Although the AK had been dissolved, many of its members remained on their guard, while units of the right-wing NSZ and the newly founded Freedom and Independence (WiN) engaged in active self-defence. By 1946 this militant underground numbered as many as 80,000 men, who were, ironically, much better armed than the AK had ever been, thanks to the passage of the Russo-German front through the country. As the NKVD and UB intensified their activities, this self-defence grew into a guerrilla war which would cost the lives of some 30,000 Poles and 1,000 Soviet soldiers over the next two years.
By the middle of 1946 the new Citizens’Militia (MO) was twice as strong in numbers as the pre-war Polish police, and the internal security forces numbered as many again. While the Polish and Soviet troops dealt with the militant underground, these attended to the rest of the population. Although its prime objective was the annihilation of what was left of the landed gentry and the intelligentsia, there was nobody so insignificant that he or she did not qualify for the attentions of the UB, attentions which were both meticulous and brutal. Recently vacated German concentration camps were reactivated and filled up.
The new order was imposed ruthlessly. The decisions of the political men on the ground and those of their colleagues of the police could be highly arbitrary. Anything could be ‘nationalised’—not only estates, factories, smallholdings, livestock, pictures and other valuables, but the humblest personal possessions. In addition, units of the Red Army stationed all over Poland not only lived off the land, but engaged in regular plundering expeditions.
All this took place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion. Over six million Germans either fled or were evicted, mostly from parts of Germany which had been allocated to Poland under an agreement between Stalin and the Western Allies. Their place was being taken by Poles flooding in from every quarter, 2.2 million returning from slave labour and concentration camps in Germany, 1.5 million ousted from former Polish territory taken over by the Soviet Union.
It was only after more than a year of careful preparation and positioning that elections were held, in January 1947. The strongest contestant was Mikołajczyk’s Polish People’s Party (PSL). The second largest party was the new PPS. Its old leadership having remained in exile or in hiding, it was led by a pre-war activist and survivor of Auschwitz, Józef Cyrankiewicz. The party favoured by Stalin, the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), led by Władysław Gomułka, had only 65,000 members in December 1945, just over one-tenth of the membership of the PSL. In the event, however, the PSL would be awarded only 10.3 per cent of the vote.
One million people were disqualified from voting by bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, and thousands more were arrested on the day or beaten up on the way to the polling stations, which were heavily staffed with members of the security services; 128 activists of the PSL were murdered, 149 of its candidates were arrested, 174 were disqualified and only twenty-eight were elected, of whom fourteen were subsequently disqualified. Fearing for his life, Mikołajczyk escaped to the West.
A provisional constitution adopted in February 1947 established a Council of State with almost unlimited legislative and executive powers, which were exercised by the leadership of the PPR. Operations against the remnants of the underground were intensified, a campaign of harassment was launched against the Church and all pretence at conciliation and social democratic window-dressing was dropped.
In August 1948 Władysław Gomułka, secretary of the PPR and deputy premier, the principal advocate of ‘a Polish road to socialism’, was accused of ‘nationalist deviation’ and sacked from his post, which was filled by Bolesław Bierut, a staunch Stalinist. In December 1948 the remaining deputies of the PPS were forced to merge with the PPR in the new PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), which henceforth became
There followed, in 1950, a purge of ‘alien elements’ in the PPS and the PPR, and a witch-hunt in the army. Those who had served in Polish forces abroad and returned to offer their services to the new state were mostly shot. The Russian Marshal Rokossovsky was put in charge of the army, which was staffed throughout by Russian officers.