Stalin’s Russia was determined to turn Poland into
an obedient Soviet-controlled state; all vestiges of
democratic influence were to be swept away. A
Tito-like defiance could not be tolerated in
Poland, which was strategically far more vital to
the USSR than Yugoslavia. Fearful that the orthodox
communist but nationally minded Polish
first secretary of the Communist Party, Wladysav
Gomulka, could cause trouble, Stalin had him
removed and imprisoned. Gomulka’s rival for
power, the president of Poland, Boleslaw Bierut,
a former Comintern man, was placed in the crucial
position of first secretary. To make doubly certain,
a Soviet general, Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski,
installed as deputy premier and minister of
defence, ensured that Poland did not stray from
the Soviet fold. Rokossowski could call on a Polish
army of 400,000 men and on the Soviet divisions
stationed in Poland, which was ruled by the party
rigidly on the Stalinist model. Fears of West
German demands for the recovery of Germany’s
‘lost’ territories of Silesia and East Prussia could
be used to make Poland the most important
member, besides the Soviet Union, of the Warsaw
Pact alliance, which the Russians had set up in
1955 to counter the formation of NATO in the
West. Economically, too, Poland was closely
linked to the Soviet Union through bilateral
treaties. It was also a member of Comecon, the
Soviet-dominated Council of Mutual Economic
Assistance, set up in 1949. In its early years
Comecon hardly bestowed ‘mutual’ benefits on
its members but was largely inactive, a propaganda
answer to Western cooperation and
Marshall Aid.
Industry and small workshops were almost
totally nationalised in Poland. The economy was
directed by a central plan which gave greatest
emphasis to heavy industry and armaments. The
workers suffered from the exploitation of their
labour, and independent trade unions had been
crushed. To these privations, the easiest responses
were absenteeism, petty theft and shoddy work.
Thus the Polish socialist state in this command
economy did not win the support of the class on
which communism was supposed to be firmly
built – the industrial workers. The party tried to
push state agriculture too, imposing prices and
exacting taxes. Stalinist collectivisation made only
slow progress, however: less than 10 per cent of
arable land had been collectivised by 1955. The
rest remained in the hands of small farmers, but
they were defenceless against rigid state controls
and reacted by producing less and less.
The Catholic Church, traditional custodian of
Polish culture, came to embody national independence
and resistance to communism and
Russification. Relations between state and Church
rapidly got worse after 1949; the Church’s privileges
and possessions were curtailed and in 1952
bishops and priests were arrested and imprisoned.
Then in 1953 the primate of Poland, Archbishop
Stefan Wyszynski, was forced to retire to a
monastery.
All these repressive measures failed to break
the religious feelings of the majority of Poles.
Farmers clung to their soil and workers could not
be persuaded to build up a socialist Poland which
offered them so little reward. The bureaucracy,
the secret police and the party were ‘them’, to be
suffered only as long as was necessary – and that
meant, as Poles realised, as long as Soviet military
force held Poland in its grip.
Stalin’s death did not lead to any immediate
thaw in Poland. Bierut held on to power, though
on Moscow’s insistence ‘collective’ leadership had
to be adopted by splitting the positions of party
secretary and premier. Soon a split developed, as
it had in Moscow, between the Stalinist hardliners
and the reformers, and Bierut was forced into
concessions. Beria’s fall in the Soviet Union had
downgraded in the Soviet Union the previously
all-powerful security apparatus and limited its
murderous activities. Poland’s regime had to
follow suit. Communists unjustly imprisoned
were rehabilitated and Gomulka was quietly
released from prison. Discussion became more
free and critical; even Western jazz could now be
played. The Stalinist years had proved to be no
more than a cloak as far as people’s minds were
concerned: a religious, patriotic and critical population
remained very much alive in town and
country and so showed up the isolation of the
Polish communist leadership. Khrushchev’s not
so secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the
Communist Party in February 1956 denouncing
Stalin was a heavy blow to Bierut and the hardliners
in Poland. Indeed, it may have contributed
to the heart attack and death of Bierut in Moscow
a few weeks later.
Edward Ochab, formerly a Stalinist, now with
the wind of change from Moscow a more flexible
communist, succeeded as party secretary. He had
turned reformer. Khrushchev’s speech was read
out at Communist Party meetings throughout
Poland; a general amnesty released many political
prisoners. Reforms eased the lot of farmers and
workers, but the firm control of the party made
people regard talk of ‘democratisation’ with cynicism,
and the Russians remained ever present.
