Can Poland Survive?
BLIT, LUCJAN
Having won the first battle for freedom, the Poles are caught between Soviet threats and Western indifference Can Poland Survive? By Lucjan Blit There are times when, in order to survive,...
...100,000 copies of Khrushchev's speech were printed in Poland...
...Once the question had been publicly put the answer could not be doubted...
...It started innocuously enough in the summer of 1953, with an article in Po Prostu, the paper of the young intellectuals, asking "What Is Human Happiness...
...The Poles know that they would be fighting alone...
...Replying to his opponents a few months later fin "Critique of the Poem for Adults"), he no longer looked to the existing party, but sought another which "will free the stream of revolution and will become the party of Lenin's image...
...year later came the Polish October— and also the massacre of the Hungarian Revolution...
...a member of the Polish Politburo, the 10th Department had remained under the direct control of the MVD in Moscow...
...But ordinary life had to go on just as anywhere else in the world...
...But as long as a well-organized, ruthlessly-led, fanatical minority had a myth, it could control the country...
...This was the end of the dreadful terror organization, and soon the end of fear itself...
...It could thus command the full allegiance of the Polish Communists, who were under the constant threat of "liquidation" for disobedience to Moscow's will...
...In his opinion Malenkov, the younger and more intelligent among the present Soviet leaders, may be expected to turn back to a pure Stalinist line in the event of his winning the battle for power...
...When it is, an honorable place will have to be found for the Manifesto calling the Poles to rise...
...Most of the papers, especially the weekly magazines, were dismembering what was left of the myth...
...The regime was going to pieces...
...They will crush with great brutality any movement inside these countries which aims to break the military links with Russia and which could develop into the neutral, but basically pro-Western, position which Austria has achieved...
...Khrushchev destroyed the mylh at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party...
...At other times, only wise patience can save them...
...People were talking loudly and freely about their rulers as any Irishman talks in London's Hyde Park about the "bloody English...
...They had to show the greatest determination when their mighty eastern neighbor confronted them with a show of force...
...It was then only six weeks after the memorable days of October 19-20 when the Moscow leaders descended unannounced on Warsaw in the belief that the pro-Soviet regime in Poland could be preserved by direct Russian intervention...
...Yet he said that a rejection by the nation of his regime might result in the liquidation of Poland as a state...
...This was the 10th Department of the UB, Urzad Bezpieczenstiva (Security Police) . While other UB departments after a while had only Soviet advisers and were under the supervision of Jakub Berman...
...as Party Secretary, wanted to re-establish the dominant position of the Party apparatus vis-a-vis the political police...
...When Wazyk wrote his "Poem for Adults" in the late summer of 1955, he still demanded a return to honesty "in the name of the Party...
...The second lesson stems from the West's attitude to the Hungarian revolution...
...Yet they were among the first to revolt against the Great Lie, against the suppression of everyday decency in life, against the oppression of anybody with the courage to think for himself...
...Adam Wazyk, Mie-czyslaw Jastrun, Pawel Here were Communists...
...During the last five or six months the Poles have had to use both methods...
...One is concerned with the limits which the Soviet leaders have evidently set to freedom movements in the satellite countries...
...Yet the people in Warsaw who were thinking about Poland's future saw very well the long shadow which their eastern neighbor throws over their country...
...began to "invite" to the USSR the Beria men running its satellite establishments...
...The Polish party, already weakened by the intellectual assault of the young and the artists, threw itself wholeheartedly into the process of debunking its own Leader Myth...
...People who only a short time ago were in prison as "enemies of the people" came to see me in the dining hall of the Hotel Bristol in the very center of Warsaw...
...When I was in Poland, one of the Warsaw theaters was showing Karel Capek's Mother...
...A nightmare had just gone, and a political spring was in the air...
...The Poles know that only the fear of a real war, in which the whole nation would have fought for its new-won liberty alongside the armed forces (which are as patriotic as the rest of the population), forced the top Soviet leaders to rush back to Moscow in the early morning hours of October 20, to accept the heretic Gomulka as the Polish leader, and to acquiesce in the expulsion of Marshal Rokossovsky from his commanding positions in Poland...
...But the Hungarian tragedy has also taught the Poles two painful lessons...
...He hardly needed to point to the power which would do it...
...He is not a wild demagogue...
...The head of the Polish 10th Department, a certain Jozef Swiatlo, thought the U.S...
...It was not signed, but a large printing plant, where all was ready to start the presses rolling, awaited only a signal from persons of high standing in present-day Poland...
...When I was in Poland last December, the pieces were still floating on the waves of popular enthusiasm...
...The words of Khrushchev at the Warsaw airport on October 19 about the Polish leaders having sold themselves to "the Americans and the Zionists" have not been forgotten, or misunderstood...
...Now an editor of Socialist Commentary (a Tabor party monthly), he has written for Twentieth Century and other periodicals...
...This time fin "Qui Tacent Clamant," published in Warsaw on November 25), Wazyk saw the end of his ideological road: "Where over the corpses of rebels the bitter smoke creeps,/The last myth has collapsed...
