Them: Stalin's Polish Puppets

Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Communist doublespeak will immediately recognize the time-honored fantasies spoken by the interviewees. We learn that it was really only the Soviet Union that beat Nazi Germany and that, were Poland to leave the Soviet orbit, there would be no Poland at all (or, at best, a Congress Poland). Without a doubt the USA and West Germany would quickly seize the Recovered Territories. We hear the Soviet puppet state rationalized by the fact that "There really is no such thing as a sovereign nation anymore.", and so anything goes. After all, Soviet involvement in Polish politics is really no different from US involvement in Italian politics (sic)! Another Soviet rationalization for "a friendly Polish government" was the need for protection against a repeat of Pilsudski's "attack" on the USSR in the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik war. Yes, indeed, the Soviet lion of 1944 stood in desperate need of protection from the Polish rabbit! A number of the top Communists ignore the strong resistance of Polish peasants to collectivization and insist that Poland never adopted Soviet-style collective farming only because it never became a priority for Polish Communists. In fact, the top Polish Communist leaders take credit for the fact that, even during the days of Stalin, Polish Communism never was as harsh as Soviet Communism, or even that of many other eastern European nations. Stefan Staszewski recognized the fact that the imposition of Communism on postwar Poland caused nothing short of a civil war: "But, good Lord, there was nothing to compare with the period of violence, cruelty and lawlessness that Poland experienced in the years 1944-7. Not thousands but tens of thousands of people were killed then, and the official trials that were organized after 1949 were merely an epilogue to the liquidation of the Home Army, of activists of independent parties, and of independent thought in general."(p. 139). [Perhaps, just perhaps, this atmosphere of "violence, cruelty, and lawlessness", if nothing else, had something to do with the 600 postwar Jews killed by Poles in property disputes, the so-called Kielce Pogrom, etc., trumpeted by Jan Thomas Gross in his widely-publicized book FEAR.] There is some interesting information presented by the interviewees. For instance, Jakub Berman claims (p. 246) that the idea of Poland as the seventeenth Soviet republic had still been propagated as late as the beginning of 1943. Berman also asserts (p. 248) that there never was any chance that the Curzon Line would have been extended in a manner that left Lwow (Lviv, Lvov, Lemberg) on the Polish side of the postwar Polish-Soviet frontier. Edward Ochab had this to say on Chinese attitudes towards Soviet hegemony over Poland: "All I know is what Chou En-lai told us when he came to Poland in 1957. He said they had opposed the Soviet proposal to intervene in Poland and asserted that the Poles, even if they go astray, should find their own solutions t

It is a great pity to see this book out of print. In the early 1980s, before the imposition of martial law, Toranska interviewed five aged Polish politicians: Julia Minc, Roman Werfel, Edward Ochab, Stefan Staszewski and Jacob Berman.Each had served in the leadership of the Stalinist "Polish People's Republic" between 1945 and 1956, and played some part in implementing the various Stalinist policies: propaganda and press control, agricultural collectivization, purges of the non-communist parties and the anti-Nazi Home Army, and dealings with Stalin and Khrushchev. One (Staszewski) has turned against communism; the others are unrepentant.Taken piece by piece, "Them" offers remarkable first-person glimpses of history -- feuds within the Politburo, decisions to repress farmers in 1954 and avert Soviet military intervention in 1956, the purge and reappearance of Party Secretary Gomulka, the attempts of the Party leader Bierut to ask Stalin to locate earlier Polish Communist figures who had been executed during the Soviet Great Purge of 1937 and 1938.Taken as a whole, the accounts of arrests, rhetorical formulae, executions, and repression amounts to a remarkable self-portrait of the Stalinist mind.