Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T18:15:11.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gomulka's ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation,’ The Postwar Jewish Communists, and the Stalinist Reaction in Poland, 1945-1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Raymond Taras
Raymond Taras*
Affiliation:
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 22 , Issue S1: Special Issue - Ethnopolitics in Poland , Summer 1994 , pp. 111 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

* I am grateful to Leszek Gluchowski and Wlodzimierz Rozenbaum for valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.Google Scholar

1. The term usually employed to describe the Gomulka group is the nativist faction, that is, Communists who spent the war years in occupied Poland. Yet virtually all native Polish Communists - Gomulka, Franciszek Jozwiak, Mieczyslaw Moczar - had under gone NKVD training at some point in their careers. In order to highlight what separated the group ideologically from the Muscovites, I use the term nationalist. By earlier interwar or later postcommunist standards, Gomulka was hardly a nationalist but contextually, in the era of high Stalinism, he was. The term is also helpful here in directing attention to the subjective understanding that Jewish Communists had of Gomulka's national road.Google Scholar

2. In the view of Jakub Berman, head of Poland's security apparatus in the Stalin era, Nowotko was killed by a provocateur. See Teresa Toranska, Oni, London: Aneks, 1985, p. 243.Google Scholar

3. See Raymond Taras, Polish Communists and the Polish Road to Socialism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar

4. “Jest tylko jedna rzecz glupsza od komunizmu - antykomunizm,” Wywiad z Wladysłtawem Bienkowskim rozmawia Jan Marx. Dziś;, nr. 7 (10), lipiec 1991, p. 90.Google Scholar

5. Anthony Polonsky and Boleslaw Drukier (eds.), The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, p. 114.Google Scholar

6. Document No. 75, “Extracts of the Minutes of the Plenum of the PPR Central Committee, 20-21 May 1945,” in Polonksy and Drukier, p. 434. Jasny was subsequently expelled from the party, in November 1945, for “a panicky overestimation of the reactionary forces” together with the fact “he had rejected the possibility of a broad-based democratic front.” See Document No. 80, “Central Party Control Commission Resolution of 28 November 1945 Concerning Zawazki, Wlodzimierz (Jasny),” in Polonsky and Drukier, p. 450. Shortly thereafter, however - as was so often the case of those found guilty of sectarianism and dogmatism - Jasny was reinstated with the party.Google Scholar

7. Document No. 75, in Polonksy and Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland, p 430.Google Scholar

8. Document No. 75, in Polonksy and Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland, p. 426.Google Scholar

9. Document No. 75, in Polonsky and Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland, p. 440.Google Scholar

10. Document No. 75, in Polonsky and Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland, p. 436.Google Scholar

11. On this, see Nicholas Bethell, Gomulka his Poland and his Communism, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972.Google Scholar

12. Józef Swiatlo, Za kulisami bezpieki i partii, Warsaw: Bis, 1990, p. 29.Google Scholar

13. Polonsky and Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland p. 2.Google Scholar

14. “Sprawozdanie z prac komisji KC PZPR powołtanej dla wyjaśnienia przyczyń i przbiegu konfliktów społtecznych w dziejach Polski Ludowej,” Nowe Drogi, special issue, undated (ca. autumn 1983). The commission chairman was Hieronim Kubiak.Google Scholar

15. Schatz, Jaff, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, p. 207.Google Scholar

16. Checinski, Michael, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, New York: Karz-Cohl, 1982, p. 11.Google Scholar

17. These motives are listed by Chccinski, Poland, p. 64.Google Scholar

18. Rozenbaum, Wlodzimierz, “The Road to New Poland: Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union, 1939-46,” in Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-46, London: Macmillan, 1991, p. 224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Schatz, Jaff, The Generation, p. 194.Google Scholar

20. Schatz, , The Generation, p. 328.Google Scholar

21. Kersten, Krystyna, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm: anatomia półtprawd 1939-68, Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1992, p. 78.Google Scholar