Yet, three years after Stalin’s death popular pressure
from below intensified in Eastern Europe,
fuelled rather than appeased by half-hearted
reforms, as it turned into open risings in Hungary
in November 1956. But the most serious crisis
appeared first to be occurring in Poland, when in
June 1956 the Poznan steelworkers escalated a
pay dispute into a disturbance of much wider
significance. They now loudly demanded ‘Bread
and Freedom’ and so challenged the whole
Soviet-backed system, though only in peaceful
demonstrations. The authorities reacted with
brute force. Army units fired into the crowds,
killing and wounding more than 300. Poles were
killing Poles. In the aftermath of these events in
Poznan the Politburo of the Polish Communist
Party was thrown into confusion by the deep division
between the Stalinists and the reformers.
According to the Stalinists the Poznan disturbance
was the work of ‘enemy agents’; according
to reformers it was an expression of legitimate
grievances. Most worrying were demands of
‘freedom’, not just internal freedom, but freedom
from the Soviet Union. This, no Soviet leaders at
the time would tolerate and the Poles knew that
if Russia’s position were seriously threatened
Poland would be forcibly brought back into line.
Nevertheless the Polish reformists gained the
upper hand. ‘Workers’ councils’ were established
to bring a ‘democratic’ element into management.
A reform programme was adopted and
Gomulka emerged as its leading exponent on
the Central Committee. In the struggle with the
Stalinists he soon enjoyed extensive popular support
in Warsaw and other cities. The crisis point
was reached in mid-October 1956. The Soviet
leadership became so alarmed that Khrushchev
and a high-powered Soviet delegation arrived
uninvited in Warsaw to halt the slide, which
might end in a repudiation of Soviet control and
of socialism. Soviet troop movements were set in
motion. Poland was on the brink of bloody conflict.
It is interesting to compare the situations in
Poland and Hungary at this time and to ask why
an armed conflict developed in Hungary but was
averted in Poland.
It is clear that Khrushchev wanted to avoid a
military showdown, whether in Poland or in
Hungary, because he realised the immense setback
it would mean for his reformist policies and for his
own position in Moscow. From a Soviet point of
view the danger Gomulka presented lay in his
Polish nationalism – another Tito could not be
tolerated. Then there was the even greater danger
that a national popular uprising would occur and
that the Polish leaders would lose control.
Gomulka convinced Khrushchev that only he and
the reformers could retain control, that while he
wished to correct the Stalinist errors of the past he
was a convinced communist, and that while Polish
nationalism required that Poland assert the right
to be treated as a sovereign nation Poland would
remain loyal to the Soviet alliance. What was
equally clear to Khrushchev was not only that
Gomulka enjoyed immense popular support for
his stand, but that the Polish army would be likely
to side with the Polish leadership, however hopeless
the struggle. Khrushchev had enough trouble
on his hands without inviting more, but he
returned home with misgivings. Before the end of
the year the Stalinists were purged from the Polish
party and the Russians agreed to abandon direct
interference in Polish affairs. The way was open for
‘national communism’. Gomulka also delivered
his side of the bargain. Poland remained a communist
state; it did not repudiate its membership
of the Warsaw Pact and did not intervene on
Hungary’s side. The Polish leaders recognised the
limits of Soviet tolerance. The Hungarians did not
and paradoxically it was Hungarian support for
Poland that radicalised the Hungarian unrest into
a full-scale rebellion against Soviet domination.
Hungary had suffered particularly under the iron
hand of the Stalinist first secretary Mátyás Rákosi,
having since the summer of 1949 been turned
into a communist state on the Soviet model.
Rákosi eliminated his communist rivals, even
hanging Laszlo Rajk, a former minister of the
interior. The peasantry was forced into collectivisation
and industry was placed under central state
control. The prisons filled and a vast and much
hated secret police enormously extended its
activities. To Khrushchev and the majority of the
Kremlin leadership an unreformed Rákosi was a
distinct liability. Rákosi in turn anxiously watched
the de-stalinisation developments in Poland and
was shaken by the apparent Yugoslav–Soviet reconciliation.
His response to demands for economic
reforms and for more freedoms within a
communist system, which were being advocated
by intellectuals and the more progressive communists
around Imre Nagy, was to clamp down
even more severely in the summer of 1956. In
July, however, the Kremlin forced him to resign.
There was no strong and popular communist
like Gomulka to replace him. The post of first secretary
was given to another, hardly less hated
Stalinist, Ernö Gerö. At least János Kádár, a cautious
reformer, who later was to play a critical role
in the revolution and the post-revolutionary history
of Hungary, joined the Hungarian Politburo.
After July, the divided Hungarian leadership
and the still overwhelmingly Stalinist party
machine failed to provide any firm national communist
direction to those such as the students,
intellectuals and many urban Hungarians who
were looking for change. Imre Nagy was potentially
the only popular communist around whom
the nation might have rallied, but like a good communist
he refused to organise an opposition.
