The Origins of Gomulkaism

...As far as Russia is concerned, quite apart from the suppressions of the Tsars, Poles remember the Russo-Polish war of 1920, the terror against thousands of Polish citizens and clergymen in post-Revolutionary Russia, the Nazi-Soviet partition of 1939, the murder of Polish officers at Katyn, the Soviet betrayal of the Warsaw Insurrection of 1944, the deportation and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Poles in the Soviet Union during and after the war...

...In other satellites, the proportions ranged from 26 to 75 per cent...

...With exceptions which can literally be counted on one's fingers, the entire Polish Central Committee was shot in Russia or sent to concentration camps from which they never returned...

...And, though the Polish Communists used all the approved Soviet methods, they were by far the least successful of the East European states in collectivization...

...The speech was made without prior consultation with the Politburo, and its theses met with the decided opposition of a majority of the Politburo and Central Committee...

...The answer is that in 1948 he did not enjoy wide support either among the people or in the Party...

...Thus, he pressed for the earliest possible merger of the Socialist and Communist parties—before the Socialist party could be purged...

...Even Soviet aid to Poland had a deplorable effect...

...One must add, too, the fact that the Communist plan for agricultural production was, over the years, about 70 per cent unfulfilled...

...To cite two of many examples: In 1947, Gomulka was quite reserved and reluctant when the Cominform was being organized, fearing it as an instrument of Soviet domination...

...While the charges against all the latter were for the most part fabricated, the charges brought against Gomulka were in many respects true...

...To begin with, Gomulka was undoubtedly an adherent of alliance and cooperation between Poland and the USSR...

...Although Gomulkaism has an international character, it is Poland which became the center of this movement of reforms and resistance to Soviet Communism...

...Second, Gomulka atempted to detach the traditions of the postwar Polish party from those of the prewar Polish Communist party...

...In contrast to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria, during the years 1949-53 there were no trials of real or imagined "Titoists...

...He was, nevertheless, reelected to the Central Committee...

...For the people, Gomulka was a symbol of Soviet intervention in Poland, falsified elections, secret-police lawlessness and deportations to Siberia...

...For the tendency which Polish Party Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka represents sprang from forces operating in all the satellite countries and ill nearly all Communist parties, forces which can be summed up as the political and ideological crisis of Soviet Communism...

...For example, on the basis of Soviet credit, Poland built a large steel works at Nowa Huta, with a capacity of several million tons...

...Finally, though the population of the Western territories is only a third of the total Polish population, three-fourths of collective-farm families were concentrated in these districts—where many peasants lack ownership deeds and the right to sell their land, and all peasants have been cultivating their soil only since the end of the war...

...The plenum sent a telegram to Gomulka with best wishes for his "health," and announced a general discussion on fundamental' problems of Party policy...

...He stated many times that Soviet-style collective farms were not suited to the Polish peasant, and absolutely opposed the use of force in collectivization...

...As a result, Edward Ochab, who had succeeded Bierut as First Secretary, transferred authority to Gomulka in October without—as Erno Gero in Hungary did in transferring power to Imre Nagy—calling in Soviet troops...

...He hoped the new party would synthesize the Socialist program in national matters with the Communist program in social matters...

...All Socialists," he stressed, "should find themselves in the new party...

...Gomulka was then removed as General Secretary, but remained in the Central Committee...

...In this situation, Gomulka, secretary of the Warsaw Party committee, became First Secretary...

...He used police methods, accepted the aid of Soviet troops, falsified elections, and did not object to Soviet interference in Polish life so long as it was aimed at defeating his foes...

...In the other countries, entire villages, subjected to a Party-police "offensive," joined the collectives...

...Earlier, when the first state stations were established to rent machinery to peasants, he opposed the plan to scale rental fees to the size of the farms...

...This project also engaged the activities of numerous Polish technicians, skilled construction workers, etc...

...According to official figures, investment amounted to some 25 per cent of national income...

...other villages, not yet attacked, remained independent...

...Some time later, Pawel Finder, who had succeeded him, was also killed by the Gestapo...

...After a few months, Nowotko was captured by the Nazis and shot...

...a year later, he was arrested...

...With him into the new regime came his old colleagues of 1948: Defense Minister General Marj an Spychalski, Gomulka's ideologist and Education Minister Wladyslaw Bienkowski, trade-union chief Ignace Loga-Slowinski, Central Committee cadres chief Zenon Kliszko, commander of Internal Security troops General Waclaw Komar, and many others...

