Poland and Hungary: A Reappraisal
WILES, PETER
By Peter Wiles Poland and Hungary A Reappraisal "A specter is haunting Eastern Europe, the specter of humanitarian socialism."—Edda Werfel, Przeglad Kulturalny, November 5, 1956. "Do you want to...
...Again, he should never have gone for safety to the Americans...
...Now come along, rally round, chaps, and let's all be nice Communists together," he is in effect saying...
...The Emperor said to him, "Well, Mr...
...This is vital: In what ways, it may be asked, is the state of Poland less democratic than that of Mississippi, U.S.A...
...In both, there is to a great extent freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the rule of law, though these things are more highly developed in Mississippi since the single party there makes fewer totalitarian claims...
...In particular, they disagreed over the foundation of the Cominform, which was—ironically—one of Tito's pet schemes...
...A second question of equal importance in Poland is formal democracy...
...Geography, too, imposes a restraint upon Poles...
...There were very few "captive minds...
...In particular, Nagy himself cannot be blamed...
...The patriotism was not always creditable (anti-Russian sentiment is very naturally of the most virulent kind), but on the whole both preserved an astonishing moral purity...
...Consequently a majority of Polish Communists, even at top levels, were people who had distinguished themselves during the wartime resistance or had at least been too junior before the war to be thoroughly Stalin-ized...
...In Hungary, on the other hand, Rakosi and Gerti dammed it up until the terrible explosion of October...
...In industry, Tito pressed on toward his own conception of "full Communism": The state "withered away" as planning was decentralized, price and output decisions were left to the free market, and—above all —workers' councils took more and more managerial power...
...She has more than 20 divisions and an output of 80 MIGs a year...
...The answer is: by breaking no law and threatening force against those who did...
...The Stalinist perversion was to use threats, lies and force—but illegally...
...So, for all these reasons, the Polish coup d'etat pursued its course as a purely intra-Party struggle, with the people acting as a Greek chorus, albeit a very one-sided one, while the Hungarian party struggle, similar as it was up to the point of the second Soviet intervention, followed in the wake of a popular explosion...
...His role was thus much more decisive than that of Gomulka, whom he could easily have arrested...
...The Poles have unanimously collaborated in the rebuilding of their country, consoling themselves with the achievements for the waste and misery...
...The independent socialist firms thus created are to decide their own outputs and possibly prices on a free market...
...Lastly, both countries possessed distinguished "national Communists," then out of office, around whom to rally...
...Brought up on our smooth British story, in which "freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent," I saw nothing whatever funny, and had great difficulty in making him appreciate how significant this was...
...Far from being a viceroy, he was not even ex officio doyen of the diplomatic corps...
...reduced the compulsory teaching of Russian in schools...
...The Hungarian Revolution had begun in the absense of most of the Politburo...
...But the antagonism between the two seems to have persisted...
...Nevertheless, a single party, if its inner life is not totalitarian, cannot avoid embracing very many trends at work in the community, and these indirect elections up and down the Polish party (conge d'elire from above having been abolished, of course) will come to mitigate Polish totalitarianism much as Democratic primaries mitigate white supremacy in Mississippi...
...However, there are also many differences...
...Moreover, force had not been lacking on the other side...
...With 28 million people, Poland is disagreeably large to be a satellite at all...
...many on both sides would go so far as actual federation...
...Many people have tried to blame these renascent bourgeois parties for the Hungarian debacle, but neither they nor the so-called National Committees (the more or less non-political ad hoc bodies in the provinces) ever made such extreme demands as, for instance, the Hungarian miners who demanded that the Soviet troops retire from the country flying the white flag...
...The only plausible explanation is that during the Great Purge Stalin developed one of his paranoid obsessions against the Polish party and physically liquidated the whole leadership, subsequently dissolving the party as such...
...And so, you see," said my Hungarian friend, "the joke ran at the time, 'Lawyer Deak has won his case for the Hungarian nation,' " and he burst into peals of laughter...
...It was interesting and tragic to watch his evolution under the pressure of events from a Gomulkaite into a positively anti-Soviet Communist, proclaiming his country's neutrality and denouncing the Warsaw Pact...
...Terror will, of course, be accompanied by economic concessions...
