course Romania was the first Warsaw Pact state to enter GATT (in 1971), the World Bank and the IMF (1972), to receive European Community trading preferences (1973) and US Most-Favored-Nation status (1975).[182]
What Western diplomats thought they saw in Bucharest’s anti-Russian autocrats were the germs of a new Tito: stable, biddable and more interested in local power than international disruption. In one sense, at least, they were correct. Tito and Ceausescu, like Kadar and the neo-Stalinist leadership in the GDR, successfully negotiated the shoals of the Sixties. Each in his own way, they assured their authority and control at home while maintaining at least a
The peaceful outcome to the Polish uprisings of 1956 had been achieved at a price. While Catholic institutions and writers were permitted in Gomulka’s Poland, opposition within the Party itself was severely constrained. The Polish United Workers’ Party remained deeply conservative, even though it had successfully avoided violent purges in the Stalin years. Nervous at the prospect of a re-run of the disturbances of 1956, the Party leadership treated any criticism of its policies as a direct threat to its political monopoly. The result was deep frustration among ‘revisionist’ intellectuals, not just at the regime in general but at the lost opportunity for a new direction, the unfinished business of the Polish October.
In the summer of 1964, two graduate students at Warsaw University, Jacek Kuron and Karel Modzelewski, drafted an academic critique of the political and economic system of People’s Poland. Their dissertation was unimpeachably Marxist in tone and content, but that did not stop them being expelled from the Party and the Union of Socialist Youth and being denounced in official circles for spreading anti-Party propaganda. Their response was to publish an Open Letter to the Party, submitted to the Warsaw University Party branch in March 1965. In the Letter the authors depicted a bureaucratic, autocratic regime, deaf to the interests of all but the ruling elite that it served, ruling incompetently over an impoverished working population and censoring all commentary and criticism. Poland’s only hope, Kuron and Modzelewski concluded, was a genuine revolution, based on workers’ councils, freedom of the press and the abolition of the political police.
The day after presenting their Letter the two men were arrested and charged with advocating the overthrow of the state. On July 19th 1965 they were sentenced to prison terms of three and three and a half years respectively. The authorities were particularly sensitive to the impeccably Marxist terms of their critique, its effective use of social data to point up the regime’s shabby economic performance, and its call for a workers’ revolution to replace the current bureaucratic dictatorship (a neo-Trotskyist touch that did not help the authors’ case[183]). Above all, perhaps, the Party was determined to head off precisely the combination of intellectual diagnosis and proletarian action for which the Kuron-Modzelewski letter called.
The Kuron-Modzelewski Affair sparked a heartfelt response in the university. The secret trial of the two students came as a shock, and there were demands not merely for their release but for their Letter and earlier research paper to be made public. Senior scholars took up their case. Leszek Kolakowski, professor of philosophy at Warsaw University, addressed students of the History Institute the following year, on the 10th anniversary of the Polish Party’s plenary session of October 1956. The Polish October was a missed opportunity, he explained. Ten years later Poland was a land of privilege, inefficiency and censorship. The Communists had lost touch with the nation, and the repression of Kuron, Modzelewski and the criticisms they espoused was a sign of the Party’s—and the country’s—decline.
Kolakowski was duly expelled from the Party as a ‘bourgeois-liberal’, though his colleagues at Warsaw University valiantly asserted his internationally recognized Marxist credentials. Twenty-two prominent Polish Communist writers and intellectuals then wrote to the Central Committee defending ‘Comrade Kolakowski’ as the spokesman of a ‘free and authentic socialist culture and democracy.’ They in turn were expelled from the Party. By the spring of 1967 the clumsy Polish leadership, enraged by criticism from its Left, had succeeded in forging a genuine intellectual opposition; and Warsaw University had become a center of student revolt—in the name of free speech and in defense, among other things, of their persecuted professors.
The issue of free speech at Warsaw University took an additional twist in January 1968. Since late November 1967 the University theatre had been running a production of
The response was a wave of student-organized petitions to the Polish Parliament, sympathetic resolutions at the Warsaw branch of the Polish Writers’ Association and speeches by Kolakowski and other prominent professors and writers in defense of the students. One writer publicly denounced the Communists’ treatment of culture as ‘the dictatorship of the dumb’. On March 8th a meeting of students in Warsaw University to protest the expulsion of Michnik and Szlajfer was violently broken up by police. There followed nationwide student demonstrations three days later and a strike at Warsaw University itself. Neo-Stalinist circles within the Party began to speak ominously of the Party’s loss of control, some of them even alerting Moscow to the dangers of Czechoslovak-style ‘revisionism’.
The Gomulka regime struck back decisively. The strike and ensuing protests were crushed with considerable violence—enough to provoke one Politburo member and two senior cabinet ministers to resign in protest. Thirty-four more students and six professors (including Kolakowski) were dismissed from Warsaw University. Then, following the crushing of the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia (see below), the authorities arrested the organizers of protests and petitions against the Soviet invasion and brought them to trial. In a long series of trials held between September 1968 and May 1969, students and other intellectuals from Warsaw, Wroclaw, Cracow and Lodz were sentenced to terms ranging from six months to three years for ‘participation in secret organizations’, ‘distribution of anti-State publications’ and other crimes. The harshest sentences were handed out to those like Adam Michnik, Jan Litynski and Barbara Torunczyk who had also been active in the initial student protests.
A disproportionate number of the students and professors arrested, expelled and imprisoned in Poland in the years 1967-69 were of Jewish origin, and this was not a coincidence. Ever since Gomulka’s return to power in 1956, the conservative (neo-Stalinist) wing of the Polish Party had been seeking an occasion to undo even the limited liberalizations he had introduced. Under the direction of Mieczyslaw Moczar, the Interior Minister, this inner-party opposition had coalesced around the cause of anti-Semitism.
From Stalin’s death until 1967, anti-Semitism—though endemic in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself—was kept out of official Communist rhetoric. After the war most of Eastern Europe’s surviving Jews had gone west, or to Israel. Of those who remained, many fled, if they could, in the course of the persecutions of Stalin’s last years. There were still substantial communities of Jews remaining, in Poland and (especially) Hungary; but most of these were not practicing Jews and typically did not think of themselves as Jewish at all. In the case of those born after the war, they often did not even know that they were—their parents had thought it prudent to keep quiet.[184]
In Poland especially, the still considerable numbers of Jewish Communists—some of them holding political office, others in universities and the professions—were mostly indifferent to their Jewish background, some of them naive enough to suppose that their indifference was shared by Poles at large. But they offered an irresistible target for anyone seeking a route to power within the Party and demagogic popularity in the country at large.[185] All that was lacking was the opportunity, and the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors duly afforded this in June 1967. Soviet support for the Arab cause legitimized vocal criticism of Israel, Zionism—and Jews.
Thus in a speech on June 19th 1967, condemning those who had backed Israel in the recent conflict, Gomulka brazenly conflated his Jewish critics and the Zionist state: ‘I wish to announce that we shall not prevent Polish citizens of Jewish nationality from returning [