22. Kersten, Krystyna, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm, p. 73.Google Scholar

23. Kersten, Krystyna, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm, p. 86.Google Scholar

24. Kersten, Krystyna, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm, pp. 83-84.Google Scholar

25. Schatz, , The Generation, p. 249.Google Scholar

26. Rozenbaum, Wlodzimierz, “The Background of the Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1967-1968 in Poland,” Essays in History, 17 (1972-73), p. 75. Rozenbaum also notes (p. 87) that the first public denunciation of the “Jewish” KPP was made by Wladyslaw Wolski in an article in Życie Literackie in 1967. Wolski had already been at the center of an anti-Jewish surge within the party in 1950.Google Scholar

27. Schatz, , The Generation, p. 249.Google Scholar

28. Checinski, , Poland, pp 62-63.Google Scholar

29. Checinski, , Poland, p 57.Google Scholar

30. Checinski, , Poland, p. 72.Google Scholar

31. Schatz, , The Generation, p. 258.Google Scholar

32. Kersten, Krystyna, Narodziny systemu włtadzy: Polska 1943-1948, Poznan;: SAWW, 1989, p. 382.Google Scholar

33. Kersten, , Narodziny systemu włtadzy, p. 390.Google Scholar

34. Ochab's testimony to Toranska, Oni, p. 39.Google Scholar

35. Kersten, , Narodziny systemu włtadzy, p 398.Google Scholar

36. Minc, Hilary, “Niektóre zagadnienia demokracji ludowej w ’swietle leninowsko-stalinowskiej nauki o dyktaturze proletariau,” Nowe Droqi, no. 6, 1949.Google Scholar

37. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC i CKKP PZPR w dniach 11-13 listopada 1949 r,” Dokument 237-II.2, p. 218.Google Scholar

38. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” p. 237.Google Scholar

39. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” p. 455.Google Scholar

40. Toranska, , Oni, pp. 32, 300.Google Scholar

41. Cited in Kersten, Narodziny systemu włtadzy, p. 393.Google Scholar

42. Szlachcic, Franciszek, Gorzky smak włtadzy, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo FAKT, 1990, p. 100.Google Scholar

43. Swiatłto, Za kulisami bezpieki i partii, Warszawa: Bis, 1990, p. 27.Google Scholar

44. Swiatłto, Za kulisami bezpieki i partii, p. 27.Google Scholar

45. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC PZPR w dniach 8-10 maja 1950 r,” Dokument 237/II-3, p. 326.Google Scholar

46. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” p. 327.Google Scholar

47. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” pp. 365, 403, 594.Google Scholar

48. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” p. 626.Google Scholar

49. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” p. 629.Google Scholar

50. “Stenogram III Plenarnego Posiedzenia KC,” p. 630. Wolski defended his position subsequently in letters addressed to the Central Committee; see Gomułtka, i inni: dokumenty z archiwum KC 1948-1982, London: Aneks, 1987, pp. 57-63.Google Scholar

51. On the basis of research into military and security archives, Leszek Gluchowski has concluded that Russian officials, not Poles, kept the log on the ethnic origins of cadres. Personal communication.Google Scholar

52. Checinski, , Poland, p 90.Google Scholar

53. Schatz, , The Generation, p 254.Google Scholar

54. Checinski, , Poland, p. 76.Google Scholar

55. Checinski, , Poland, pp 80, 82.Google Scholar

56. Schatz, , The Generation, p. 225.Google Scholar

57. Zambrowski had little or no Jewish self-identity as is attested by his diaries published in Krytyka, no. 6, 1980.Google Scholar

58. For the resolution of the Ninth Plenum of the Central Committee held in May 1957 resolution, see Checinski, Poland, Appendix A, pp. 264-267.Google Scholar

59. Khrushchev, Nikita, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, Boston: Little Brown, 1974, pp. 179-182.Google Scholar

60. Schatz, , The Generation, p. 1.Google Scholar