...In both, much of the population is excluded from power on grounds difficult to justify...
...First, while Malenkov was boss in the USSR there happened to be no stir in Poland, but he brought Nagy to power with him in Hungary...
...There exist, indeed, rump fellow-traveling parties, which are now taking on new life...
...Stalin never laid down an official Fuehrerprinzip or declared, even in a secret protocol, satellites to be colonies...
...Even the UB took Gomulka's side—and why not...
...he keeps his Djilas under lock and key...
...Indeed, the ghost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire loomed large over the Hungarian Revolution, for however innocently Austrians and Hungarians may discuss federation, the word implies the break-up of Czechoslovakia (Bohemia going to Austria and Slovakia* to Hungary), the cession by Yugoslavia of Croatia and Slovenia, and the cession by Rumania of Transylvania with its huge Hungarian minority...
...The majority also had its conspiracy...
...His press and literature are as unreadable as any—quite different from Polish writing, which presents as fascinating and frank a tension between freedom and authority as Graham Greene or Francois Mauriac...
...once that was in session, they could sit back and let the "Leninist norms of party legality" take their course—they knew that they had a majority...
...Gomulka is...
...To the west of Poland there is efficient Germany, thirsting for reunification, and after reunification for the recovery of the territories which—frankly—Poland stole from her in 1945, expelling 8 million Germans...
...Their leaders, Zenon Nowak and Kasimierz Witaszewski, the Army's chief political commissar, prepared a list of names of Gomulkaites whom it would be necessary to arrest...
...There was no state law, international treaty or, above all, Party statute saying that Poland shall obey the Kremlin...
...the people seized the opportunity, and the thaw developed gradually and naturally...
...further collectivization, state vs...
...by this time Soviet tanks were already on the Danube...
...But the hard facts seem to be effecting a rapprochement...
...What of the future...
...The only other card to play was troops in large numbers, as at Poznan...
...When there was real hatchet work to be done—e.g., at the enthronement of Ochab or Gero —a VIP always came from Moscow...
...Mindszenty has courage, he is of the stuff of which martyrs are made...
...It appears that Witaszewski actually gave orders to this effect, not to the security police over whom he had no control, but to the Army—and was simply disobeyed...
...There is even a large body of Polish intellectuals who believe that Gomulkaism can be developed into a watertight ideology, and are willing to make very bold experiments to that end...
...The Stalinist Natolin group had a minority on the Central Committee, so they had tc try for a coup d'etat...
...Now in fact his previous demands had been, by Austrian standards, quite excessive, but under the circumstances they were all granted...
...But he will not go down as a great man...
...It was not tactful of Mindszenty to say to a German journalist during the revolution that the greatest bulwark in Europe against Communism was a reunited and rearmed Germany...
...So here again Gomulkaism is seen to be a purely temporary phenomenon...
...Apres moi le degel...
...decentralized the planning system...
...It is difficult to see why...
...He arrested four particularly hated AVH men...
...This is not to say the same of Gomulka...
...A young Party intellectual, Kolakowski, has given the only possible nen-Stalinist answer (Nowe Drogi, September 1956) to this question: Basic dogma is not threatened by the freedom of its acolytes, simply because it is objectively true and reason will always reveal it to be so...
...Or he may be replaced—after a Russo-Polish war —by someone more Stalinist...
...Tito is a watered-down Stalin, while Gomulka is a charismatic leader of the Lenin type...
...Hungary and Poland have much else in common...
...Yugoslavia, then, remains a closed society while Poland is open to every wind that blows...
...The Polish coup d'etat and the Hungarian Revolution had the same causes: patriotism and the passion for truth and freedom...
...Happy accidents of history had preserved the lives of both these men, thus proving how right Molotov was in the Vicky cartoon: "I told you so...
...like Bukharin, a tolerant pessimist...
...He went to see the Emperor again...
...Indeed, even under Rakosi there had been the so-called Petofi club—a series of professional meetings of economists, writers, journalists, etc...
...Hungarian writers were even more important and gave an even bolder lead than Polish...
...eased the lot of independent craftsmen...
...Hungarian patriot...
...There were Jews in the Polish Politburo, but Moscow, itself extremely anti-Semitic, never liked to give them the top places, and it so happened that in Poland it did not have to...
