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the supranational character of the Cominform created in mid-1947 and his criticism of the prewar party for its insufficiently national character and program. Gomulka's subsequent obstinacy in defending his positions led to a prolonged party crisis in 1948. Gomulka lost the leadership struggle to the Stalinist element because he did not have sufficient control over the party machinery, not because of his lack of support from party ranks; most members apparently shared his desire to place Polish-Soviet relations on the footing of close friendship between two sovereign states rather than on the basis of total subservience.
Gomulka's defense of his position was the key factor in the subsequent growth of the legend surrounding him as a "liberal" and "nationalist" leader. The new party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, and his colleagues seemed aware of the dangers of the legend and attempted to counteract it by dealing mildly with Gomulka. Although removed from leadership, Gomulka was never tried. He was not present at the "merger congress" in December 1948 when the Polish Workers Party in effect absorbed the Polish Socialist Party to form the PZPR; nor was he associated in the popular mind with the rule of terror and economic exploitation of the people during the Stalinist period of the early 1950s. When he was released from strict house arrest in 1954, Gomulka's popular image was a major factor in the developments which led to his regaining the reins of power - in the face of Soviet hostility - at the eighth plenum of the party in October 1956.
The earliest harbingers of the 1956 political upheaval, which culminated in the change of leadership in October of that year, were the signs of internal weakness in the terror apparatus after the death of Stalin in 1953, signs which were accompanied by more frequent manifestations of intra-party and popular discontent throughout much of Eastern Europe. In Poland increasing pressure by influential officials - both Communist and non-Communist - within existing regime institutions, together with initially cautious popular pressure undermined the seeming stability of Communist controls and once again exposed the divisions within the party. Traditional Polish nationalism reappeared everywhere, although with less romanticism and tempered with the realization of postwar Poland's vulnerable geopolitical position; Polish Catholicism revealed itself to have been strengthened by persecution; the individualism of the Polish peasant reasserted itself with a new determination born of his experience with collectivization; the social democratic bent of the workers and the intellectuals appeared reinforced by the years of disillusionment with Communism's "dictatorship of the proletariat"; and the pro-Western sympathies of the nation appeared heightened by the years of isolation under Stalinist domination and economic exploitation.
When these accumulated factors burst forth in June 1956 during the workers' "bread and freedom" riots in Poznan, the already shaken Polish party under the leadership of Edward Ochab, the successor to Bierut who died while attending the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party the previous February, realized that more than palliatives were needed to reverse its crumbling hold over the nation. The disarray within the security apparatus, the Soviet Party Congress criticism of Stalin which fell on ready ground in Poland, the Poznan riots, the intellectual turmoil which exceeded all formerly permissible limits, and the general atmosphere of popular expectation and willingness to bring about change by whatever means gave every indication of coalescing into an uncontrollable revolutionary situation, sweeping aside the party and resulting in a bloodbath through Soviet armed intervention - as occurred later in Hungary. The factors which instead brought about a peaceful change of regime were varied; they certainly included the fear by the people as well as by all elements within the party of direct Soviet intervention. The most important factor, however, appeared to be the availability of a once-deposed leader, reasonable acceptable to all, who was able and willing to try in effect to restore a "ruling" party to power.
Gomulka's reassumption of power in 1956 as First Secretary of the PZPR resulted in a formal repudiation of Stalinist methods, but not of Communist goals, and was accompanied by a brief outburst of political energy during which non-Communist political activity and non-Communist press could and did appear. These visible evidences of a reversal of former policies were not, however, a measure of Gomulka's publicized "liberalism," but rather of the extent to which the party had lost control over the political life of the nation. His main task in the months that followed, apart from implementing the tangible reforms of the party and government apparatus, was to eliminate non-Communist political activity not only for doctrinaire reasons but to preclude the real possibility of belated intervention by a Soviet leadership hostile to and deeply suspicious of the "Polish experiment." Whatever the charges leveled at Gomulka for his subsequent retreat from the liberal innovations of 1956 - most of which he tolerated and in part used but did not approve - achieved the successful transformation of a terror-ridden Soviet
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
