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the meeting opened, Moscow intervened. Soviet forces began to mass along Poland's borders and those Red Army units already on Polish soil moved out of their garrisons toward Warsaw. A star-studded Soviet delegation headed by Khrushchev himself flew to the Polish capital uninvited in order to assess the situation and, if need be, to bully the Poles into submission. Ochab thereupon adjourned the PUWP plenum and, together with Gomulka (who had been hastily coopted into the Central Committee on the news of Khrushchev's arrival) and a number of other senior Polish leaders, entered into a stormy negotiating session with the Soviets which lasted into the early morning hours of 20 October.
In the end, the Poles not only persuaded Khrushchev that Gomulka's accession to power would strengthen Polish socialism (and that, on the other hand, any attempt to block his election as First Secretary would have very bloody consequences) but also succeeded in hammering out the basis for a new and healthier relationship between Warsaw and Moscow. The Soviet delegation departed for home as hastily as it had arrived. The PUWP plenum resumed its work, and on 21 October Gomulka was confirmed in office as party chief. The events of the proceeding week had made him a national hero. His countrymen were prepared to believe that such a man could do no wrong, and Poland entered the third phase of its postwar development on a great wave of popular enthusiasm.
For a time it seemed that Gomulka might live up to popular expectations. He halted the forced collectivization of agriculture and allowed those peasants who wished to withdraw their land from established collectives to do so. Rejecting the rigidly hostile stance of the old Bierut regime, he negotiated a mutually acceptable, if somewhat uneasy, accommodation with Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church. Despite the tense atmosphere which prevailed in Eastern Europe in the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt, he successfully defended and consolidated his country's newly expanded autonomy in the conduct of its domestic and foreign affairs. These were no mean achievements, and they endured to become an important and positive part of the legacy which Gomulka bequeathed to Gierek in 1970.
But the process of accommodation with Moscow involved many compromises, and, in any event, Gomulka's views on the proper lines of Poland's future evolution were far different than those of most of his countrymen. The people hoped that he would democratize and rationalize Poland's political and economic institutions and that he would lead them into ever greater independence from Moscow. Gomulka, on the other hand, wished only to correct those Stalinist distortions which had derailed Poland's existing socialist system and which had reduced his country to the demeaning status of a Soviet satellite.
Gomulka was, in fact, in a very uncomfortable position during his first few months in office. The chain of developments which culminated in his return to power had left the PUWP in total disarray and had released spontaneous forces for change which had pushed him much further in the direction of radical reforms than he wanted to go. Though he had, of necessity, dealt with his Stalinist opponents forcefully and quickly, he was convinced that if Soviet hostility to the Polish experiment were to be overcome and the disaster of Hungary avoided, the more tenacious and more destabilizing liberal elements in Poland's post-October internal environment would have to be suppressed - and the control of the party over all aspects of national life reasserted - as soon as possible. He set about this task with characteristic determination and thus planted the seeds of popular distrust and disillusionment which were to bear such bitter fruit less than 14 years later.
The consequences of Gomulka's retreat from liberalism might have been less serious had it not become a self-feeding process or had Gomulka found it in himself to be more responsive to changing internal and external conditions once he had consolidated his domestic position. As it was, Gomulka became increasingly preoccupied with the task of maintaining a delicate factional balance within the PUWP and governmental hierarchies and therefore tended to neglect his country's other internal problems. When this resulted in outbreaks of popular dissatisfaction, he responded by incorporating increasing numbers of hardliners into his regime to control the population
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9
