Poland and the crisis of Stalinism. Part one: 'Polish October'

THE RECENT STRIKES, demonstrat carry enormous political significance f To see why, it is necessary to go back to the great changes that took place in Poland at the end of the last With the collapse of Nazi rule in E Europe, millions of workers and poor peasants looked to the advancing Red Army for political and economic as well as military aid in their struggle for a better life.

But standing behind the heroi oviet troops, who battled thei way at incredible human and material cost from the Volga to Berlin, was the Stalinist bureaucracy, which in the USSR had destroyed every vestige of the working-class democracy and control that had existed under Lenin and Trotsky.

Stalin had no intention of conceding to the Polish and Hungarian workers the rights he had stolen from the Soviet working class.

So, even when the Kremlin was forced, in its own defence against imperialism, to nationalize the economies of E Europe, the move was made bureaucratically, over the heads of the working class. :

war Poland, the working class From the beginning of postfelt alienated from the regime.

Its long traditions of struggle for socialism ensured that it would always defend the new nationalized property relations, which are essential for the creation of a genuine socialist democracy.

But for the bureaucratic cast nat distorted and misused thes new property relations, the working class had nothing but hatred.

On two occasions this has exploded • with a wild, uncontrollable fury.

In June 1956, the workers of Poznan, a large industrial city ir W Poland, staged a strike, taking to the streets in protest against starvation wages and the lack of political rights. had been taken over by fascist agents (again the 'agent' theory).

Its leaders, exiled in Moscow, were shot, also as 'FascistTrotskyite agents'.

Several of the Party's future leaders, including Gomulka himself, owed their survival to the fact that they spent much of the 1930s in the jails of Poland's semi-fascist regime and not as Stalin's guests in Moscow!

The 1939 partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin was also a bitter blow to the survivors of the Party.

Now that Khrushchev had denounced at least a part of Gomulka addressing a 240,000-strong crowd in Warsaw's Plac Defilad on October 24, 1956. Stalin's crimes, these questions could be discussed after nearly 20 years of silence.

Poznan was, therefore, a turning point in this maturing of the Stalinist crisis.

For the first time, the working class entered the 'discussion', disrupting the old relations between the working class and the bureaucracy in not only Poland but throughout E Europe and the USSR.

The impact was also, inevitably, felt in the British CP, whose Stalinist leaders were engaged in a desperate rearguard action against a growing army of rank-and-file critics.

After Poznan, events moved to a climax. Gomulka, who had not long been released from a five-year prison term (for 'national deviations') now began to gather around him a group of 'liberal' Party members, many of whom had been excluded from the leadership since the anti-Tito purges of 1949-1952.

Their criticism of the most repressive aspects of Stalinism, while never going to its roots in the theory of 'socialism in one cann-and fie worker member for the Party and to the Polish people.

ferment Others in the Party to the left of Gomulka, joined with his group in an assault on the Stalinist hard-liners in the leadership, who by their refusal to adapt to the radicalization in the ns and bureaucratic repressions : the British working class. working class were risking a Poznan revolt on a national scale.

Gomulka's fight for the Party leadership ran parallel and, to a degree, merged with the ferment among advanced workers.

In and around Warsaw, especially, they began to elect their own workers' councils, bodies which vied with the bureaucracy for control of the factories.

Millions of workers, youth and students thought that here, for the first time, was a leader who spoke the truth.

Gomulka certainly revealed the desperate plight of the economy, which in many sections had a lower level of productivity than pre-war Poland!

He was also very outspoken against the repressions Stalinism in Poland. This alone was sure to win him widespread support.

But at no time was the theoretical foundation of the Stalinist system challenged. Gomulka's team, however explicit their denunciations of Stalin's crimes (many had suffered personally from them), remained trapped in the reformist strategy of national roads to socialism', which became the Polish version of 'socialism in one country'.

The session of the Central Committee of the Polish CP which saw Gomulka restored to its leadership (the famous 'Eighth Plenum') was the scene of a bitter struggle between the hardline Stalinists and the 'liberals'.

The tension at the Plenum was unprecedented.

The Soviet army was at that very moment closing in on Warsaw, and the workers' councils were clamouring for arms.

Many of the old guard - the 'Natolin' group - continued to churn out the same old line of 'agents' stirring up trouble in the factories. ulka casting his vote in the Polish elections of January 17, 1957.

But the pro-Gomulka group drew their strength from the workers' movement.

Romana Granas, one of Gomulka's most radical supporters, taunted the old guard. She said they were afraid of the workers once they moved independently of the bureaucratic machine:

Why does Warsaw terrify them? ... Warsaw which leads the whole country in the tempestuous movement-initiated in the factories-for workers' councils. Warsaw, whose youth with devoted enthusiasm searches for new roads • • • Warsaw, where the flower of our intelligentsia breaks through the darkness of the past . . . Warsaw .. • always faithful to her progressive revolutionary traditions.

