Gomułka was finding it difficult to contain the revolution which had brought him to power. A purge of Stalinists was being carried out in the ranks of the Party, factory workers in Silesia were sacking their bosses and collective farms were being dissolved spontaneously by those working on them. Associations and periodicals suppressed in 1948 revived, opening up debate on every subject. The collecting of funds, medical supplies and blood on behalf of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a major embarrassment to the Polish government, which found itself obliged to take a different line from the Soviet Union in a United Nations vote on the issue. On 10 December the Soviet consulate in Szczecin was stormed by angry workers.
Even reformers in the Party had to admit that the time had come to close ranks and safeguard its interests. A few months earlier Gomułka had praised the workers of Poznań for having taught the Party ‘a painful lesson’, but he had never abandoned his old authoritarian views. By the middle of 1957 the striking tramdrivers of Łódź were branded with the more traditional epithet of ‘hooligans’, and 1,500 miners in the Katowice area were fired in the interests of ‘discipline’. Following the elections of 1957, during which Gomułka posed as the saviour of Poland, he began a crackdown on revisionists in the Party. In 1959 General Mieczysław Moczar, a member of the Natolin group and hero of the Stalinist ‘partisans’, was placed in command of the security services.
A new campaign of petty persecution was launched against the Church. The government had already tried repression, which had merely turned priests into martyrs. It had tried subversion, by encouraging a movement of ‘patriotic priests’ who were to reconcile the teachings of Marx with those of Christ, which, after some initial success, had turned into a fiasco. Thereafter it followed the course of pettifogging obstructionism and judicial harassment, while seducing the young into rival activities. Practising Catholics were banned from holding office within the Party. The security services infiltrated the Church, spying on priests who might reveal foibles so they could be turned into agents and informers. Crosses were removed from schools and hospitals, and a ban was imposed on the building of new churches.
Despite this the Church’s position in national life went from strength to strength. Faced with the injustice, falsehood and drabness of socialist reality, people of all classes sought solace, truth and beauty in the Catholic faith. As the countryside had been methodically denuded of social elites, the parish priest was the one educated man to whom people could turn. In the hideous industrial quarters of the cities workers looked to the parish priest for comfort and guidance, and resisted with force when the militia tried to tear down crosses erected on plots where they hoped to build new churches.
The Catholic University of Lublin was the one free seat of learning. For a long time the Catholic periodical
After the ‘thaw’ of 1956 the universities once more became centres of learning, and cultural life revived. Increased contact with the outside world—through trade, travel, cultural exchange and the broadcasts of such services as Radio Free Europe—expanded horizons and raised hopes of a return to normal relations with the outside world. But such contacts had a depressing side, as they revealed that the outside world viewed Poland in negative terms.
One of the more bitter aspects of Poland’s post-war experience was that it had come out of the conflict not only as the greatest loser, but with its reputation seriously tarnished. The pre-war Polish state and its government were generally viewed as backward and authoritarian. The Western love affair with communism and the Soviet Union meant that Poles were also seen as ideologically suspect. The Polish war effort was dismissed as futile and its leadership as inept. Catholicism was not in fashion in Western intellectual circles, and nor were the kind of values the Poles had fought for. In addition, the Polish nation stood accused, particularly by the intellectuals and Jews of France and America, of anti-Semitism on a scale to rival that of the Germans. The fact that the extermination camps had been sited on Polish territory (because over four-fifths of those to be exterminated lived in that part of Europe and it was conveniently free from interference by the RAF) was held up as evidence of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust.