POLAND: MUST HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?
Socha, Lukacz
The following essay was written by a Polish sociologist who for obvious reasons must remain pseudonymous. I have translated it, incorporating some material from a far longer essay by the same...
...9, 1982...
...After the War we had an independent Polish Peasant party and a Socialist party...
...It was reestablished under a new name—the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza—PPR) by Wladyslaw Gomulka and others in 1942...
...A.B...
...212 (as the decree stipulated) former AK officers, but representatives of the security services, who were in charge, and who often "rehabilitated" the soldiers by dispatching them to local prisons and detention camps...
...13 The treatment of the Catholic Church in the mid1940s was so extraordinary that it deserves to be characterized as a blatant attempt to buy it off: the land reform of 1944-45 did not touch the huge estates owned by the Church...
...The democratic opposition was ruthlessly liquidated...
...That there were still individual groups carrying on armed resistance against the authorities is indisputable...
...Thousands of people were killed without due process of law or as a result of sentences passed summarily by military tribunals...
...This was clearly an act of good faith on the part of Okulicki and his colleagues: they had recognized the Yalta Agreement and hoped to play a constructive role in the political life of the country...
...In March 1945, the commander-in-chief of the AK, General Leopold Okulicki, along with 15 other leaders of the Polish underground, accepted an official invitation from the Soviet authorities to enter into negotiations with the Red Army and with the representatives of the new Polish Communist government...
...213 Yet in referring to "armed bands," the government press conveniently lumped together individual bandits, criminal groups, and political opponents, accusing them all of acting at the behest of the anti-Communist underground...
...We may never know precisely when the fateful decision was taken, but common sense and the historical record both suggest that preparations for the ultimate showdown had been worked out months in advance (just think of how much time it took to manufacture the hundreds of thousands of uniforms that were to make the ZOMO look like regular army units...
...And the same insidious rationale is now offered by the Jaruzelski regime to justify the suppression of Solidarity, the enactment of numerous outrageous laws, the continuation of the country's state of emergency...
...But most of those "terroristic attacks" were staged by the security services, employing for this purpose special detachments disguised as antigovernment partisans...
...Under the command of the London-based Polish Government in Exile, the AK planned to stage a general uprising as soon as the German armies began to withdraw—and before the Red Army fully "liberated" the country...
...See the New York Times, December 19, 1982, and Foreign Broadcasting Information Service, Washington, D.C., December 19, 1982...
...it was raised during the strikes in the summer of 1980...
...Only in 1956, after the death of Boleslaw Bierut, Poland's Stalinist dictator, following the publication of Khrushchev's "secret speech" in February '56, was Marian Spychalski released from prison and were Rokossovsky and the Soviet advisers sent packing...
...Religious services were broadcast over the radio...
...The decree, as admitted in the official press, opened the door to a host of abuses: an anonymous denunciation was enough to settle a personal or political score, to get rid of an irksome individual, to silence a potential critic...
...215 There will be no return, says General Jaruzelski, to the period before 1980...
...But these hopes proved illusory...
...z After having been forced to expel its "right-wing" elements, the Polish Socialist party (PPS) was merged, in December 1948, with the Communists into a new "Polish United Workers party...
...211 Reflecting the country's postwar social structure (a far larger percentage of peasants than before the War, resulting from the slaughter of over 3 million Jews, most of them urban and silted dwellers, and the destruction of Warsaw and other urban centers), the PSL was at first allowed to be represented in the government (by a vice-premier and three ministers), to run its own newspaper, Gazeta Ludowa (Peasant Daily), and to occupy a number of posts on the lower rungs of the state administration...
...The war in Europe ended on May 9, 1945, but Poland remained under martial law...
...After all, what's happening today is not exactly unprecedented...
...over 6,000 in 1947, and more than 5,300 in 1948...
...He is right...
...Equally ominous was the ubiquitous presence of military units, dispatched throughout the country ostensibly in order to combat corruption and prop up the sagging economy...
...The death penalty was to be applied for offenses such as ownership of weapons, membership in various "hostile" organizations, propaganda against "allied armies" (that is to say, the Red Army), and so on...
...Not one shop window was smashed by those hundreds of thousands of people—tired, hungry, on the verge of despair—who would wait endlessly in line for a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes for their children, for cigarettes or the occasional piece of meat...
...But one thing is certain: only when challenged by a powerful mass movement of protest will the regime of intimidation be broken...
...Consequently, the PSL refused to join the "democratic bloc"— composed of the PPR, the PPS (the Polish Socialist party), and a few splinters subservient to the Communists—and decided to run independently in the upcoming elections...
...Yet behind it, violence raged unrestrained...
...Some political prisoners were set free, and the number of political trials declined...
...These murderous actions were justified by the ostensible dangers posed to the security of the state by numerous "armed bands...
...Yet the lessons of the past are palpable: now as before, the job of destroying the opposition and of establishing (or reestablishing) the authority of the ruling elite is left to the Poles themselves...
...The observation of a contributor to the recently published Cambridge History of Poland is worth quoting in full: It is surprising that not a single senior officer .. . was killed or wounded in the course of [these] operations, with the exception of General Karol Swierczewski, the deputy minister of national defense, who died at the hands of Ukrainian partisans at BaligrOd in the foothills of the Carpathians...
...Similarly fraudulent were the legal sanctions the Communists invoked in their drive against political opponents...
...The Peasant party was decimated...
...It stipulated savage sentences for a variety of loosely defined "counterrevolutionary activities," including anti-Soviet propaganda, sabotage, diversion, terror, and treason...
...While the degree of violence may vary, the readiness to use it has never wavered...
...On September 23, 1944, a new "Criminal Code of the Polish Armed Forces" came into effect...
...Obviously, what is happening in Poland today cannot be strictly compared to the events of 1944-48...
...The similarity between those tactics and Jaruzelski's attempt to strike a bargain with the present primate, Cardinal Glemp, is striking...
...Let me turn, then, to the story of those fateful years...
...In November 1944 he resigned and then joined the new Communistdominated government established in Poland in 1945 and recognized by the Western powers...
...53, the Dziennik Ustaw had published three decrees that formally ratified the earlier decrees concerning the military courts...
...The KRN's session was taken up largely with discussions about the bill on the nationalization of industry...
...Once the military courts swung into action, however, the complaints came to an end...
...The "People's Guard," organized by the Communists in 1942 and supported by the Soviet Union, had no more than about 20,000 members...
...A.B...
...They were far too lenient, the press complained, showing undue compassion for youthful offenders...
...scarcely a deputy paid any heed to these measures that violated the most elementary principles of legality, and in effect deprived the citizens—including members of parliament—of any defense against the power of the state...
...The specter of "civil war," to repeat, is another classic stratagem...
...71-73...
...All the decrees were approved unanimously (by acclamation) at the Ninth Session of the National Council of the Homeland (KRN), on January 3, 1946—the final day of its deliberations...
...The reason for it was the reluctance of the civil judges, many of whom had practiced law before the War, despite great pressure, to hand down death sentences...
...religion in schools was compulsory, so was attendance at Sunday mass in the armed forces...
...More important, the principle of disguising brutality with a facade of democratic institutions has remained a permanent feature of Communist rule...
...Nevertheless, the notorious "Small Criminal Code" was not repealed until 1969...
...The prewar Polish Communist party was dissolved by Stalin in 1938 on grounds that it had become infiltrated with "Trotskyite" and other "hostile" elements...
...As I mentioned earlier, there were indeed some "armed bands" carrying on guerrilla warfare against the government...
...A close look at the decrees is instructive...
...12 These and all subsequent figures are taken from confidential government reports, shown to me by a party historian...
...In relating some of the highlights of Poland's earlier undeclared (but lethal) "state of emergency," I am not suggesting that the present situation is merely a replay of an old record...
...The reason seems clear: Poland was (and is) the largest of Moscow's satellites, and one in which the Communists had never commanded any real following...
...The three preceding years have somehow gone down in history as an era of pluralism: a legally constituted political opposition was allowed to function, the press engaged in spirited polemics, and the Catholic Church enjoyed unprecedented freedom—indeed, for a Communist country especially, astonishing privileges...
...The prisons could not accommodate everybody, but potential troublemakers had to be told what they could expect...
...210 (e.g., LwOw and Wilno) led to armed collaboration between units of the AK and the Red Army...
...Its demand for a proportional number of seats in the Sejm (parliament) was rejected...
...The real role of the police was revealed by Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Gen...
...This was the man who had led the Polish ' Stanislaw Mikolajczyk was the leader of the prewar Polish Peasant party...
...After the student riots in March 1968, the authorities used it in their vile anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual witch-hunt...