Concessions by the Politburo were interpreted as
signs of weakness. Opposition grew and took more
and more challenging forms under the influence of
the Polish October. On 23 October 1956 students
spearheaded a mass demonstration of support for
Poland in the Hungarian capital. A ban on the
demonstration, which looked as if it would have
been in vain, was lifted. At first everything proceeded
peaceably. But during the evening the
hated Hungarian security police, the AVO, started
firing on demonstrators. The demonstrators were
joined by huge crowds calling for Imre Nagy. Gerö
then agreed to the intervention of Soviet troops to
restore order. At this stage they behaved with
restraint. On the following day, 24 October, the
Hungarian Politburo, in the hope of containing
the revolutionary situation, appointed Nagy premier
but Gerö remained first secretary.
The party had lost the support of the people
and, although the greater part of the Hungarian
army did not join the rising, the Politburo felt too
uncertain of the soldiers’ loyalty to use them
against their fellow countrymen. The rising was
spreading through Hungary and was taking the
form of a national rebellion. That same evening
of 24 October two important emissaries arrived
from Moscow, Mikhail Suslov, the party ideologist,
and Anastas Mikoyan, the oldest member of
the Politburo to have survived Stalin’s purges, a
man of negotiating skill and adaptability. They
agreed with Nagy that Soviet intervention had
been a mistake and consented to the dismissal of
Gerö and his replacement by Kádár. The Kremlin
saw a ‘Polish solution’ as the lesser evil, despite
the danger of allowing the uprising to spread
disaffection to Czechoslovakia, Romania and
Bulgaria. That did not happen. Nor was there a
Polish solution in Hungary.
Nagy was being swept along by the rising and
the committees and organisations springing up
all over Hungary. His success in securing the
withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest only
created the illusion that the mass protest of
Hungarians against communist autocracy and foreign
occupation had succeeded. A heady Hungarian
nationalism asserted itself. Nagy tried to ride
the revolutionary wave in order to direct it into
less dangerous paths. On 29 October Suslov and
Mikoyan were back in Budapest. The following
day Nagy announced that Hungary would return
to a multi-party system, making a decisive breach
with communist (though not necessarily socialist)
rule. But when he gave way to the demand that
Hungary should withdraw from the Warsaw Pact,
the writing was on the wall. The Kremlin could
not afford to lose total control or to take the risk
of being replaced in Hungary by the West. Anglo-
French preoccupation with Suez made the Russian
decision to intervene easier; it was equally clear
that the US would restrict itself to diplomatic
protests. What the Soviet leaders had to weigh
was the effect of their decision whether or not to
intervene on Eastern and central Europe. The
Warsaw Pact and Russia’s whole position was
in jeopardy. The Chinese, Bulgarian, Romanian
and Czechoslovak leaders were urging intervention;
Poland was busy with its own affairs and
Yugoslavia could not oppose the Soviet Union in
Hungary. So the Kremlin decided on the repression
of the Hungarian rising.
The pretext for intervention was provided by
Kádár. The first secretary had left Budapest
and had broken with Nagy, whose supporters
he condemned as counter-revolutionaries. On 3
November 1956 Soviet tank divisions returned in
force. The Hungarians, who had hastily armed
themselves, were joined by only a few detachments
from the Hungarian army. Civilians were
resisting trained troops and the Russian suppression
of Hungarians fighting for independence and
democracy could be seen on Western television
screens. The fight lasted long enough to influence
Western opinion against the Russians. In the West
it also opened the eyes of many communists and
fellow travellers, who now left the party. Nagy and
the Hungarian military commander Pal Maleter
were arrested while negotiating (they were later
tried and executed). Soviet tanks showed no
restraint this time but pulverised any building
from which rifle fire was heard. Thousands of
Hungarian refugees fled to the West, and armed
resistance in Hungary was soon crushed.
Kádár, carried to power on the back of Soviet
tanks, now worked to restore some semblance of
credible Hungarian independence. He accepted
that the Kremlin would not permit any democratic
multi-party government or Hungarian neutrality.
Provided, however, that the Kremlin could
be reassured on these two crucial points, then, as
in Poland, the Kremlin would allow Hungary
some degree of autonomy and freedom to choose
its own path. That was Khrushchev’s policy and,
to the surprise of the West, Kádár at first very cautiously
and then much more boldly charted the
course of Hungarian autonomy within the Soviet
alliance. In economic policies, Kádár followed a
new course, less repressive, less rigidly centralised,
allowing some scope for private enterprise and so
eventually turned Hungary into the most liberal
and, for a time, most prosperous communist
state. Kádár’s realistic nationalism and his
country’s growing prosperity in the end more reconciled
the Hungarians to his regime, which had
saved them from the threat of another Soviet
intervention.
World History