...yet reconstruction was so slow that in 1955 the housing space per capita was lower than in 1948...

...At the December 1948 congress of the Polish Party, Gomulka spoke on the danger of "cosmopolitanism.1 He used Zhdanov's slogan, however, to warn the Polish Party against "subjugation" not by the West but by the East...

...There are cities in Poland, including Warsaw, in which 80 per cent of the housing space was destroyed by the war...

...Such, then, were the major political and social ex-1 periences which contributed to the rise and triumph of Gomulkaism in Poland...

...Between 1944 and 1948, the first stage of the Communist revolution in Poland, Gomulka and Moscow viewed events identically...

...He died in 1956...

...During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he had urged an alliance of Communists and non-Communists for the duration of the struggle...

...The roots of the Gomulkaist program are to be found primarily in the years 1944-49, the period of the formation of the Communist state in Poland, when Gomulka was General Secretary of the Party...

...Gomulka's attitude in this respect also determined his view of the Socialist tradition in Poland...

...The experiences of the last twelve years only added fuel to the fire...

...The fact is that, even though Gomulka's faction has led the party for a year, both the "conservative" (Stalinist) and "liberal" (more properly, socialist) factions command positions in the Party and state apparatus, and continue to influence Party policy and official statements...

...At the regular meeting of the Central Committee, Gomulka delivered a report on the traditions of the Communist and Socialist movements in Poland...

...Though the USSR supplied much equipment, what could not be brought from Russia for this plant had to be produced in Poland—and thus over a hundred large Polish plants became involved in supplying the steel works...

...Polish patriotism, and the strong aversion to Russia and Germany among its workers, are well known...

...the lower-type "cooperatives," designed for less "aware" peasants, were least successful...

...And no Okhrana or Gestapo killed as many of our comrades as the Soviet NKVD...

...A number of other key Polish Party leaders had to operate within the USSR, organizing a Polish army which would enter Poland with the Red Army and constitute the nucleus of the apparatus of Communist dictatorship...

...In the view of the majority of the Party, too, he had become if not the "ideal leader" at least "the best solution...

...Toward the end of August, another Central Committee plenum was called, at which Bierut delivered a speech on "Nationalistic and Rightist Deviations in the Party...

...Only a few members of the postwar Politburo had been prewar Central Committee members...

...The tempo of industrialization in Poland was also exceptionally high...

...Between 1951 and 1956, it suffered more than any other satellite besides Hungary—even though its living standard had ranked right behind Czechoslovakia's and East Germany's...

...But even some well-informed Western correspondents in Poland attach the label "Gomulkaism" to everything that happens in the Polish Communist party...

...Uninformed commentators tend to lump Gomulkaism and its program with Titoism, clearly a very different phenomenon...

...Polish coal was transported to the Soviet Union in enormous quantities, either at prices only a fraction of the world market price, or gratis—as war reparations...

...Poland was the main satellite producer of jet planes, tanks and other heavy war equipment...

...Poland's policies today were framed in debates a decade ago The Origins of Gomulkaism By Seweryn Bialer (First of two articles) There are few Communist parties in the world today, and none in Eastern Europe, in which individual leaders and even major groups cannot accurately be described as Gomulkaist...

...they also tell us much about Gomulkaism today...

...Here there was a bitter legacy of "cooperation" with Soviet Communists...

...In 1948, he branded a report that kolkhozes would be established in Poland as a "hostile rumor" and "propaganda...

...The fight first broke into the open in June 1948...

...A popular saying in the Party aktiv in 1955 was: "It is not fair that the French Communists call themselves the Party of the Murdered...

...This was contrary to Soviet plans, plans which led to the Soviet betrayal of the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the destruction of Warsaw and the death of hundreds of thousands of Polish patriots...

...The chief task of foreign policy was to terminate the war with Germany and annex its eastern territories to Poland...

...In December 1949, a Central Committee plenum condemned Gomulka and his colleagues for accepting bourgeois police agents into Party ranks, political blindness, lack of vigilance and factional activity...

...The expansion of heavy industry was rapid, but reconstruction was slow...

...if one considers that the prices of capital goods were markedly lower than commodity prices, the investment burden was probably closer to 50 per cent of national income...

...The situation Seweryn Bialer, 31-year-old native of Lodz, Poland, spent ten months in Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Friedland...

...But he regarded these relations as state matters, not ideological or Party affairs...