...Said the general, "The goals set and the results achieved could not have been possible without the support given to our ministry by the Polish People's Army and the party apparatus...
...I was loath to rob my questioner of the hopes he still obviously clung to...
...there is a return, however, more or less, to the state of affairs in 1945—that is, to the point of departure, when a small clique of power-hungry politicians set out to bring a nation of more than 20 million people (36 million now) to heel...
...In July 1945, a new government—the Provisional Government of National Unity—was established, including representatives from democratic parties (those representing the prewar right were not allowed to resume their activities...
...The resistance continued until the end of the ill-fated Warsaw uprising, which began in August and ended in October 1944 (an uprising for which Stalin refused to provide any assistance, despite Soviet radio appeals calling upon the people to rise, and despite the fact that Soviet troops were approaching the eastern bank of the Vistula River...
...For already at that time I saw the writing on the wall: the appointment of General Jaruzelsld as the party's first secretary (this in addition to his functions as minister of defense and, since February 1981, prime minister) was in itself a chilling omen...
...9 See Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), Vol...
...As a result of the Yalta Agreement, the Provisional Government of National Unity came into being, including Stanislaw Mikolajczyk and other representatives of democratic parties.' Free elections were to be held...
...At the same time, and for the same reasons, the need to maintain the pretense of a "democracy" was correspondingly greater...
...In July 1944, military forays in various areas ZOMO—Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej (Motorized Detachments of the Citizens' Militia) —the special branch of the police used to disperse demonstrations and protests...
...Finally, the third decree that brought about the undeclared state of emergency in Poland established a Special Commission authorized to pronounce sentences of up to two years of forced labor upon people accused of a variety of "economic" crimes, such as speculation, corruption, and bribery...
...I must confess that I lacked the courage of candor...
...Translated from the Polish by ABRAHAM BRUMBERG 216...
...Yet precisely in this era of "pluralism" the terror was at its height...
...The de facto state of emergency lasted, as I mentioned before, for nearly ten years—until the beginning of 1955...
...I have added a few explanatory footnotes to the author's about references that may not be familiar to the American reader...
...A.B...
...In July 1945 he became prime minister of the Polish Government in Exile...
...Thousands of AK soldiers and officers were lured with promises of clemency, only to be arrested and deported deep into the Soviet Union—to Kaluga, Orel, and beyond...
...12 The overall number of sentences handed down by the tribunals (including prison sentences) was staggering: 5,000 in 1945, over 6,000 in 1946 (that is, after the formal abolition of martial law...
...How did it happen...
...But one cannot understand the present period without reference to this sinister chapter in Polish history...
...Returning to the decrees of 1945: the second one had stipulated that summary convictions could be pronounced only by civil courts...
...The vote went overwhelmingly in the PSL's favor, but the results were suppressed and falsified.' The same happened in the elections to the Sejm, which after many delays were finally held in January 1947...
...When I finished, a young man rose to ask a question that had no relation to the subject of my talk, but which was clearly uppermost in the minds of my audience—indeed, in the mind of every thinking Pole at that time...
...The ties between the Polish security police and Moscow remained intact, though now they had to be concealed from public view...
...Instead, they were arrested, brought to Moscow, and put on trial, under the notorious article 58 of the RFSSR criminal code, for engaging in anti-Soviet activities.' The charges were as absurd (such as "terroristic attacks" against the Red Army, undertaken jointly with the Wehrmacht) as the original invitation was duplicitous.' The arrest and trial of the 16 underground leaders, while the most shocking, was but one of many similar incidents, all designed to break the political opposition...
...What guarantee do we have that Solidarity will not meet with the same fate...
...This the AK decided upon...
...The article (with some prescience, one must admit . . . ) asserted that "in view of the international solidarity of the interests of all working people, all actions are deemed counterrevolutionary if they are directed against any workers' state, even if it does not constitute part of the U.S.S.R...
...The Communist press made it clear that the civil judges caused the authorities no end of embarrassment...
...3 And the prime mover was not (as one often apparently hears in the West) the armed forces, called in to "save the country"— or the party—but the same old police apparatus that has ruled Poland ever since 1944-45, an apparatus whose ties to Moscow had never been broken, all the heady achievements of the Polish "renewal" notwithstanding.' History, as we have all learned from our high-school teachers, seldom repeats itself in exactly the same way...
...As the author demonstrates, Polish Stalinism was not a product of the cold war but was concomitant with the "liberation" of the country by the Red Army...
