of its former members were still at large, and armed attacks as well as more common acts of resistance such as defacing propaganda posters and painting slogans were recorded as late as 1955.
Władysław Gomułka managed to convince Khrushchev that he could contain the situation. As the Soviet units returned to base, Gomułka told a rally in Warsaw on 24 October that ‘The Party, united in the working class and the nation, will lead Poland on a new road to socialism.’ It was to be socialism with a human face and a Polish garb. Cardinal Wyszyński was released and the Church was allowed to resume its normal activities in return for a pledge of allegiance to the regime. Marshal Rokossovsky and hundreds of Russian officers were dismissed from the Polish army and sent home. A quarter of a million Poles stranded in the Soviet Union were allowed to emigrate to Poland. Commercial treaties were renegotiated on more favourable terms and the Soviet Union was to pay for the upkeep of its troops stationed in Poland. But none of the fundamentals had changed.
On 30 October the Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy announced a return to democracy, and five days later the Soviet army invaded his country in defence of ‘Leninist principles of equality among nations’. The warning for Poland was clear.
Gomułka was finding it difficult to contain the revolution which had brought him to power. A purge of Stalinists was being carried out in the ranks of the Party, factory workers in Silesia were sacking their bosses and collective farms were being dissolved spontaneously by those working on them. Associations and periodicals suppressed in 1948 revived, opening up debate on every subject. The collecting of funds, medical supplies and blood on behalf of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a major embarrassment to the Polish government, which found itself obliged to take a different line from the Soviet Union in a United Nations vote on the issue. On 10 December the Soviet consulate in Szczecin was stormed by angry workers.
Even reformers in the Party had to admit that the time had come to close ranks and safeguard its interests. A few months earlier Gomułka had praised the workers of Poznań for having taught the Party ‘a painful lesson’, but he had never abandoned his old authoritarian views. By the middle of 1957 the striking tramdrivers of Łódź were branded with the more traditional epithet of ‘hooligans’, and 1,500 miners in the Katowice area were fired in the interests of ‘discipline’. Following the elections of 1957, during which Gomułka posed as the saviour of Poland, he began a crackdown on revisionists in the Party. In 1959 General Mieczysław Moczar, a member of the Natolin group and hero of the Stalinist ‘partisans’, was placed in command of the security services.
A new campaign of petty persecution was launched against the Church. The government had already tried repression, which had merely turned priests into martyrs. It had tried subversion, by encouraging a movement of ‘patriotic priests’ who were to reconcile the teachings of Marx with those of Christ, which, after some initial success, had turned into a fiasco. Thereafter it followed the course of pettifogging obstructionism and judicial harassment, while seducing the young into rival activities. Practising Catholics were banned from holding office within the Party. The security services infiltrated the Church, spying on priests who might reveal foibles so they could be turned into agents and informers. Crosses were removed from schools and hospitals, and a ban was imposed on the building of new churches.
Despite this the Church’s position in national life went from strength to strength. Faced with the injustice, falsehood and drabness of socialist reality, people of all classes sought solace, truth and beauty in the Catholic faith. As the countryside had been methodically denuded of social elites, the parish priest was the one educated man to whom people could turn. In the hideous industrial quarters of the cities workers looked to the parish priest for comfort and guidance, and resisted with force when the militia tried to tear down crosses erected on plots where they hoped to build new churches.
The Catholic University of Lublin was the one free seat of learning. For a long time the Catholic periodical Znak and the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, both published in Kraków, were the only papers to maintain any editorial freedom. They brought together priests and laymen, who formed the Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK), a discussion group which grew into a youth organisation offering an alternative to Party-sponsored associations.
After the ‘thaw’ of 1956 the universities once more became centres of learning, and cultural life revived. Increased contact with the outside world—through trade, travel, cultural exchange and the broadcasts of such services as Radio Free Europe—expanded horizons and raised hopes of a return to normal relations with the outside world. But such contacts had a depressing side, as they revealed that the outside world viewed Poland in negative terms.
One of the more bitter aspects of Poland’s post-war experience was that it had come out of the conflict not only as the greatest loser, but with its reputation seriously tarnished. The pre-war Polish state and its government were generally viewed as backward and authoritarian. The Western love affair with communism and the Soviet Union meant that Poles were also seen as ideologically suspect. The Polish war effort was dismissed as futile and its leadership as inept. Catholicism was not in fashion in Western intellectual circles, and nor were the kind of values the Poles had fought for. In addition, the Polish nation stood accused, particularly by the intellectuals and Jews of France and America, of anti-Semitism on a scale to rival that of the Germans. The fact that the extermination camps had been sited on Polish territory (because over four-fifths of those to be exterminated lived in that part of Europe and it was conveniently free from interference by the RAF) was held up as evidence of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust.