...The discussions of 1948 revealed the main lines of Gomulka's policy and how it differed from Moscow...

...Thus Gomulka, though he had been deposed in 1948 as Party Secretary, had remained alive, wielding great authority and cast in the role of a martyr...

...Finally, Gomulka differed from the Stalinists on key economic questions...

...The chief economic tasks were the nationalization of industry, the division of landlords' estates among the peasants, and the reconstruction of war damage...

...A favorite Gomulka statement was: "We are a new party...

...With much difficulty, a group of Communists was mustered and sent into Poland...

...When it came to these ends—as well as the means of carrying them out—Gomulka had no quarrel with the Soviets...

...A sharp discussion took place, but was inconclusive, and Gomulka went on "vacation" in order to think over the problem...

...And, on the industrial front, he supervised the elaboration of the Three Year Plan for 1947-49, which did not stress the Stalinist principle of priority for heavy industry, and which Gomulka called a "plan for abundance...

...Gomulka himself, though a man of stature, was the product of a whole confluence of conditions and circumstances, traditions and experiences...

...Without Soviet credit, the Poles would never have dreamed of building such a plant...

...Continued next week...

...The old leaders of Polish Communism having been liquidated, Moscow had to start afresh when it began to organize an underground party in Poland in 1942...

...there were also some fortuitous events...

...To be sure, there were potential divergences in the field of long-range policy, but Moscow needed Gomulka to attain its immediate goals in Poland, and Gomulka knew that Polish Communists needed Soviet aid to achieve power...

...Soviet credits amounted to some 3 billion rubles, more than all the other East European satellites together, and the major influence was to further unbalance the Polish economy...

...It was, moreover, a party with extremely rich traditions, with hundreds of leaders whose experience extended back to Tsarist times...

...Only when Gomulka's party had attained full power, that is, in 1948, did these long-range divergences come to the fore...

...The purge that followed was unprecedented...

...In view of these divergences between Gomulka and the Soviet Communists, it is easy to understand why Gomulka took an unfavorable view of the Cominform declaration of 1948 which condemned Tito's Yugoslavia...

...The entire party discussed the published minutes of the plenum...

...That this link broke differently than the link in Hungary may be traced to the fact that the desire for change in Poland had long reached higher into the Party aktiv...

...Boleslaw Bierut, whom the Kremlin trusted best, was also in Poland, but Moscow's plan called for him to assume the office of President of the state, traditionally non-partisan in Poland...

...Among the latter was the death of the outstanding Polish Stalinist, Boleslaw Bierut, shortly after the 20th Soviet Party Congress...

...Using Lenin's phrase, Poland had become a weak link in the chain of Soviet imperialism...

...He emphasized that his party would not, like the prewar one, be dependent on Moscow but would consider the class struggle and national independence as equally important...

...The younger Party generation was still lost in the haze of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and Stalin, the "conqueror of fascism" and "liberator of humanity...

...Many of the views condemned were, after all, the views of Gomulka himself—particularly with regard to national independence...

...It is we who deserve that name...

...The only prominent prewar Central Committee member in Poland after the war was Franciszek Fiedler, who had been in France during the purge and war periods...

...Soviet occupation forces in Poland were more numerous than in any other satellite country besides East Germany...

...While the fight against the others was waged from the start according to the Soviet pattern of 1936-38, in terms of a criminal case, the fight against Gomulka was first conducted on political grounds, resembling the Soviet pattern of 1926-29...

...Furthermore, the centrist Gomulka group is often compelled—under the pressure of the masses in October 1956, in fear of Kremlin intervention more recently— to take steps which it regards as improper or insufficient...

...would begin their replies: "The basic errors of the Communist party before the war were...

...Its military burden was more severe than that of any other East European state...

...Gomulka was expelled from the Party...

...In other words, collectivization in Poland could attract or coerce only the very weak or Communist-minded peasants, without denting the broad peasant mass...

...Unlike Czechoslovakia, which had developed defense industries before the war, Poland had to build most of its war plants from their very foundations...

...Soviet exploitation of Poland was also especially severe...

...The chief political task was to defeat the non-Communist parties and insure the monopoly of the Communist party...

...Thus, the highest types of collectives, similar to the Soviet artel, constituted 80 per cent of all collectives...

...It should be noted here that Gomulka's view of the struggle against Hitlerism had differed in some aspects from that of Moscow...

...After six years, only 9 per cent of the arable land—representing 7 per cent of farm production—had been collectivized...