...In particular, they broke the law: The Kadar Government never invited their troops back on November 4. That this is a lie, I am myself an ear-witness...
...But there was not the feeling, so pronounced when I was in Poland, that there had been a change of heart at the top...
...To be fair to Gero, he made substantial concessions between July (when he succeeded Rakosi as First Secretary) and October...
...Hungarian Communists, on the other hand, are all Stalinists or nobodies, and even before the recent events there was probably a smaller proportion of Communists anyway...
...Deak, what do you want this time...
...Be that as it may, your typical Polish Communist is a decent but fanatical type who actually takes humanitarian Communism seriously...
...This anarcho-syndicalism fits more easily into left-wing Communist ideas (a right-winger would prefer state capitalism counterbalanced by normal trade unions) ; yet Gomulka is imitating it...
...A majority of the ordinary Hungarian people thought otherwise...
...When Khrushchev won in February 1955, Rakosi also won, and Stalinism returned with more force in the smaller country...
...Radio Warsaw now broadcasts his sermons weekly...
...They say, "We built Nowa Huta...
...The chips are down all around: There is no possibility of restoring a "people's democracy...
...In neither country did the revolution bring any fascism to the fore, or any attempt at a "capitalist restoration...
...Attributed to Joseph Stalin...
...It was these broadcasts that incited the students in Budapest to meet and make demands on Monday, October 22...
...Freedom or death...
...After their three weeks' ordeal, the Nagyites must be the most right-wing Communists in the world...
...Above all, he took no action when writers exercised a more than Polish freedom of speech...
...What else can he do...
...It was, indeed, intellectuals of some sort that began both movements, with the industrial workers following them...
...One would like to know what went on in his mind...
...We must never forget that we thought Hungarian heroism had won the day, that the country w;is in fact free...
...Yet by a delicious irony the Kremlin must tolerate the program, for it is the minimum price payable for the continued existence of satellites at all...
...But the biggest difference is the bad luck that Hungary had in the chronology of her revolution...
...It is what his workers want...
...The Kadar Government was not in existence until later that day...
...the Hungarians say, "They built Sztalinvaros" (these are the two great Communist steel towns...
...in which they could blow off steam...
...They went so far as to lynch only security policemen (AVH), leaving other Communists untouched...
...Polish Communist...
...In the face of the Kremlin, however, "national Communism" is inevitable whether it be of the Right or the Left...
...With extreme diplomacy he replied, "Nothing more after Sadowa than before, your Majesty...
...It is official in Yugoslavia (which is supposed to be a left-wing anti-Stalinist country) and in Poland (which is supposed to be right-wing) ; it is the unofficial wish of the overwhelming majority of Hungarians—and, one may add, of virtually all resistance groups inside the Soviet Union...
...In both countries, the bourgeoisie was mainly Jewish and was regarded as an excrescence upon the social body by the classes above and below it...
...Some Roman Catholics are also demanding something new and less compromised...
...In these two countries, so deeply disgraced by anti-Semitism, many Jews naturally react by being anti-Polish or anti-Hungarian as the case may be...
...It had lost Poland a fortnight before, and seen its proconsul there humiliated...
...active coexistence) reproduced itself more sharply in Hungary between Nagy and Rakosi...
...Both countries, again, are "historic nations...
...But all this refers only to the political and intellectual sides of Gomulkaism...
...Gero reverted at the microphone to pure Stalinism, thereby turning the demonstrations into a revolution...
...During the Revolution the free Radio Miskolc advocated Danubian federation...
...Marshal Rokossovsky actually called out the Polish Army for "seasonal maneuvers," or possibly "to help with the potato harvest...
...The essential difference is that in Mississippi this party has democratic primary elections, while in Poland it co-opts its members and chooses its leader by indirect election only...
...The oldest generation was anti-Communist all right, but tired...
...My own observations in Poland, which were much more thorough than in Hungary, confirm the leading role of youth in this process...
...The peasants had, of course, never ceased to resist since 1945, but from the nature of things in a dispersed and passive manner...
...Thirdly, it is very important that Hungary is one third the size of Poland...
...Its whole satellite empire was crumbling...
...In agriculture, there is to be a free peasantry which may voluntarily cooperate for certain purposes...