This lack of empathy from outside meant that Polish society had to come to terms with its predicament on its own, and this had a profound influence on the development of literature and the arts. The war had scythed through the established writers of the 1930s, and those who were not killed were scattered—to London, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires or Tel Aviv. Their writings, published by independent émigré presses, nevertheless found their way back to Poland, where they played a part in a remarkable literary flowering whose best-known figures were the poets Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert and Czesłlaw Miłosz, the novelists Jerzy Andrzejewski, Stanisław Dygat, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Tadeusz Konwicki, the playwright Sławomir Mrożek, the writer Stefan Kisielewski and the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. This was run close by a similar flowering in film-making, whose greatest exponent was Andrzej Wajda, which explored Polish realities in subtle but penetrating ways.
The holiday did not last long, and in 1958 a clampdown began. Books were banned and periodicals shut down. Censorship was imposed more ruthlessly than ever, with the censor’s office deciding how many copies of each book could be printed and how many performances of a play could be staged. Writers who did not conform were harassed and arrested. And while they responded by retreating into allusion and other subterfuges to evade the censor—or, in the case of Stanisław Lem, into the realms of science fiction—the state’s manipulation of language reached Orwellian proportions, for different reasons.
In 1965 two young Party activists, Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, wrote an open letter demanding a complete overhaul of the political machine and a return to the basic values of socialism. They were immediately arrested and sent to prison, but others, most notably their colleague Adam Michnik, carried on the discussion, in universities and youth organisations. While Gomułka grew more reactionary, a faction within the Party viewed him as soft and incompetent. General Moczar, now Minister of the Interior, was biding his time.
The Church had been preparing to mark a thousand years of Christianity in Poland in 1966, and as part of this preparation, in November 1965 the Polish bishops sent an open letter to their German counterparts calling for mutual forgiveness and reconciliation between the two nations. Gomułka had already launched a rival programme of celebrations to mark the millennium of the Polish state, to provide an excuse for the disruption of the Church’s celebrations by police and ‘worker activists’. Now Moczar’s faction seized on the bishops’ letter and accused them of encouraging ‘German revanchism’ and undermining the Polish state.
The Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states in 1967 raised the political temperature. The Soviet Union and her satellites backed the Arabs, but most Poles were on the side of Israel and greeted its successes with delight, partly as a slap in the face to Russia, partly because they could identify with the Israelis, many of whom were of Polish origin. The deputy Konstanty Łubieński cast one of the only two votes ever registered against the government in the Sejm on its condemnation of Israel, one of many open manifestations of sympathy for the embattled state. Gomułka responded by declaring that Poles could only have one motherland and denounced Israeli sympathisers as ‘Zionists’.
In January 1968 Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve was playing in Warsaw to houses filled with students who cheered the anti-Russian references in the play. The authorities took the absurd step of banning it. The demonstrations which ensued at Warsaw University were dispersed with unwarranted brutality by the militia, supported by its Volunteer Reserve (ORMO). Over a thousand students were arrested and thousands more expelled. A small demonstration on their behalf elicited similar overreaction, with hundreds of ORMO’s ‘sociopolitical activists’ doing their utmost to turn it into a pitched battle. The Catholic members of the Sejm protested and the bishops’ conference issued a condemnation. The student protest had spread to other parts of the country and other organisations, and demands for democratic processes and freedom of the press were voiced openly. The press gave lurid accounts of massive disturbances barely contained by the forces of order, and on 11 March blamed them on ‘Zionist agents’ taking their orders from Germany.
According to Moczar’s partisans, a huge conspiracy was afoot, and Gomułka called for the Party to be purged of ‘revisionists, lackeys of imperialism, Zionists and reactionaries’. This impressive umbrella reflected the fact that while he was principally concerned with ridding it of intellectuals and revisionists, Moczar, who was more in tune with the virulent anti-Semitism of his Russian colleagues, saw the whole thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He pointed out the Jewish origins of some of the student ringleaders, and indeed of some high-ranking Party officials. On 13 March a number of senior officials were dismissed for Zionism.
Moczar’s partisans played heavily on the fact that during the first years after the war some of the best Party jobs had gone to people of Jewish origin. The envy of the lower ranks did the rest, and a purge began as Party members sniffed at each other’s pedigrees. Among the most vociferous of the anti-Zionists were those like Edward Gierek, Secretary of the Silesian Committee of the Party, new men hungry for power. At a lower level, disgruntled workers and peasants were more than happy to express their hatred of intellectuals of every kind by calling them ‘bloodsucking Jews’, a random linkage that would resurface more than once in the future. Hundreds of Party officials and people in senior posts were sacked for ‘Zionism’.