...The existence of terrorists was convenient for the Communists, because it gave them a good reason to strengthen the security forces and to postpone holding elections until they had tightened their hold on the country...
...In the first years after the War, the facade was that of a "people's democracy," an ostensible "multiparty" system, with elections and a "national referendum" (about which more in a moment...
...While the War was still in progress, a number of decrees were promulgated by the PKWN," conferring extraordinary powers on military tribunag...
...Even so the resistance would have been fierce, the number of casualties and the political price enormous...
...Nevertheless, the security organs continued to function, and severe sentences against the regime's political opponents were still meted out, all based on extorted confessions and bogus evidence...
...During the election campaign, thousands of PSL members (including 142 candidates...
...In the 1960s it was used to prosecute numerous intellectuals who were accused of maintaining relations with foreign "subversive centers...
...In addition, AK members who, following the amnesty, reported to the special rehabilitation commissions, found themselves facing not only An extremely revealing book by the Polish historian Maria Turlejska, entitled Zapis Pierwszej Dekady ("The Record of the First Decade"), noted that in the few districts where PSL tellers were admitted to the count, they learned that 85 percent of the voters followed the PSL's appeal, but that, on the whole, votes were counted in secret by government representatives (Zapis Pierwszej Dekady, Warsaw, 1972, pp...
...London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 291...
...A.B...
...As this period drew to a close, the dreadful rigors of the earlier years were relaxed...
...More than a month earlier, however, in its issue No...
...The elections were a fraud...
...209 troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was responsible for the massacre of workers in December 1970...
...The PSL was certain of victory: after all, a few months earlier, in November 1945, free elections in Hungary had resulted in victory for the Small Landowners' party (the Hungarian counterpart of the PSL), and the appointment of its leader, Ferenc Nagy, as prime minister...
...on March 28, 1947...
...Soviet Marshal Konstanty Rokossovsky, who—along with a bevy of Soviet gen214 erals—had taken over the Ministry of Defense in 1949, remained in power...
...One part was devoted to "crimes against the state...
...The bloodiest toll was exacted in the countryside, under the guise of "pacification" of "rebellious" villages, both Ukrainian and Polish...
...were arrested, and about 2 million people were disqualified from casting their votes.' According to the official statistics, the "democratic bloc" captured 80.1 percent of the vote, and the PSL only 10.3 percent, which meant that the latter was to have only 28 out of the 444 seats in the Sejm...
...Second, the way in which Solidarity was subdued is singularly reminiscent of the tactics used by Moscow and Polish Communists during the mid-1940s in imposing a detestable system on a country where Communists had never enjoyed popular support...
...Yet during the 16 months of Solidarity's existence not one person was killed, not one party building was set on fire (as happened, largely owing to police provocations, during the previous workers' uprisings, in 1956, 1970, and 1976...
...The consolidation of Communist rule, therefore, had to be more ruthless...
...Soviet advisers (many cloaked in anonymity to this day) continued to supervise the grisly work of the Bezpieka (Security Office...
...Its leadership remained, of course, politically anti-Communist, but it hoped to become part of the open, legally constituted opposition...
...an outright military invasion of Poland probably would have necessitated at least a million troops...
...Yet without evidence of disarray within the German ranks, the AK decided to launch another operation called "Tempest," which was to consist of diversionary attacks—rather than a fullscale insurrection—in the rear of the Wehrmacht...
...The "pacification" of Czechoslovakia in 1968 required about 400,000 troops...
...When and how this will come to pass again is difficult to predict...
...Now they found that mere membership in the AK constituted a "crime...
...Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic (RFSSR) was promulgated in 1926 and served as the basis for the criminal codes of all other Soviet "Republics...
...Especially in the Ukraine various nationalist groups, some of them formerly allied with the Nazis, engaged the Polish and Soviet troops in sporadic battles, and often committed atrocities upon the non-Ukrainian civilian population as well...
...By the summer of 1945, the tribunals were literally working round the clock...
...With the rout of the German troops, however, the AK was confronted with the choice of either disbanding or entering the First Polish Army, organized in Moscow in 1943 under General Zygmunt Berling, and loyal not to the Polish government but to the Soviet Union...
...In the summer of 1981, the West seemed chiefly to be worried about an impending Soviet invasion...
...The jails were filled with political prisoners, most of whom were never even brought to trial (a total of 100,000 according to the internal reports of the Ministry of Public Security in 1949, as many as 150,000 according to the 1962 reports of the Ministry of Internal Affairs...
