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Provisional Government of Poland. Six months later, following the Yalta agreements and the broadening of the Lublin group to include four non-Communist Poles from abroad, Moscow's creation was recognized by the major Western powers as Poland's legitimate government.
With the negotiation of this hurdle, Poland had moved well into the first phase of its postwar evolution, that of the suppression of democratic forces and the consolidation of Communist (local and Soviet) power. These processes were hindered, however, by the fact that Poland's Communists were woefully ill-prepared to assume control of their war-torn country. Among other things, they were few in numbers, weak in organization, and generally unpopular. During the interwar years, their small party had been paralyzed by factional struggles, police penetration, and repeated purges. In 1938 it has been dissolved altogether on Stalin's orders. Although the party had been resurrected in 1942, wartime conditions had delayed progress toward filling out its ranks and rebuilding its domestic organizational base. And neither its new name, the Polish Workers Party, nor the minor role it ultimately came to play in the anti-Nazi resistance movement had served to alter the decades-old conviction of most Poles that their country's Communist party was antinational and therefore an alien organization.
Popular prejudices notwithstanding, however, the Polish party had never been entirely immune to the nationalist virus. Thus one effect of World War II was to create a basic division within its ranks between the so-called native Communists - those individuals, typified by the Party's First Secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka, whose roots were firmly in Poland and who had spent the war years in their homeland - and the emigres (popularly known first as the Stalinists and then, as times changed, simply as the Muscovites who had returned home from varying periods of exile in the Soviet Union in the baggage of the Red Army. Both groups were agreed on the necessity of active collaboration with Soviet advisors, military units, and secret police during the consolidation period, but the emigres were understandably far more prepared then the Gomulkaites to subordinate purely Polish interests to those of the Soviet Union.
As time passed, Gomulka became increasingly uneasy about the Kremlin's hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe and its insistence on slavish adherence to the Soviet model. He was firmly in favor of maintaining the closest possible ties with the Soviet Union, but he wished to see the partnership develop on a more equal basis. By 1948, his outspoken objections to the supranational character of Stalin's newly established Cominform organization, his refusal to inaugurate a program of forced collectivization, and his criticism of the insufficiently national orientation of Poland's prewar Communist party had placed him on a collision source with the Stalinists.
It was an unequal contest. Gomulka may have enjoyed the sympathy of the bulk of the party rank and file, but he did not have control of the party machinery, and, more important, he had incurred Stalin's wrath. Yet even after he was forced to resign his job as party chief in September 1948, he refused to renounce his basic views. In 1949 he was stripped of his remaining party and government posts. In 1951 he was placed under strict house arrest and disappeared from public view. However, memories of his stubborn defense of his position lingered on. The Polish people compared Gomulka to his Stalinist successors, and in time the legend grew that he had been a truly "liberal" and "nationalist" leader.
Gomulka's fall from power and the "merger" of Poland's Communist (Workers) and Socialist parties which gave birth to the PUWP a few weeks later marked the end of the consolidation period. With Soviet help, Warsaw had broken the back of all organized political and paramilitary opposition. Most of Poland's prewar political parties had been disbanded and their leaders converted, jailed, or forced into exile. The two non-Communist parties still in existence, the United Peasant Party and the Democratic Party, were mere appendages of the PUWP. The voice of the Roman Catholic Church, while not stilled, had at least been somewhat muted. The ouster of Gomulka and his associates had cleansed the party of its own potential troublemakers. Its new leadership, headed by Boleslaw Bierut, was unquestioningly loyal to Moscow.
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