...In Poland, however, the local collective ordinarily embraced a handful of farms, while the rest of the village resisted it...

...Heavily contributing to the growth of anti-Soviet sentiment—and to the victory of the Gomulka faction— was the economic position of Poland...

...several of his colleagues were also removed from key posts...

...Industrialization lay especially heavy on the people because Poland's war damage was the highest in the world proportional to national wealth...

...An underground Communist since 1942, he was employed by the Central Committee of the Polish Communist party from 1951 through 1955 in ideological activity...

...in Poland made him the symbol of victorious resistance to the Kremlin within the Communist movement...

...Poland was still paying these reparations in 1954, after East Germany had been exempted from them by Moscow...

...Gomulka openly opposed not only limitations on Polish national sovereignty by the USSR, but any limitation of the sovereignty of the Polish Party by the Soviet Communist party...

...In December 1948, Gomulka, a delegate to the Party Congress, delivered a speech which brought sharp retorts from Politburo members...

...The percentage increase in production of heavy industry, and the absolute increase per capita, were higher than in the other satellites, and in many cases higher even than in the Soviet Union...

...his speech on the occasion of the formation of the Cominform was devoted chiefly to underscoring the freedom which the Polish party would enjoy despite it...

...With the exception of the insignificant parties of Korea and Switzerland, this was the only case in the Communist movement where a single purge embraced the entire party...

...Poland, the first nation invaded by Nazi Germany, paid reparations to the USSR for German assets on the Western territories annexed to Poland after the war...

...The hidden aversion to Stalinism in the Polish Party came to the surface after Stalin's death, and gained in strength as police terror diminished...

...It was a speech clearly calculated to warn the delegates against the danger of losing Polish freedom to the Soviets...

...Gomulka's attitudes had stemmed from his own Polish experience, and in many respects they were (and are) very different from those of Tito...

...He escaped to West Berlin in January 1956 and later came to this country...

...He stated unequivocally that the prewar Socialists were right and the prewar Communists were wrong in regard to national independence...

...By the end of the war, he possessed great authority...

...To begin with, Gomulka's selection as General Secretary in 1944 was, to a large extent, the result of circumstance...

...Crucial to this situation was the atmosphere prevailing in the Communist party aktiv, particularly among Party intellectuals but including top leaders...

...therefore, his Party work had to be kept secret...

...And in 1953 Poland had to begin repaying the credit —with valuable export goods constituting some 10 per cent of its annual export...

...In 1949, however, the attacks against his group grew ever sharper, and accusations of a criminal character began to appear more frequently...

...The old Party activists, on the other hand, would not forgive Gomulka's attempt to erase their past traditions, his favoring of underground anti-Nazi fighters to old Moscow-based Communists...

...He even said, on several occasions: "We are not a Communist party, we are a workers' party and a party of the nation...

...Eight years later, however, Gomulka had become, in the eyes of the people, a symbol of resistance to Stalinism, of endurance and strong principles...

...Stalin had dissolved the Communist party of Poland in 1938...

...The remnants of the Socialist party were absorbed by the Communists into the new United Workers party in December 1948...

...It is thus necessary to distinguish carefully the essence ol the Gomulkaist program from the various tactical maneuvers it must undertake from time to time...

...The story goes that when Gomulka was Party secretary, 99 out of 100 students at Party schools, asked "What do you know about the prewar Polish Communist party...

...It was only at the end of that period that the differences between him and the Stalinists became manifest, but they had always been present in embryonic form...

...How was it that in 1948 Gomulka was quietly and easily defeated, in contrast to his stormy return last year...

...In July, a Central Committee plenum was held in his absence and his views were widely criticized, though his name was not mentioned...

...Poland was also the chief transit country for the Soviets, and the transit costs were primarily paid by the Poles...

...The subsequent rise of liberal influences in the Polish party enabled the opponents of Stalinism to gain a majority in the Central Committee and Politburo even before the October upheaval...

...among them, Marceli Nowotko was to be the underground party's First Secretary, Gomulka a district secretary...

...It is important to note a crucial difference between the Stalinist struggle against Gomulka in 1948-49 and the struggle against Laszlo Rajk in Hungary, Ana Pauker in Rumania, the Slansky group in Czechoslovakia, and other alleged East European "Titoists...

...But Gomulka's views were not mere echoes of Tito's—the two men met but once in 1946, and contacts between the Yugoslav and Polish parties were weak between 1945 and 1948...