...by July 1946, however, the military tribunals totally took over this function...
...The other option was to withdraw to the western part of (still occupied) Poland, and there to engage in sporadic resistance...
...Official propaganda claimed that Poland was in the grip of a "civil war," instigated by "terroristic gangs" working with the London government...
...It issued appeals to its followers not to engage in any military actions against Soviet troops or their Polish allies...
...The aim was to place the country in a de facto state of emergency, and thus to nullify the significance of the subsequent abolition of the state of war...
...It seems clear that Jaruzelski neither wants nor is able to resort to the brutal methods employed by his predecessors in the 1940s and early '50s...
...the judges were loyal party members or military men trained to follow orders, and they did as they were told...
...and it was resurrected a year later, when the party press insisted that the workers were being incited by their "extremist" advisers to a violent confrontation with the regime...
...A.B...
...only a few months later, the Sejm went through the motion of conferring its stamp of approval...
...It was in fact the first version of a decree published a year later, on June 13, 1946, called the "Small Penal Code," and it remained on the books until 1969...
...Boguslaw Stachura at a meeting of the parliament's Committee for Internal Affairs, Administration, and Justice on Dec...
...These Poles can be relied upon to preserve —by employing subterfuge and lies and by hiding behind a facade of "democracy"— the system and its ultimate subservience to Moscow...
...In his report on the activities of the police during the year of martial law, the general said that his troops had arrested more than 10,000 people, broken up nearly 700 opposition groups, silenced 11 clandestine radio stations, destroyed nearly 400 underground printing shops, confiscated more than a million copies of illegal pamphlets, and carried out nearly 150,000 "preventive and warning conversations" with people suspected of underground activities...
...I vouch for their accuracy...
...To be sure, while the Church was thus being wooed (and not altogether unsuccessfully—the bishops, for instance, issued several appeals to the faithful to support the authorities) the prewar leader of the Fascist party Falanga was permitted to organize a diversionary pro-Communist Catholic organization (PAX), and a number of laws distasteful to the Church, such as one legalizing civil marriage and divorce, were promulgated...
...many had played a prominent role in the underground against the Germans, frequently as partisans, and frequently fighting " The History of Poland Since 1863, by R. E Leslie et al., R. E Leslie, ed...
...The arrests were ordered and carried out by the security services...
...A.B...
...II, p. 570...
...I have translated it, incorporating some material from a far longer essay by the same author that appeared in Krytyka, an uncensored political quarterly published in Warsaw since 1979 (No...
...ABRAHAM BRUMBERG At the end of October 1981, I delivered a lecture at one of the higher educational institutions in southeastern Poland...
...For an account of the trial by one of its survivors, see Z. Stypulkowski, Invitation to Moscow (1939-45), with a preface by H. Trevor-Roper (London, 1951...
...A.B...
...And as there could be no real "liberalization" then, so now talk about liberalization is sheer delusion...
...During those operations, in which the principle of "collective responsibility" was frequently applied, a total of 10,000 people lost their lives...
...Mikolajczyk and his associates were forced to flee the country...
...What is the evidence...
...Even after the proclamation of an amnesty for the Home Army, issued in August 1945, trials and deportations continued...
...The unyielding and provocative attitude of the authorities ever since Solidarity had come into being, the shrill references in the press to the danger of a "civil war," the open talk about an impending state of national emergency (to be introduced, so everybody thought, with the full "majesty of the law," that is, by a vote of parliament)—all this, evoking memories of the past, suggested that yet another in my country's periodic quests for freedom was about to be crushed...
...See, for instance, Michael Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York: Karz-Cohl, 1982), Part IV...
...The real offensive against the Church, however —consisting of wholesale arrests of the clergy, including Cardinal Primate Wyszynski, and the closing down of churches and tight censorship of Catholic publ:;..ations —began only in the early 1950s...
...IT IS CURIOUS that the post-1948 period is remembered as the apotheosis of Stalinist terror...
...Censorship of mail and telephone surveillance have now been incorporated into the Polish Criminal Code...
...6, 1980), and made available in the West by the Polish journal ANEKS (London...
...16 The bill on "social parasites," for instance, passed by the Sejm in November 1982, provides stiff penalties for those "deliberately avoiding work...
...The essay, in my opinion, is fascinating on two counts...
...Yet it was precisely the popularity of the PSL that proved to be its undoing...