...Workers' councils are to have considerable powers...
...The Hungarians are a good deal more romantic...
...Above all, there is the growth of democracy inside the Communist party itself...
...Undeniable of course, and Mindszenty must be excused because he is himself volksdeutsch (his name was Pehm until 1945), but there are times and places for saying such things...
...A left-wing Communist, he was the boss of the most fanatical and most quickly "socialized" of all Stalin's satellites, while Gomulka was and is the man of the Right par excellence...
...Youth is as irresponsible as age, but not so tired...
...Nagy is a man with a less distinguished past, a less powerful intellect and fewer gifts of leadership than Gomulka...
...Finally, Hungary has been ill served by the other personalities in the affair...
...In both, one party has the monopoly of power...
...Again, the whole idea of moderation in politics is alien to them...
...initiative was the astonishing dispatch of free food to Budapest after the first Soviet attack had been beaten...
...these are an invariable Kremlin specific after revolutions...
...But why should they...
...Komar is said to be a personal friend of Cyrankiewicz, who was of course strongly on the side of Gomulka since he is himself an ex-Socialist...
...When we are very frightened, we revert to the simple wisdom we absorbed at our mother's knees...
...and now it had been defeated by schoolchildren in Hungary...
...The difference between Ochab and Gero is the crux of the difference between Poland and Hungary...
...But the Kremlin could not permit it twice, and in Hungary they did indeed revert to Stalinism, lying as the old man himself had never lied, and using force on a scale that would have made him lift his eyebrows...
...Compulsory collective farms are to be abolished, and the crop sold on a free market without compulsory deliveries to the state...
...Control by informal violence withered with the death of the political genius who invented it...
...you should have waited till they were dead before you rehabilitated them...
...In the summer the militarized security troops ("KBW," to be distinguished from the security police—"UB") had been put under the command of General Waclaw Komar, a Communist veteran of the Spanish War who had fallen victim to Stalinism...
...and even experimented with workers' control...
...All that Ochab and Gomulka had to do was have strong nerves and rest upon their rights...
...They were concentrated more in politics than in the arts, and there are far fewer today...
...In 1867, after the Austrian defeat at the hands of Prussia, the Hungarians renewed the demands for independence which they had raised before the war...
...The journalists' night at the club [June 27, 1956] was the main thing that persuaded the Kremlin to throw out Rakosi—"little Poznan" they called that night...
...There is already a strong movement to revitalize the Parliament as such, thus splitting sovereignty between it and the Central Committee...
...It was the writer's own opinion—I will not forget that when I saw my first Soviet tanks west of Gyor on November 2 I said, "Ah, Soviet tanks...
...After Gero's initial mistake, the Hungarian Revolution could not have been controlled by anyone, especially not, incidentally, by a bourgeois politician...
...The speech struck shame, inertia and hesitation into the Polish leaders...
...These saw that it wasn't a question of ideology but of simple imperialism and military prestige...
...It was incredible how similar have been the ideas of the Poles and Hungarians for the future economic structure of their countries...
...we needn't be frightened of them...
...So is Professor Julian Hochfeld, who counts in Poland as a good Communist...
...Secondly, there is the common aristocratic-romantic tradition...
...Most probably, popular and intellectual pressure will nudge him to the right, as it did Nagy, who ended up as the reductio ad democraticum of Gomulkaism, a Communist presiding over a many-party system...
...Fir st, both are Roman Catholic countries...
...To the west of Hungary lies neutral, friendly Austria, the home of Schlamperei and, since Deak, her historical friend and ally...
...The KBW straddled all the approaches to Warsaw...
...not to mention the end of Tito's dream of becoming the center of a federation himself...
...In Poland, the people never got on top of the politicians...
...A Pole thinks of a Polish Communist as a queer kind of Pole, a Hungarian thinks of his as a Russian agent...
...They are far to the right of Gomulka, since they actually accept free elections and the permanent prospect of the Communist party being one among many...
...They were represented by a lawyer, Deak, a peaceable, pipe-smoking man who had taken no part in the 1848 fighting...
...Gomulka was—temporarily—liquidated, Tito won through: There was not enough Soviet force to kidnap him or browbeat his Central Committee...