Gomułka was no longer in control, but hung on in the hope that the witch-hunt would deflect the discontent with his own leadership. He decided to grant exit visas to those ‘Zionists’ who wished to emigrate, and over the next few months up to 15,000 Polish Jews availed themselves of these, including a couple of hundred former employees of the Ministry of the Interior and the secret services. Gomułka’s Jewish wife was not among them, nor were some highly placed Jews who had managed to sidestep the attack, nor was Adam Michnik, who was in gaol.
Gomułka’s position was nonetheless tenuous, and he had to reach out for Soviet support. He secured it with the participation by 26,000 Polish troops in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of that year. But this did nothing to enhance his popularity within the Party and in the country at large—on 8 September a former AK officer, Ryszard Siwiec, burned himself to death before Gomułka and a huge crowd in the country’s largest stadium in protest.
People were also far from enthusiastic about the effects of Gomułka’s economic policy. He had tried to decentralise the economy, but it had proved impossible to shrug off the old habits of central planning. As wages slumped and working conditions declined, absenteeism and careless work crippled production. The private sector in agriculture was starved of investment; socialist principle demanded that it should be eventually phased out, although it was responsible for 80 per cent of all production. Terrified of the country becoming a debtor, Gomułka resisted imports, including those of grain and animal feed. The result was a fall in the quantity of livestock, and following two bad harvests in 1969 and 1970, a severe shortage of meat.
The cost of living had risen throughout the 1960s, while wages lagged far behind. The sudden increase by an average of 30 per cent in the price of food announced on 13 December 1970 produced an instant reaction. The following day workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk went on strike and marched in protest to the local Party headquarters. Militia and Interior Ministry forces had been placed on full alert two days before, and those guarding the building opened fire on the strikers, who burnt it down. Similar confrontations took place in nearby Gdynia and in Szczecin, and on the following day tanks moved in, supported by 27,000 troops. The fighting spread to Elbląg and other coastal cities, and on 17 December the whole area was sealed off by the army. By the end of the first four days, forty-one people had been killed, over 1,000 injured and 3,200 detained.
On 19 December an emergency session of the Politburo assembled without Gomułka, who had suffered a stroke, and voted to replace him with Edward Gierek. Gierek managed to impress the workers with his apparent goodwill, but it was not until he rescinded all the price rises that the strikes abated. He admitted that the episode was ‘a painful reminder that the Party must never lose touch with the working class and the nation’, and many believed in his sincerity. But the next ten years of his rule were to transform this lack of contact into an unbridgeable chasm. The unimaginative traditionalist communists of Gomułka’s generation were replaced by a new breed of apparatchiks who fancied themselves as modern managers and socialist captains of industry, and felt a concomitant contempt for the grimy peasants and workers.
Gierek entertained ambitious plans for an ‘economic leap forward’, to be achieved by massive borrowing from the West which was to be repaid through the improved extraction of raw materials and the export of goods produced in new factories built with foreign capital. The spirit of détente favoured his scheme, and money poured in from Western banks only too happy to lend. Companies such as Fiat and Coca-Cola eagerly signed contracts to start production in Poland.
Initial results were dramatic: production rose sharply and the Polish economy began to grow at a faster rate than any other bar Japan’s. New roads were built, railways were modernised and modern apartment blocks sprang up around every city. The standard of living went up, and its cost went down. Private cars, dishwashers and trips abroad came within the reach of the average citizen. Gierek was out to buy popularity, so the peasants were relieved of the compulsory delivery quotas, and national insurance was extended to cover them. The price of food was frozen at the 1965 level in order to win the hearts of the workers.
It was not long before cracks began to appear in Gierek’s economic structure. The new factories were finished behind schedule, while their products proved to be of inferior quality and difficult to sell in the West. The foreign debt spiralled. The only answer was to increase exports of coal and other raw materials, and to divert consumer goods originally intended for the home market to exports. The consequences were felt immediately, through shortages of staple items. As Gierek juggled with figures, he forgot the lessons of history. In 1975 he raised the prices of ‘luxury’ consumer goods, and on 24 June 1976 the price of food by an average of 60 per cent. On the following day strikes broke out in Radom, Warsaw and around the country. The price rises were quickly withdrawn, but the motorised detachments of the Citizens’ Militia (ZOMO) went into action, arresting and beating the striking workers. People were dismissed from their jobs by the hundred, and sentences of up to ten years were handed out.
The crisis brought to the surface a basketful of problems which had been obscured by Gierek’s economic fireworks. His plans were based on an assumption of technical competence on the part of the Party cadres, but while membership had risen to a record three million, quality had not. The new men lacked the commitment to socialist ideals of those they replaced, and brought neither a sense of realism nor managerial ability in its stead. Rather than curing the ills endemic to socialist economies, they added to them, as corruption came in on the tail of incompetence. It was corruption on a vast scale, spreading through every branch of the system in the most flagrant manner, giving birth to a vast kleptocracy that bred resentment throughout society.
