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influence of a new psychological climate born of East-West detente, and if this materializes, lose sight of such constraints as are now operative on Polish leaders and are likely to continue to exist in the future.
2. Subversion
Except for the immediate postwar period when the advent of Communist rule was restricted to the variety of active subversive networks, there have been no known subversive organizations operating in Poland on a national scale. The rapid decline in subversive activity by the early 1950s was primarily a result of the effective terror tactics used by the Communist regime. Gradually, however, the main reason for the absence of active subversion has become the enhanced political realism of the Polish people which has created a climate inhibiting the formation of organized subversive organizations intent on a violent overthrow of the regime. No organized subversive activity was involve in the two instances of postwar social, economic and political change - those of 1956 and 1970 - both of which were characterized by spontaneous outbursts of repressed popular grievances, but neither of which was essentially subversive in intent.
This situation contrasts significantly with that of the immediate postwar period, when Poland was the only country in Eastern Europe where Communist rule was for a time effectively resisted by force of arms and by subversion, accompanied by covert Western help. Initially, this seemed not only from the anti-Communist, anti-Russian, strongly individualistic, and religious attitudes of the people, but also from the predisposition of most Poles to regard themselves as part of the West. Circumstances surrounding the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent occupation of the eastern half of the country by the USSR strengthened these attitudes, and wartime underground resistance against Nazi rule was predominantly Western-oriented.
Until 1948, open combat between armed non-Communist partisans bands and the regime's forces prevailed in many areas of the country. Thereafter, consolidation of Communist political power, skillful Communist penetration of the subversive networks, and a series of amnesties combined to liquidate armed resistance. The non-combatant subversive networks which supplemented the armed groups persisted for several years, but by 1951 the lapsed loss of effectiveness of the London-based Polish Government-in-exile, lax security and the absence of common operational guidance contributed to the disappearance of these networks.
Under the post-1956 Gomulka regime, the rapidly tightened internal discipline and the fading away of the liberal atmosphere that characterized the regime's first months in power combined to create both dissidence on the one hand and apathy and fear on the other. Dissent, however, was generally concentrated within small and generally ineffective groups advocating often contradictory remedies, and factors making for dissent were outweighed by the people's political realism, general public apathy, and the increased effectiveness of the police apparatus. Thus, although there were a variety of elements within the Polish population which could serve as the basis for subversive activity if united in a popular cause, their internal lack of cohesion and organization together with the popular conviction that nationwide subversive activity would have no change of success prevented these elements from constituting a meaningful threat to Communist rule.
Small, localized groupings of articulate individuals that existed on both sides of the political spectrum were most often not even subversive in intent, but the Gomulka regime portrayed them as such for political and propaganda reasons. For example, the regime's raising in 1968 of the straw man of a "Zionist, revisionist conspiracy" had no basis in fact, being merely a public propaganda cloak behind which a factional struggle within the party took place. Because of the chronic internal disunity of the Gomulka regime, the greatest potential for serious "subversive" activity in fact rested within the party itself.
Disappointing economic conditions, growing restrictions on personal expression, bureaucratic corruption, and policy stagnation had over the years engendered the existence of small, semi-secret groups among university students devoted to an often overt spread of philosophically idealistic but generally "democratic" alternatives to the Communist system. Probably few if any of these groups survived the regime's countermeasures following the student demonstrations of March 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August that year.
There is no hard evidence that prior contact with students in Czechoslovakia or elsewhere played a major role in sparking the 1968 unrest in Poland, although during the initial stages of the student demonstrations clear support was shown for the then newly installed liberal regime in Prague. There is also little to suggest that interest among Polish students in various Western student movements had a significant influence on the course of the ferment in Poland.
In late 1968 the number of alleged student leaders of the March unrest still awaiting trial was augmented
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