...By Leninist tradition—not seldom violated by Lenin himself, but never mind—the Kremlin keeps its control by influence and (for Communism is a highly rationalistic creed) by being obviously right all the time...
...I was awakened by firing at 5:15 a.m., and heard Nagy make his last broadcast as Prime Minister, demanding resistance, at about 5:45...
...On Tuesday morning the students had brought out the whole town, and it was not until then that Gero returned to his capital...
...There was instead a vicious, silent struggle between two Party factions, each trying to lay their hands upon the levers of power...
...Alas, more Deak and less Kossuth was just what the nation needed in 1956...
...These same ordinary Hungarians, however, cut off any retreat behind their politicians...
...Do you want to rebuild Warsaw every ten years...
...Tito remains, however, a totalitarian...
...Economic demands played hardly any role in Hungary, though workers' delegations to the various governments did of course raise them...
...Now, of course, there are no Stalinists and no nobodies either— just the AVH and the cabinet...
...the cry was free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops...
...It was almost unanimously anti-Communist...
...For it did so happen that at the critical moment Poland was governed by Polish and not Jewish Stalinists...
...Their sole Peter Wiles, a young economist and Fellow of New College, Oxford, arrived in Poznan, Poland the day of the strike and went on to Hungary to witness the revolution...
...This sort of program is indeed a universal reaction to Stalinist economics...
...He has played his part manfully and history will be kind to him...
...Also the secretary of the Warsaw Party organization, Staszewski, arranged for arms to be delivered to various factories in Warsaw and insured an unofficial bodyguard for Gomulka until the Central Committee should meet...
...The essence of this program has not to my knowledge been made articulate anywhere: It is that people can only work well in the kind of social set-up that they as workers personally prefer, and that this set-up may well differ from occupation to occupation...
...This latter was put down by Polish forces and had no direct or visible consequences beyond the city of Poznan...
...He is no Keren-sky...
...The middle generation contained not only the fathers of young families but also the weak characters and muddled thinkers...
...Tito is at once more stable and less attractive than Gomulka—his dreams of Balkan federation shattered, his uniqueness duplicated, his appearance of decency and moderation exposed as a sham by the Polish reality, his protege (Kadar) and his patron (Khrushchev) both discredited...
...Industry is to remain in public ownership, but to be radically decentralized...
...The next point of difference is easily misunderstood...
...For, first, what is the status of Party dogma if Party members are to be intellectually free...
...In Poland, prophecy is permissible: For all his great gifts and services to the nation, Gomulka is the Kerensky of Polish liberalism...
...Tito is a totalitarian optimist in a hurry: The people can be educated into "full Communism...
...Indeed it is very doubtful whether the radio would have given such prominence to the events in Poland, translating Gomulka's speech in full and topping ofE the program with the Marseillaise, had the Politburo been present in the country...
...In a frenzy of anarchic self-discipline the people, including the criminals, stole nothing, beat no Jews, and never got drunk...
...Just one proof out of many: The Soviet Ambassador interfered in every possible way, but he was still only an ambassador...
...She cannot be shoved around...
...Of Hungary one can only say that it will either become another Finland or remain under Soviet military government, however disguised...
...Any Pole can see that the Soviet guarantee of the Oder-Neisse line is a matter of life and death to his country...
...In a crisis, every Pole or Hungarian has certain historical symbols and historical moments at the back of his mind to which he can turn for encouragement and example: 1831, 1848, Kossuth, Kosciuszko, etc...
...Torturers and hangmen are not necessarily unpatriotic, or extreme in their political views...
...As an economic and social structure, we have seen that it is perhaps the most stable in the world, and will radiate, under whatever name, far beyond Poland...
...Its importance was to increase the disgrace and embarrassment into which Khrushchev's speech had already plunged the Polish Stalinist leadership...
...How did Poland fight off Soviet intervention...
...The contrast is even more striking between Mindszenty and Wyszynski...
...So when in February 1956 Khrushchev made his celebrated de-Staliniz-ing speech, Poland was ready for her first and only thaw...
...it may be asked...
...Nor have there yet been exchanges of VIP visits, as between Yugoslavia and all other satellites...
...Above all, Gomulka was obviously on the way back, while the fall of Rakosi merely brought Gero...
