APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
Soviet secret police actively helping to suppress anti-Communist opposition, the government ignored its commitment to hold free elections promptly. Finally, in January 1947, rigged elections were held and Communist domination insured; after his movement had been liquidated by police terror, Mikolajczyk escaped abroad in October 1947. Although armed underground resistance to Communist domination persisted for some years thereafter, Mikolajczyk's flight marked the end of organized, legal, political opposition to the Communist regime.
During the following 9 years the U.S.S.R. succeeded, to a greater degree than any other foreign power that has ever occupied Poland, in establishing political control, exploiting the country economically, and in suppressing resistance. The only leading Polish Communist to oppose the Stalinist principle that Soviet Communist doctrine and experience were generally applicable to all Eastern European Communist states - specifically Poland - was Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Secretary General and former head of the underground Polish Workers' Party, the Communist party. This opposition led to his removal as Secretary General in 1948 and to his imprisonment from 1951 to 1954.
The death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in March 1953 and the subsequent changes in the Soviet leadership and its modus operandi caused major cracks to appear in the Polish regime's control apparatus, made popular dissatisfaction more overt and acute, and weakened the stability of the party and government machinery. By 1956, some of the Polish Communist leaders themselves became aware that a substantial modification of the system was imperative. Gomulka appeared to be the only Polish Communist leader able to undertake this task without encouraging popular revolt or bringing on Soviet intervention - and the only one willing to try. A series of turbulent events in mid-1956 reached a climax in October, when Gomulka was elected as party First Secretary.
In external relations, a series of skillful political moves helped the Gomulka regime in overcoming initial Soviet hostility, and gradually it obtained Soviet acceptance of Gomulka's formula of internal diversity keyed to national distinctions and external Communist unit under Soviet leadership. At home, the relatively short post-1956 period of acute party instability and weakness coincided with a revamping of major sectors of the political, economic, and social apparatus, and a significant extension of individual and collective freedoms. By mid-1957, however, the relatively rapid consolidation of the regime and its reassertion of party control over all aspects of national life signaled a gradual but steady retreat from the liberal gains of 1956.
What followed were years of increasing bureaucratization, policy immobilism, internecine party strife, and social and economic stagnation. Some feeble and mismanaged attempts were made to reform the system after 1968, but the leadership's misreading of the mood of the people resulted, in December 1970, in an explosion of accumulated economic grievances among the working class who saw their welfare further endangered. The regime's ill-advised use of force led to almost a week of bloody rioting in several cities along the Baltic coast, the collapse of the Gomulka regime, and the installation on 20 December 1970 of a new party leadership, with Edward Gierek, an experienced, tough, but pragmatic "technocrat," at its head.
Under Gierek, a new style of rule, sharply contrasting with the past, has appeared in Poland. During his skill relatively short tenure, Gierek has successfully controlled the social, economic, and political forces set loose in December 1970, and has gained a substantial measure of support from the people for a program of gradual reform. His concrete actions indicate that his views on the need for a continuing dialog between the rulers and the ruled, for enlisting the talents of the broadest spectrum of the population, for a freer flow of information, and for humanizing the party's approach to internal political and economic matters are genuine. Despite certain unorthodox aspects of Gierek's style, he has continued to strengthen the political and materiel support initially gained from the USSR and his other Eastern European allies.
Gierek is no liberal and he has made it clear that the political spontaneity accompanied by loss of Communist party control that characterized the Czechoslovak heresy in 1968 will not be tolerated in Poland. He has stressed that Poland's alliance with the U.S.S.R., the basic features of the internal system, and the party's monopoly of power are not to be tampered with. While he has eschewed force, he has hammered home the need for greater national discipline, particularly a dedication by the workers and all strata of the population to a new "work ethic." His moderate program of reform promises no miracles but only hard work, which he has pledged will be justly rewarded. As a result, the workers and the people in general, though still skeptical and occasionally militant in pressing for more positive improvement in their lives, have shown themselves willing to give him the time he needs to fulfill his promises. Most
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