...He was forced to flee the country in 1947...
...Now, more than a year after the imposition of martial law, and several weeks after its farcical "suspension," the missing links are slowly emerging...
...i° PKWN—Polski Komitet Wywzeolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation), established in Moscow in July 1944, was recognized by the Soviet Union as the "temporary organ of executive power in Poland, and superseded a year later by the Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN...
...First, it contains revelations about the early period of the Communist takeover in Poland proving that it was one of extraordinary brutality and not—as is commonly assumed—one of relative freedom, "pluralism," and tolerance...
...Even though the PSL was not opposed to the program in principle, it asked the voters to vote No on the first proposal, thus registering their support of the PSL...
...the Socialists were split and swallowed up in the new Polish United Workers party.' The election results were falsified...
...57, published a decree by the Presidium of the National Council of the Homeland (KRN)— the parliamentary body organized by the Communists in 1944—terminating the state of war that had been proclaimed by the president of the Polish Republic on September 1, 1939, the day of the Nazi invasion...
...The AK was formally rehabilitated in 1957: henceforth mere membership no longer constituted a punishable offense...
...It is noteworthy that none of the other East European leaders were treated as contemptuously as the Poles: not one of them, for instance, was put on trial in Moscow...
...A.B...
...It was only on December 17, 1945, that the journal Dziennik Ustaw ("Daily Monitor"—the official government organ), in its issue No...
...Political cases, which traditionally (before the War) had been tried by civil courts, were now to be tried exclusively by military tribunals—all firmly under the thumb of the Communists...
...The first dealt with crimes deemed especially dangerous during the country's reconstruction...
...This was admitted subsequently by several Polish historians...
...Once the political opposition was crushed—that is, by 1948—the terror began to decline...
...After this tragic debacle (which resulted in over 80,000 casualties, and the deportation of over 500,000 others), the AK was officially disbanded...
...It was used to justify the terror of the 1940s...
...Do you think that Solidarity will be allowed to continue, or will it be suppressed...
...The spurious "representative" bodies created by Jaruzelski, such as the Citizens' Committee for National Salvation (OKON) and the Patriotic Movement of National Rebirth (PRON), are all remnants of 1945 that have been maintained throughout the history of Communist Poland (e.g., the "Front of National Unity," the "coalition" of various groups that since the late 1940s has provided the Communist party with an instrument for exercising its monopoly of power...
...The largest of these was the Polish Peasant party (PolsIde Stronnictwo LudowePSL), which by mid-1946 had far more members than the Workers' (that is, Communist) party (PPR)7-600,000, as compared to the latter's 300,000...
...To be sure, the earlier state of emergency finally came to an end, largely as a result of the pressure of a population bursting at the seams, emboldened by the death of Stalin, sickened by lies, and prepared to struggle for its rights...
...Indeed, within several months after the elections to the Sejm, a number of deputies, including ministers and deputy ministers, were stripped of their parliamentary immunity, arrested, and accused of "antistate" activities...
...The preparations for the trial of Deputy Minister of Defense Marian Spychalski, for instance, who was arrested in 1950 in a purge of "national deviationists," still went ahead...
...On June 30, 1946, the government (now completely controlled by the Communists) staged a referendum asking the Poles to approve the major planks of its program: a unicameral parliament, nationalization of industry and land distribution, and the incorporation of the western territories...
...On the basis of this decree, as well as of the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces, military tribunals sentenced over 2,000 people to death between 1946 and 1948...
...side by side with Soviet troops...
...The military courts entertained no such scruples...
...And indeed, it was precisely the young people who were the most numerous victims of the military tribunals: most were under the age of 21, with little or no education, mainly of peasant or working-class background...
...It was far less risky, therefore, to resort to the tested instrument of the past: to set up the machinery of a putsch months in advance, to select the proper cadres, work out the necessary logistics, empty the prisons so as to make room for new prisoners, and draft the decrees—all the while maintaining the pretense of reasonableness and desire for "national reconciliation...
...Article 58 provided the "legal" justification for Stalin's reign of terror, and also for the prosecution of Polish "counterrevolutionaries...
...Yet in Poland (as in other Communist countries) historical precedents are unusually compelling, for the rulers of these countries have repeatedly resorted to the same methods to eliminate their real or potential challengers...
...The mainstay of the opposition to the Nazi occupiers during World War II was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa—AK), numbering approximately a quarter of a million members...
...Yet we all know what happened...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
