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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9

The next phase in Poland's postwar evolution - its Stalinist era - was more or less coterminous with the 7-year period of Bierut's rule. It was a time of forced draft industrialization, of energetic but largely ineffective efforts to collectivise Polish agriculture, of police terror, and of total subservience to the Soviet Union. The Warsaw regime's repressive policies and the degree of control which Moscow exercised over Poland's internal affairs deeply alienated the bulk of the Polish population. Passive resistance to the party's dictates became widespread. For their part, however, Poland's top leaders were wedded to the Stalinist system, and when this began to break down under the pressures for change released by the Soviet dictator's death in early 1953, a factional struggle developed between conservative and reform-minded forces in the PUWP which finally reached its climax 3 years later.

1956 was quite a year for the Poles. In February, Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress set the stage for the first round of de-Stalinization in Eastern Europe as well as in the Soviet Union. The convenient death of Boleslaw Bierut a few weeks later removed one potentially formidable obstacle to domestic reforms in Poland. In late June, just before the outbreak of rioting in Poznan convinced Bierut's successor, Edward Ocher, of the urgency of such reforms, President Tito of Yugoslavia secured the Soviet Party's first official endorsement of the concept of separate roads to socialism. For a moment it appeared that the Soviets had given a green light to their allies to emulate some of the more innovative features of the Yugoslav experiment. But Khrushchev hastened to dispel this illusion. Laying the blame for the Poznan riots on the old bogey of imperialist provocation, he held fast to the view that radical political and economic reforms were neither needed nor permissible within the Soviet empire. And he made it clear that the Kremlin still regarded Titoism as a particularly dangerous form of heresy.

Under these circumstances, Gomulka - who had been released from detention in 1954 - became the man of the hour in Poland. Not only was he an advocate of a uniquely Polish path to socialism who had stood up to the Soviets in the past, but he alone among Poland's more prominent Marxists enjoyed a public image favorable enough to bridge the gulf that had developed between the regime and the general population. Courted by the reformists (both liberal and moderate) as a seemingly ideal champion in their struggle with the still well-entrenched Stalinist faction, Gomulka was quietly readmitted into the party in August. Thereafter, pressures for change mounted both within and outside the party as a steady decline of the effective power of the security apparatus opened the way for a virtual flood of liberal proposals and commentary in the Polish press.

Poland's internal crisis reached its climax on 19 October. Benefitting from Ochab's support and growing popular enthusiasm for their cause, the reformists had made steady gains and it was no secret that they hoped to use the PUWP Central Committee Plenum which was convened on that date to elect Gomulka as Party First Secretary and to adopt his political line. An attempted coup by the beleaguered Stalinist faction was thwarted on the very eve of the plenum. Then, as

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9