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security forces and the population, and the open solicitation of public help in maintaining law and order. While there may be more appearance than substance in this campaign, the Gierek regime has shown in other ways that it seeks public respect, not fear and hate, for all organs of state and party authority.
G. Selected bibliography (U/OU)
A rich library exists on Poland's politics and their place in the European context both before and after World War II. The 1956 upheaval and the subsequent Gomulka era has also been well covered both sympathetically and critically. Understandably, perhaps, no single work has yet been produced analyzing the causes of the December 1970 change of regime, its innovations and prospects.
Zbigniew Brzezinski's Soviet Bloc-Unit and Conflict (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967) discusses trends in the Soviet bloc since the death of Stalin. It also serves as a well-documented historical analysis of the postwar development of Eastern European communism as a whole, the changing relationships of individual parties with Moscow, and the role of Poland in this process.
William F. Reddaway (et al. ed.). The Cambridge History of Poland (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1941) in two volumes, is the classic history of Poland up to the end of the Pilsudski era and provides the necessary insights into the political and social antecedents of the postwar Communist takeover. A shorter and more readable version, although more uneven, is Oscar Halecki's History of Poland (J.M. Dent, London, 1961).
Marian Dziewanowski's History of the Communist Party in Poland (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1959) is a basic work on Polish political dynamics, and the role, characteristics, and contradictions of communism in Poland. Adam Bromke's Poland's Politics: Idealism vs. Realism (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967), analyses the historical factors influencing Poland's political though and the dichotomy which has contributed at different times to the country's strength and weakness. A work of high scholarship and insight, it is particularly germane to the understanding of the broad political factors that were in play before, during, and after the events of December 1970. A more general and less scholarly assessment of Polish communism is found in Richard Hiscocks' Poland-Bridge for the Abyss (Oxford University Press, London, 1963); its usefulness lies in its analysis of the impact of communism on Polish institutions and the extant threads of political continuity from the interwar period.
Several useful works have been written on the 1956 political upheaval in Poland, its antecedents, and its aftermath. Flora Lewis' A Case History of Hope (Garden City, N.Y., 1958) is a highly readable and reliably journalistic account of the events. Paul Zinner (ed.) National Communism and Popular Revolut in Eastern Europe (Columbia University Press, New York, 1956), provides a selection of documents on political events in Poland and Hungary in the critical months from February to November 1956. A readable and reliable account of the first decade of Poland under communism (1947-56) is to be found in Frank Gibney's The Frozen Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Cudaliy, New York, 1959). Insight into Poland's political, social, and economic developments in the decade following 1956 is available in the Independent Satellite (Fredrick A. Praeger, New York, 1965), by Hansjakob Stehle, a respected West German journalist formerly stationed in Poland.
The single most authoritative work available on Gomulka, including an analysis of his strengths, weaknesses, and motivations, is Nicholas Bethell's Gomulka (Longman's, New York, 1969). It is a generally sympathetic biography, but it falls short in its analysis of Gomulka's politics and his role in the party's factional struggles.
A more recent, factual, and concise review of the political scene is available in Bernard Newman's The New Poland (Hale, London, 1968); in its effort to be objective with regard to Gomulka's accomplishments, however, it tends to understate his failings and the social and political strains they generated. William Woods' Poland: Phoenix in the East (Hill and Wang, New York, 1972) is a useful study by a well-intentioned author, but the work shows signs of official guidance.
Since the advent of the Gierek regime, incisive analyses of the shift in generations, policies, and new style of rule have appeared almost exclusively in various journals and periodicals; most notable are articles by established scholars of the Polish scene in Foreign Affairs, East Europe, Problems of Communism, and others. A timely volume on Communism in Eastern Europe which includes a highly useful though short review of the 1970 change of regime in Poland is Adam Bromke and Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone (eds.) The Communist States in Disarray, (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1972).
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