...The rank-and-file of the Party, who all the while had been paying lip-service to the Communist idea, had thrown away all pretense and either kept away from any Party activities, or silenced the representatives of the leadership who tried to guide them...
...The reason was that the Poles confused Capek's Mother with Maxim Gorki's novel of the same title, and nobody would force them, in December, to attend a play written by a "Bolshevik...
...The questioning young were soon to find powerful allies among the disillusioned poets...
...The Soviet press, when discussing Polish affairs, sometimes replaces sulkiness with open hostility...
...a more peaceful haven than the Moscow Lubianka...
...Moscow is determined to keep its empire intact, by whatever means...
...The replacing of Communists as the ruling group by a combination of democratic parties is tantamount, in Soviet eyes, to such a development...
...Former Party chief Bierut's death from a heart attack during the 20th Congress did not result from an act by an unfriendly host, but occurred after he had been told over the phone that the prisons were being opened in Poland and that his greatest enemies were being released...
...Sympathy is no substitute for physical power...
...His story of the 10th Department, with its "private prisons" (where Wladyslaw Gomulka, Marian Spy-chalski and many other present Polish leaders were held), and the "investigating" methods used in them, became known to the Poles thanks to a most successful broadcasting campaign by American and Western European radio stations...
...Usually the theaters in Poland are very well attended, but this one was playing to empty seats...
...Nobody knows what the future holds for the men struggling for power in Moscow...
...It is no fun now to be a Moscow representative in Poland...
...The full story of those dramatic days has not yet been written...
...This atmosphere of a disintegrating ideology, Party organization and state apparatus made possible the Poznan workers' uprising last June...
...The key to Poland's fate is in Soviet hands...
...They have won only the first battle...
...but, after winning their first battle, they had to curb their natural feelings of triumph in order to avoid bringing about a catastrophe of immense proportions...
...Malenkov, even more than Khrushchev, would be disinclined to leave the Polish island of heretics in peace within the orthodox sea of the Soviet Empire...
...When I landed on Polish soil last December 1, the air of triumph was all there...
...When Beria was removed...
...Militiamen (the uniformed police) were briskly changing into civilian clothes as soon as a crowd on the streets showed any inclination to demonstrate, especially if the target was a Soviet consulate...
...Moscow (was it Khrushchev, who...
...A leading Communist intellectual in Warsaw, who knows something about the internal situation in the Soviet Communist party, talked to me freely about the dangers of a new wave of Soviet oppression resulting from possible developments inside the Kremlin...
...Nobody cared to obey Government orders, and the Government knew it perfectly well...
...The dislike of everything connected with Moscow sometimes took grotesque forms...
...The members of the secret police, who were being dismissed at short notice, were holding secret meetings, trying to form a kind of trade union of people who didn't dare to appear at an ordinary working place...
...It was available to practically anybody who wanted to read this catalogue of Soviet sins...
...Since the war every one of them had published more than one elegy for Communism, Soviet Russia and Stalin...
...The emergency orders which they started implementing in October are no doubt still valid...
...From what I have seen of him and heard about him, he is a man in firm control of his passions...
...The overwhelming majority of the Polish nation never shared his belief in the Communist myth...
...A Lucjan Blit, who recently visited Poland as correspondent for the London Observer, was a member of the Polish Socialist party before World War II...
...They also have no illusions about the comradely feelings of the rulers of the neighboring satellite countries...
...They noticed in October the movements of Czech troops on Poland's southern frontier...
...The October days marked the peak of the Polish upheaval, which may yet change the political map of Eastern Europe...
...Whoever cares for the enlargement of the sphere of freedom and human dignity may now include in it the Polish people...
...The members of the large Soviet diplomatic mission in Warsaw were more isolated from the native population than Soviet representatives in Western capitals...
...In the middle of October, Soviet tanks were in the suburbs of Warsaw and other Polish cities...
...But it was a great victory for the unconquerable spirit of a proud nation...
...Marshal Zhukov boasted at a recent reception in Moscow that he personally had to stop the commanders of his 22 divisions stationed in East Germany from joining the 7 Soviet divisions permanently based in Poland...
...This the Poles know...
...Moscow could still have strangled the rebellious movement in Poland if it had not foolishly dismantled its own terror organization in the largest satellite state in Europe...
...The Party leadership was ideologically confused and bitterly divided into cliques and factions...
...By Lucjan Blit There are times when, in order to survive, nations must abandon all caution...
...Human happiness could not be found in a country terrorized by the scum of a secret police, exploited by a ruthless neighbor, and ruled by a tiny minority which compensated for its lack of idealism by a limitless lust for power and greed for material privileges...
...On January 1, on the eve of the election of a new Sejm, Gomulka broadcast to the nation...
...Meanwhile, the Polish October is being keenly observed not only by us in the West, not only by the unwilling subjects of the other satellite states, but also by many intelligent and influential Soviet citizens...
...Yet, apart from a few riots (in Bydgoszcz where a radio station which had been jamming Western broadcasts until November was burned down, or in Szczecin, where the Soviet Consulate was ransacked with great thoroughness), the population behaved with commendable restraint...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 12