'Some comrades,' she went on, 'see Warsaw as the breeding ground of that terrible plague that is now spreading over Poland. Yes, this "plague of democracy" has spread. Not only over Warsaw, but over Lodz, Katowice, Wroclaw, and today, it has already embraced the whole country in spite of those who wanted to guard their areas against this plague.' old guard This speech helps to convey the scope of the workers' revolt As was the case with Hunagainst the bureaucracy, an up- garian uranium, and more surge which made its power felt recently, Czech steel, the Soviet even inside the walls of the bureaucracy forced the Poles to Central Committee buildings in sell their coal to the USSR at Warsaw. well below world market prices, Others then joined the attack Soviet exports at an equally guard. Artur inflated cost.

Starewicz dealt with the Stalinist conception of planning whic Stalin's milking of the E Eurohad choked the Polish econom pean economies had been one of since the war: the main factors driving the Tito Its greatest failure is not Yugoslavia.

A section of the cheering crowd simply the result of certain disproportions and serious errors due to the excessively centralized system of planning and control, but first and foremost of the unsocialist attitude to the working class.

"The working class was not master of its workshops, in its name control was exercised by the representative of the state a bureaucracy often indifferent to the needs of the masses.' He also dealt with the problems of the countryside. Due to the bureaucratic way in which collectivization had been carried out 'a situation resulted in which the main line of battle ran not between poor peasants and rich, but between the united peasantry on the one hand and the bureaucracy on the other.' Roman Werfel also attacked slanders that the working class and youth were being duped by anti-communist agents:

I think that it is a sign of the sound class instincts of the popular masses, of the unconquerable strength of our socialist ideas, that when the popular masses take the initiative, their initiative is directed unambiguously to the left, towards socialism ...' Another issue that constantly cropped up in the Central Committee discussions was the Kremlin's exploitation of Poland's mineral resources.

while being compelled to buy leadership into opposition in It was made a central issue in all the show trials staged by the bureaucracy from 1949 to 1953.

The so-called 'mixed companies' set up by the Kremlin in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere were little more than legal covers for the pillage of these countries' badly needed natural resources. In 1956, this naturally came up for discussion.

The three-day Plenum finished on October 21, 1956. Two days later, the Hungarian Revolution, triggered off by basically the same process that produced the ferment in Poland, began.

Then on October 24, Gomulka, now the General Secretary of the Party, addressedia mass meeting in Warsaw's main square.

His 'victory speech', cheered to the echo by more than a quarter of a million workers, ended with a thunderous rendition of the "Internationale'.

It seemed that nothing could dislodge Gomulka from his position of leadership. Yet 14 years later, Gdansk shipyard workers— also singing the 'Internationale'— began the Baltic strike wave that swept his group out of their party and state offices.

From being the hero of the 1956 'Polish October' Gomulka had become the workers' most bitter enemy.

Continued tomorrow

deaths were caused directly by smoking and the figure is more likely to be 24,000.

The report calls for action to contain and end what it describes as "the present holocaust'-a fitting word, it declares, for an annual death toll of some 27,500 men and women aged 35 The report - Smoking anc Health Now'-follows the Col lege's 1962 report 'Smoking and Health' and it is critical of continued government inaction over this health hazard.

The group of eminent doctors, headed by Lord Blenheim, Président of the College, who produced the report, inter that governments have been preoccupied with the loss of revenue that would follow a drop in smoking.

The 1970 Finance Act even ensured that substances less harmful than tobacco would be taxed at the same rate if used for smoking, but there was no consideration of health aspects.

"The issue is, in essence, quite simple' , they write.

Government and parliament have to decide between an easy source of revenue and the preservation of the lives, health and productivity capacity of the people they serve.' Unsound economics In fact, says the report, the Treasury's economics may be unsound. Surveys in America and Canada have shown that elimination of smoking would result in greater savings than losses.

Sickness benefit and loss of production and earnings due to lung cancer, bronchitis and coronary heart disease, attributable to cigarette. smoking, were estimated at £270m a year.

The 150-page report's proposals include: a ban on cigarette coupons and advertising; no cigarette vending machines in public places, reducéd life insurance premiums for non-smokers; more effective anti-smoking advertising coordinated through the government; and danger warnings on cigarette packets.

The mass of statistics on the dangers of smoking are impressive.

The heavy smoker has only half the chance of a non-smoker of surviving to the age of 65.

Giving up smoking means that the increased risks are negligible after ten years' abstinence.

However, it is unlikely that the Tories and their friends in the tobacco business will act on the report's recommendations any more than they did in 1962.