APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
appeared as a monolith, run with iron discipline by a united leadership. The events of the "Polish October" in 1956, when Gomulka regained power, and the events of 1968, when the power passed through its most profound crisis, publicly revealed endemic, deep divisions within the party that were characterized by genuine political differences and by large-scale breaches of party discipline. Despite Gomulka's temporary stabilization of the intra-party situation in 1968, his compromise with new, rising forces in the party - Gierek's among them - ultimately marked his regime for a fall, more by its own dead weight than by positive action of its adversaries. The nature of the strains that burst forth in 1956 and in 1968, and which ultimately created the preconditions for a rejuvenated regime under Gierek in 1970, had been shared by the origin and development of the Polish party.
a. Background
Until World War II, when the Soviet party itself shifted to stressing patriotism and nationalism, the disparate predecessors of the Polish Communist party were to various degrees anti-nationalist. Consequently, they were in unequal contest with the rest of the Polish socialist movement for the allegiance of the strongly nationalistic workers. The nationalist tradition of the Polish Socialist Party, its services on behalf of Polish independence during World War I, and its subsequent social and political program gained for it the support of the majority of the Polish working class.
In marked contrast, the Communist Workers Party, formed in December 1918, emphasized internationalism and opposed the very existence of independent Poland. This outlook, amidst the general elation over newly won independence, stamped the Communist Workers Party as an alien body, and it was largely regarded as such throughout the interwar period. Although it was not specifically outlawed in interwar Poland, the Communist Workers Party (renamed the Communist Party of Poland in 1925) had to operate semi-legally under the cover of various front organizations. Police persecution and increased infiltration of the party's ranks after 1926 forced it to become largely an underground organization.
Police penetration and intense intra-party factionalism made the Communist Party of Poland one of the least respected members of the interwar Comintern and subjected it to continual interference from Moscow. Of the seven congresses held by this party, all but the first were held in the Soviet Union, and these were generally dominated not by "native" Polish Communists but by those long resident and active in the USSR, the so-called Muscovite wing of the party. The resultant leadership struggles gained in intensity during the Soviet party's own internal struggles of the 1920s. Although a Polish party leadership apparently acceptable to Stalin was eventually installed, the losses incurred by the party in the subsequent round of Soviet-directed purges in the 1930s were enormous. Between 1934 and 1937 virtually all party members of any importance were ordered to Moscow, arrested there, and many of them executed. In March 1938 the Communist Party of Poland was officially dissolved by the Comintern on the double charge of being under Trotskyist influence and of having been penetrated by Polish military intelligence. The party had also become a clear liability to Stalin, whose tactical policies leading up to the signing of the non-aggression pact of 1939 with Nazi Germany were already in the making. (The 1938 dissolution of the Polish party was reviewed in 1955 by the Soviet and other parties who had rendered the original verdict and declared to have been unfounded.)
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 resulted in early Soviet approval for the attempts already underway to revive the Communist Party of Poland behind German lines. In 1943, Gomulka, whose lack of rank had saved him from the purges of the 1930s and who chose to stay in Poland during the war rather than seek refuge in the USSR, assumed leadership of the wartime party, which was organized in January 1942 as the Polish Workers Party to disassociate from the party dissolved in 1938.
The Polish party, which spent as much of its energies seeking to counter the influence of the vastly larger and more effective non-Communist underground as it did fighting the Nazi occupiers, remained politically insignificant until the entry of Soviet armies into Poland. It was solely owing to the presence of Soviet troops on Polish soil that the Communists eventually succeeded in taking over the government of postwar Poland. The same factor, however, revealed the basic split among the Communist leaders who emerged from obscurity in 1944; one group under Gomulka comprised the original membership of the party and of several other "native" organizations, and the other was the Communist group which returned from the USSR on the heels of the Red Army.
The growing split within the party took more definite shape in the following 4 years, nurtured by the Soviet party's increasing hegemony over Eastern Europe and Stalin's intolerance of national deviations from the Soviet model. Intra-party differences in Poland centered on Gomulka's declared opposition to
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
