Many young men and women had joined the Party hoping to change the world, and after it had consolidated its grip on power in 1947 many more signed up, since this represented the only possibility of achieving anything. But, having eliminated all opposition, and securely hemmed in behind the Iron Curtain by socialist neighbours, the Party embarked, at the end of 1948, on a purge of its ranks, ostensibly to weed out ‘nationalists’ and ‘deviationists’. The white-collar element were adept at keeping their heads down, while factory-floor idealists could be tripped up only too easily. As a result, the purge removed significant numbers of its blue-collar members. By the early 1950s the Party, whose membership never rose much above 1.3 million, or 5 per cent of the population, during this period, was in large measure made up of bureaucrats of one sort or another. By 1955 only one in five workers belonged.
By contrast, over 90 per cent of them belonged to the Catholic Church. This had come through the war morally enhanced by its uncompromising stand against the Germans. Thousands of priests had been sent to concentration camps or shot, and no trace of collaboration tainted the hierarchy’s reputation. It was led by redoubtable cardinals such as Adam Stefan Sapieha, Archbishop of Kraków, Augustyn Hlond, Archbishop of Gniezno, and Stefan Wyszyński, who succeeded him as Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland.
As soon as it had consolidated its power, the Party set about undermining this alien body within the new order. In 1949 the Church’s property was nationalised and its charitable institutions taken over by the state. Religious instruction was forbidden in schools and chaplains were banned from prisons and hospitals. In 1953 a number of priests were put on trial charged with spying for the United States, receiving sentences of death or imprisonment. Later that year Primate Stefan Wyszyński himself was imprisoned.
Another element which did not fit the socialist model were the peasants, who still made up over half of the population. In 1944 their support had been assured by grants of land taken from confiscated estates: over a million families acquired land in this way. But within a couple of years many of them were forced into collective farms on the Russian model, of which there were 10,000 by 1954, mostly in the territories transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. The remaining private farmers were squeezed by the imposition of compulsory quotas which they had to deliver at fixed prices, usually below the cost of production. Force was used to collect the quotas and a newly imposed land tax from the unwilling farmers, and tens of thousands of them were imprisoned. In these conditions, agriculture lagged in productivity and the countryside became increasingly pauperised.
Similar techniques were employed to eliminate small traders, private businesses and manufactures, and self-employed artisans. They were heavily taxed, starved of raw materials and excluded from markets. This was perverse, since they provided a valuable resource in the dire post-war economic climate.
The advancing Germans had done extensive damage in 1939, and when they retreated they dynamited everything they could. In the wake of the advancing Soviet armies came special units whose job it was to dismantle and remove anything that could prove useful back in the Soviet Union, including entire telephone exchanges and tramway installations, thereby reducing the country’s infrastructure to nothing.
The fact that it was necessary to start from scratch favoured the socialist penchant for a command economy based on central planning. A three-year plan (1947-49) was followed by a six-year plan (1950-55). The State Economic Planning Commission issued rigid directives which turned out to be unworkable in local conditions of which the planners were entirely ignorant. The commission did not encourage initiative or even questioning by factory managers, so there was little these could do except muddle along by cooking figures and bribing inspectors. Since it was known that factory managers concealed their real resources so as not to be caught out under-fulfilling the quotas they were set, the planners found themselves ignoring reports and estimating the possibilities themselves. The whole process of economic planning, from investment to costs and prices, was therefore carried out at a largely theoretical level and was as often as not based on guesswork. Since each factory hinged on the performance of a dozen others, and since a further dozen depended on its own performance, and since each of these had preordained supplies, capacity and output all calculated from figures which bore scant relation to reality, the results were often ludicrous.