No Heresy in Poland

...But there is no overall continuity or coherence to the book: The two halves do not make a whole and many of the pieces in the second half are fragmentary and inconclusive, particularly the one on Jakub Berman, the "grey eminence" of pre-1956 Poland...

...Nonetheless, the book has several good pieces of reporting, among them a moving description of the Warsaw ghetto, a personal visit to the Rozychi Bazar and an interview with revisionist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski and a discussion of his ideas...

...and there has been an intensification of censorship and cultural controls...

...An elderly tourist replied, impromptu: "Because he confessed a leftist deviation...

...The Gomulka regime has just recently mounted a nation-wide campaign to induce peasants into "agricultural circles...

...Moreover, the book also reveals the Gomulka Government's continued struggle against the revisionists, those promulgators of a "third ideology" between "orthodox Marxism and capitalism...

...While visiting the Wawel, Cracow's famous museum, he was standing in front of the beautiful wood carvings of a crucifixion scene by the great medieval artist, Wit Stwosz, when a young tourist innocently asked why Christ had been crucified...

...Editor, Milovan Djilas' "Anatomy of a Moral" PERHAPS THE KEY to postwar Polish history as well as to S. L. Shneiderman's The Warsaw Heresy is contained in a Polish taxi-driver's joke...

...The cabbie says, "You must have noticed our national emblem . . . the Polish eagle...

...And doesn't the history of this past decade prove that the Communists are not prepared to legislate themselves out of existence, nor to permit themselves to be legislated out of power, whether in response to Polish revisionist demands for factions within the Party, Hungarian demands under Imre Nagy for a multi-party system or Milovan Djilas's call for an end to the Communist monopoly of power in Yugoslavia...

...But one thing they haven't been able to do—turn his head to the left...

...Events (some would say history with a big "H") have a nasty way of occurring shortly after publication of a book to show that the book was wrong, inadequate or incomplete, and events of the past few months have done just that to this book...

...In this regard, perhaps Gomulka's words themselves—as quoted in the book—are as much a lesson to be learned by us as by the Communists: "You cannot escape the truth...

...In addition, the so-called Natolinists, those associated with the repressive policies before 1956, have been returning to top positions while many of the so-called liberals have been dropped from their jobs...

...In 1956, the Communists, Polish and Soviet, had a full-scale uprising in Hungary and concluded that if blood was being shed on the Danube it might be unwise to shed it on the Vistula...

...There is no doubt that there is much to learn from the Polish experience, but The Warsaw Heresy is too much a journalistic simplification, lacking historical depth and economic breadth, to teach it to us...

...industrial norms have been revised upwards...

...The first half is more interesting, though I believe it would have been far more useful if some of the "inside information" were documented, and if, in general, all quotations were given with sources and dates...

...The events of that year must always be interpreted against the background of the Hungarian Revolution and Suez particularly, and also against the background of the internal struggle for power in the USSR...

...Though the book restates the fact that there were significant departures in practice under the "Polish road to socialism"—a greater freedom of expression, an armistice with the Catholic Church, a refusal to force collectivization on the peasants, etc.—there were also significant departures in practice before Gomulka—no writers were jailed or shot, no show trials took place, Gomulka was imprisoned but scarcely suffered the fate of Lazslo Rajk in Hungary or Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia...

...Although individual sections are sharp and penetrating, there is something fuzzy about the viewpoint, structure and tone of The Warsaw Heresy...

...Somehow, it never seems to meet the central and crucial issue, so succinctly stated by Polish writer Arthur Sandauer: "If we must accept the principle that the machine can only be repaired by the men who wrecked it, then we are lost...

...Was bringing Gomulka to power and permitting a general outcry against "Stalinism" and the "cult of personality" a way of riding out the reform, attempting to keep it from getting out of bounds, without resorting to military force...

...The Polish people hoped for some thoroughgoing reforms to improve their life, but knew that their goals and their efforts were limited because of Soviet policy, the obvious difficulties of their geographical position and the naked fact that the West was in no way prepared to intervene in their fate...

...If heresy is a doctrine at variance with orthodoxy, or, in Communist jargon, a deviation from accepted Party principles and policies, then this book on Poland from 1956 to the present does not succeed in setting forth, much less in proving, that there is an official Pclish Communist heresy...

...there is new tension between Church and State...

...Did the Communists use a passionate and perhaps politically naive group of intellectuals and reformers to siphon off verbally a large part of Poland's rebellious discontent without making major political and economic concessions, and, most importantly, without losing power...

...A story that Shneiderman tells is illuminating here...

...a new Party purge is in motion...

...This inability on the part of Polish and Soviet Communists—the "they"—explains why the title of Shneiderman's book is misleading...

...If you hide it, it comes to haunt you like a ghost...

...The book is in two parts, the first a 69-page essay covering Gomulka's return to power in 1956, and the second four sections of random essays, some of them, such as the one on the Western or "Recovered" territories, very good, and others, like the one entitled "Cherries, Fish, and Stalinist Justice," embarrassingly bad...

...They've taken the crown off the bird's head, clipped his wings and even chopped a piece off his tail...

...And if the answer to these questions is affirmative, doesn't the recent tightening of control make sense...

...Rarely does a nation, either its people or its government, throw up its hands in despair and say, "We are lost"—and neither people nor Government did so in Poland...