...Be it ever so left-wing, Tito had to dissolve his collective farms and abolish compulsory deliveries—a typical Go-mulkaite policy...
...But that was a desperate throw and it was already too late...
...Then, for some reason, Polish Communists are genuinely the nicest Communists in the world...
...Their relative lack of economic interest is a case in point...
...A Czechoslovak station also jammed Radio Gyor...
...So while geography imposes no restraint on the feelings of the Hungarian in the street, it makes the neighbors very sensitive indeed to what he does...
...Insensate industrialization and excessive investment are to stop...
...The committee of Stalin's successors had only to re-establish the "Leninist norms of party legality" for Poland to be lost...
...How else, speaking with hindsight, could the Red Army have reacted...
...There was no formally valid objection if the Central Committee chose to reinstate Gomulka or sack Rokossovsky...
...the Central Committee was in session and the Marshal was ordered to return his troops to barracks...
...It chose Ochab, who actually went over to the anti-Stalinists at the critical moment...
...they actually demanded no censorship at all, and the punishment of Stalinists...
...Gomulka's own speech to the Central Committee strongly hints at the same, at any rate for peasants...
...Should there, for one thing, be opposition parties...
...Such a war is still very much in the cards, and the first duty of Western politicians is to prepare for it...
...The larger, the Gomulkaite faction, had only to wait until the newly called meeting of the Central Committee took place...
...In origin, Tito is very different...
...A Hungarian told me what he supposed was a very good story...
...Tito's party is as monolithic as well can be, and there is a sizable personality cult to boot...
...Then again, Gero was only a few hours back from Yugoslavia when he had to make his broadcast to the rioting population...
...As opposed to Hungary, Poland has had two sharp lessons on the futility of armed uprisings: the Warsaw uprising against the Germans in 1944 (the Russians waited on the opposite bank of the Vistula until it was crushed) and the unplanned workers' uprising of Poznan in June 1956...
...If it delivers the goods, it will radiate its influence into almost every country outside the English-speaking world...
...Rakosi, Gero and Hegediis are all Jews...
...Poland had less chance to show this than Hungary, where for weeks there was no authority...
...These operations were thus a clear aggression...
...National Communism is not the same as de-Stalinization...
...The moral achievement is perhaps unparalleled in revolutionary history...
...Party, passive vs...
...Peasants stop things, they don't start them...
...Both resisted...
...A very impractical nation, they can only achieve the impossible...
...In particular it will radiate into the USSR and threaten the social system there...
...The really significant conversions were those of Edward Ochab and Imre Nagy, who from different starting-points moved perceptibly to the "right," and changed the course of history in their respective countries...
...Tito hardly spoke a kind word about Poland until after Hungary, and at top levels in Poland one hears no compliments the other way...
...Radio Bratislava replied with a stream of abuse in Hungarian, a language it never normally uses...
...In Poland, on the other hand, the reaction against waste, centralization and poverty was a crucial factor, and economists were among the rebellious vanguard of the intellectuals...
...He was only hoisted into power two days after the explosion began...
...therefore Gomulkaism is a purely transitory phenomenon...
...This program is immensely attractive...
...The literary and historical traditions and the social aspirations of the lower classes were always directed toward the aristocratic, not the bourgeois virtues...
...We must reply to this modern Abelard that the human mind is naturally inquisitive and Marxist dogma is in fact false...
...Wyszynski is of the stuff of which cardinals are made...
...And in foreign policy a rapprochement seems inescapable...
...Cardinals in Communist countries should take refuge in Italian legations...
...The Malenkov-Khrushchev feud (consumption vs...
...Such was the opinion of half the Soviet experts known to me, and of Geza Losonczy and Zoltan Tildy, two members of Nagy's last cabinet, at a press conference six hours before the Soviet aggression...
...It is aristocratic to defy tanks with your bare hands...
...I suggest that, in a crisis, Hungarian Jews like Gero and Hegediis would experience less emotional hesitation before calling in the Red Army than a pure Pole like Ochab...
...It is true that 30 per cent of the Hungarian population is Protestant, but still Hungary is like Poland in that it takes its religion very seriously, and Mindszenty was the hero of the whole country...
...investment, incentives for private peasants vs...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 6
