Much of the planning defied common sense. New factories were built hundreds of miles away from existing industrial centres, coalfields or manpower pools. The planners had a weakness for monumental projects that would be seen and smelt for miles around. This went hand in hand with ideological dictates: the Stalinist city and steelworks of Nowa Huta were purposely located as a counterbalance to Catholic, traditionalist and academic Kraków.
The results were low productivity in factories, which were inefficiently managed, on collective and state farms, where low motivation and under-investment undermined attempts at raising yields, and particularly in coalmines, where the authorities resorted to using forced labour of military conscripts in an effort to boost output. The scale of growth was nevertheless impressive, and the economy emerged rapidly from the ashes of war. But the cost was borne entirely by the people, in low wages, long working hours and poor conditions, and high prices of everything from food to shoes and clothing.
It was no coincidence that the six-year plan, which ended in 1955, brought Poland’s economy into line with the Russian cycle of five-year plans. The pattern of Poland’s industrialisation had been dictated by the Soviet Union, which wanted the economies of its satellites to mesh with its own and which had forced Poland and the others to refuse Marshall Aid in 1947. All the members of the Soviet bloc were bound together into the Comecon by a set of rigid trade treaties which made them interdependent and worked in Russia’s favour. In addition, some $US5 billion-worth of coal from the fields acquired from Germany was given to the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1955 as war reparations, at a time when coal was virtually Poland’s only means of acquiring foreign currency.
It was Soviet demands too that burdened the Polish economy with the obligation to maintain a huge army and police apparatus, and to pay the keep of the Russian armies stationed in Poland. The economy was viewed as one of the fronts on which the battle for socialism was being fought, and when a machine broke down or productivity fell, it was blamed on ‘imperialist saboteurs’, agents of the London government or ‘hooligans’. Miners, factory workers and collective-farm workers were continually bombarded with paranoid propaganda representing the Soviet bloc as a peace-loving brotherhood of nations threatened by capitalist warmongering and aggression, and the conflicts in China and Korea were made to loom large in their everyday work.
The sort of industrialisation that was implemented in post-war Poland usually has the effect of drawing people from the country-side into the towns, where they soon turn into a rootless proletariat. In Poland the process was so rapid and on such a large scale that it backfired. By 1970 no less than 63 per cent of the entire bluecollar workforce had come from the country. In 1968, 22.3 per cent of industrial workers, 28 of construction workers and 31.7 of transport workers still lived in the country and commuted to work, while 10 per cent of industrial and building workers and 15 of transport workers were also part-time farmers. Instead of creating a socialist urban proletariat, the rapid industrialisation had the effect of ruralising the workers of the cities. This helped keep them within the ambit of the Church, which was stronger in rural parishes than in the cities, particularly the new industrial centres, where there were no churches.
Trade unions were set up to control the workers, which they did on the one hand through a programme of elaborate rituals ranging from May Day parades to banner-waving rallies and ceremonial deliveries of finished products, and on the other by meticulous monitoring of their attitudes, friendships, private vices and opinions. The personnel manager in any factory was an officer of the UB, and Party members in the workforce were expected to inform on their comrades. Workers accused of ‘crimes’ that were difficult to disprove were also blackmailed into spying on their colleagues.
In addition, the Ministry of Public Safety had paid informers everywhere—over 70,000 of them by 1954. By that date the register of ‘criminal and suspicious elements’ in the population contained nearly six million files, covering one in three of the adult population. The criminal justice system was geared not so much to delivering justice as to protecting the social, economic and political order, and as a result there were some 35,000 political prisoners behind bars by the mid-1950s. These were mostly people whose outlook, education, independence of mind and leadership potential classified them as elements to be weeded out so that those left at liberty could be more easily manipulated and moulded.