He was in the unenviable position of having to gauge which way Moscow would move next and he therefore zig-zagged between thaw and repression, personally favouring the latter. There were many traditional Stalinists like him in the Party. Their reaction to the Światło revelations was not that the system had to be cleaned up, but that security ought to be tightened in such a manner as to prevent a repetition of the scandal. They were comforted when, partly as a reaction to West Germany’s accession to NATO in the previous year, the Warsaw Pact, signed on 14 May 1955, bound all the Soviet satellites to Moscow more firmly than ever.
In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev made his famous speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing Stalin’s rule. Bierut, who was in attendance, died, purportedly of a heart attack. The Party was in disarray. Khrushchev came to Warsaw to attend the plenary session of the Party’s Central Committee, which was to elect a new First Secretary, and he suggested Edward Ochab, who was duly chosen. Ochab proceeded to announce a programme of liberalisation, a partial amnesty for political prisoners, and the arrest of the chief procurator and several high-ranking persons in the UB. He committed the Party to rectifying recent ‘errors and distortions’. But this was a dangerous course, as the summer months were to show.
Back in December 1955 the 15,000 workers of the former Cegielski and now Stalin works in Poznań had discovered that bureaucratic venality had cheated them of a percentage of their salary. They remonstrated with their management, took the matter up at District Party level, and finally sent delegates to Warsaw, without effect. On 28 June 1956, during the International Trade Fair in Poznań, they staged a demonstration. They demanded that Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz come to talk to them. When he refused, they attacked a police station in which they seized arms, and went on to demolish a radio-jamming station and the Poznań headquarters of the UB. The authorities responded by sending in tanks, and the riots came to a bloody end two days later. The civilian death toll stood at seventy.
‘Imperialist agents’ were blamed, and reactionaries within the Party argued that such outbreaks were the inevitable consequence of relaxing discipline. While the Party continued its programme of decentralising the economy and democratising itself, a faction of Stalinist diehards, the so-called Natolin group, called on their allies in Moscow. As the Eighth Plenary Session of the Party opened on 19 October 1956, a delegation headed by Khrushchev flew in unannounced and Russian troops stationed in Poland began to move on Warsaw. Crisis loomed as the government called out the army, and even distributed arms to the car workers ers of Żeranń. The situation was assuming international dimensions.
Although the Polish armed forces in the West had been gradually disbanded after 1946, despite efforts to keep at least a skeleton Polish Legion in existence, the London government still upheld its claim. It was supported by a highly active emigration, which constituted a kind of Polish state in exile. As the Cold War set in, the United States began to show an interest in Polish affairs once again. In 1952 the CIA founded Radio Free Europe to broadcast straight news and cultural programmes to the whole Soviet-dominated region. It cooperated with the London Poles, and parachuted agents into Poland to liaise with people on the ground. While the fighting underground had been defeated by 1948, many of its former members were still at large, and armed attacks as well as more common acts of resistance such as defacing propaganda posters and painting slogans were recorded as late as 1955.
Władysław Gomułka managed to convince Khrushchev that he could contain the situation. As the Soviet units returned to base, Gomułka told a rally in Warsaw on 24 October that ‘The Party, united in the working class and the nation, will lead Poland on a new road to socialism.’ It was to be socialism with a human face and a Polish garb. Cardinal Wyszyński was released and the Church was allowed to resume its normal activities in return for a pledge of allegiance to the regime. Marshal Rokossovsky and hundreds of Russian officers were dismissed from the Polish army and sent home. A quarter of a million Poles stranded in the Soviet Union were allowed to emigrate to Poland. Commercial treaties were renegotiated on more favourable terms and the Soviet Union was to pay for the upkeep of its troops stationed in Poland. But none of the fundamentals had changed.
On 30 October the Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy announced a return to democracy, and five days later the Soviet army invaded his country in defence of ‘Leninist principles of equality among nations’. The warning for Poland was clear.