Gierek had leapt at every opportunity of credit and cooperation offered by the spirit of détente, and balanced this by increasingly servile behaviour towards the Soviet Union. Polish capital and personnel were committed to Soviet development projects; Polish goods produced from dollar investments were sold on for useless rubles; and the level of ‘fraternal aid’ to ‘liberation movements’ in Angola and elsewhere in the Third World rose sharply. While he flew off on official visits to France, Germany and the United States and hosted their presidents in Warsaw, Gierek also had to go to Moscow and, in 1975, play host to a none-too-happy Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin.
The Soviets wanted tangible tribute, in the form of a series of amendments to the Polish constitution. Poland was to be constitutionally committed to socialism, to the ‘leading role’ of the Party and, most important, to a ‘fraternal alliance’ with the Soviet Union. In addition to being larded with references to the Great October Revolution (which had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917), the constitution was also to contain an insidious clause which made civil rights dependent on ‘the fulfilment of civic duty’, but this was dropped as a result of public protest and the vehement intervention of the Church.
The breadth of the public response and the fact that Gierek felt obliged to give in were twin symptoms of a radically altered relationship between Poland’s government and its people. It was not that the authorities had grown soft or neglected their defences—the budget of the Interior Ministry remained larger than those of the ministries of culture, health and education put together. It was simply that society had grown more assertive and politically more mature.
The early 1970s had seen an exponential increase in the numbers of predominantly young Poles travelling to western Europe and the United States in order to learn a language and earn enough money to buy a car or a flat on their return. Members of the post-war emigration and their children began visiting Poland in similarly growing numbers. This great movement of people broke down the barriers built up by decades of isolation, and opened permanent channels of communication. Polish thought and culture evolved in a semaphoric concert of individuals scattered throughout the world, transmitted through émigré journals and publishing houses of which the Paris monthly Kultura and the imprint Instytut Literacki were the most distinguished. These contacts were to prove of vital importance over the next years.
In the summer of 1975 the conference on Security and Co operation in Europe meeting at Helsinki reached a number of agreements which were ostensibly a triumph for Soviet diplomacy. The division of Europe into a Soviet and a Western sphere of interest was tacitly recognised and accepted by both sides, which amounted to a betrayal by the West of all the nations under Soviet domination. But the third basket of agreements extended human rights to the citizens of all thirty-five signatory states, and obligated those states to respect them. This would play a part in the Soviet Union’s undoing.
There had been plenty of dissident activity since 1968, and radical discussion involved large numbers of people, both at personal level and in samizdat or émigré publications smuggled into Poland. By the middle of the 1970s political programmes were beginning to take shape. But it was not until after Helsinki that a new sense of strategy emerged.
The first sign of this was the formation of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) in September 1976 by a group which included former AK officers, lawyers, writers and young dissidents. This provided workers with legal advice, sent observers to their trials, and informed the public on their treatment through its Information Bulletin. It also collected money to help pay fines and to assist their families. The committee gradually extended its activities to cover all cases of human rights violations, and mercilessly heckled the authorities on points of law. As it was entirely open, invoking the relevant clauses of the Helsinki agreements, the authorities could not simply silence it by arresting its members and banning it. This did not stop them from harassing active supporters—with searches of their homes, confiscations of property, dismissal from work or expulsion from university, short detention on technical grounds and severe beatings by supposed hooligans, and, occasionally, murder. But all of this was meticulously documented and reported to the Helsinki monitoring organs and to the world. KOR was joined in March 1977 by the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO), and in May by a Students’ Solidarity Committee in Kraków, both of which helped to collate the evidence against the Polish authorities and their doings.
Periodicals of every kind and underground presses began pouring forth a torrent of literature. In the same year a Flying University began operating in Warsaw, and discussion clubs burgeoned. The police arrested individuals, raided premises and confiscated materials, but the dissidents were well organised and protected by the sympathy and cooperation of the public. They were also given tacit support and facilities by the Church, which played an active part in defending human rights and helping sacked workers.
Gierek could ill-afford to crack down. He had official talks with the Primate, Cardinal Wyszyński, in 1976; in 1977 he visited France, Italy and India, and he hosted Jimmy Carter, Willy Brandt, King Baudouin of Belgium, Helmut Schmidt and the Shah of Iran in Warsaw. He needed to appear statesmanlike in order to stave off economic nemesis. The world recession was hurting the overstretched and incompetently managed Polish economy. The terminal condition of Polish industry spelt chaos, the desperate condition of Polish agriculture threatened crisis. The election, on 16 October 1978, of the Cardinal Archbishop of Kraków Karol Wojtyla to the Holy See meant that the crisis could, when it came, no longer be confined.