As a result, the workers’ protest, the massacre and the Party leadership’s conservative attitude to the tragedy accelerate the impetus for change. At the production plants, workers councils are established, and pro-democratization rallies are held at schools and colleges. The culmination of the political turmoil is a Party plenum held in October. Comrades from Moscow fly to Warsaw, headed by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Khrushchev, and Soviet troops move towards the capital. There is a fear that their tanks will run down the Polish movement for the renewal of socialism.
The crisis ends with the election of a new Party chief, Władysław Gomułka, who led the communists during the war and who has recently been released from prison. He was sent to jail in the early 1950s for so-called rightist–nationalist leanings. Gomułka – who installed the Stalinist system in post-war Poland, took part in the elimination of the opposition, and agreed to Poland’s becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union – did, however, want Polish socialism to retain some specific national features. He was not a fan of collectivization; he was in no rush to condemn the ‘Yugoslav path to socialism’, which was independent of Stalin; and he was fond of the national features of Polish Socialist Party tradition. As Jacek Kuroń wrote about him years later:
No leader of the Polish People’s Republic ever gained such popularity or was as loved by the crowds as Władysław Gomułka was in autumn 1956. Few people remembered the role he had played in the late 1940s. The crowds saw him as the man of the moment, the saviour of the fatherland, the one just man. The years he had spent in prison had built him a legend as a defender of democracy and an advocate of liberty.
Many of his initial moves appeared to confirm that legend. A few days after Gomułka was brought in, Cardinal Wyszyński was released from house arrest in Komańcza. Polish debt relief was soon negotiated in the USSR, as were the rules for stationing Soviet troops in Poland, and Soviet officers were withdrawn from the Polish army.20
So Gomułka sails forth on the wave of the thaw and starts off by making a powerful anti-Stalinist speech, but soon shifts to pacifying the movement for renewal. Many of those involved in the October 1956 movement for change imagine that his election marks the start of reforms and the building of democratized socialism. During a historic rally outside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, however, Gomułka plainly states that he has no desire to make radical changes. He says there’s been enough rallying and calls on the people to go home and get down to work.
After the fuss about Nowa Huta, Kapuściński becomes a bolder promoter of the movement for the renewal of socialism.
He visits a chemical plant in Kędzierzyń. During the day he tours the production halls, and in the evenings he goes to a workers’ hotel. He wants to find out what ordinary people think. Later he writes that during his conversations, ‘tongues loosen, and people who were passive shortly before, turn out to be thoughtful, astute and intelligent.’21
He tells the story of a female worker named Cela Wehner, who had some curious adventures. One time, she saved a colleague’s life when he was electrocuted, then found a grenade among the lumps of coal on a production line that almost blew up in her hands. She also exposed ‘the engine scandal’ – discovering an engine that someone had removed from the factory floor and hidden in a burned-out building under a pile of rags. But instead of giving her a reward, a bonus, or praise, the management cut her pay. Cela Wehner’s problem is that although she belongs to the ZMP, she isn’t an activist (‘although she is capable of talking about the organization more thoroughly, wisely and truthfully than several of its official activists’).
‘I’d like to find a caricature of one of the many stiflers of criticism, an article branding a specific oppressor, a call for joint management of the department, or condemnation of a specific bureaucrat. But there’s none of that.’ The local ZMP is not aware that something is changing in the country, and that even the Party in Warsaw is now allowing limited reforms. Meanwhile, the enterprise in Kędzierzyń is being strangled by bureaucracy, and the people are feeling increasing rage.
One current of the October renewal is the workers councils that are spontaneously being formed at major industrial plants. According to people such as Lechosław Goździk, then the workers’ leader at Żerań (site of the FSO car factory), as well as Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, the future authors of a famous letter to the Party, this is the only way to remove the authorities’ bureaucratic hold on society – by taking the path of democratization and of limiting central control of the economy. This current arises from the conviction that socialism is a good thing, but that it has been stifled by the bureaucrats.
Kapuściński shares this belief. In Sztandar Młodych he publishes one of the few articles he ever wrote that had the tone of a theoretical treatise, almost a political manifesto: ‘On Workers’ Democracy’. In it he writes that in a centralized system, there is no room for workers’ democracy, and that the system prevents the workers from making even the most minor decisions concerning their own enterprise.
Kapuściński is a fan of the movement to create workers’ councils and encourage the independence of enterprises. ‘This movement is extremely valuable, because it speaks the language of practical proof and tangible example . . . The Party’s best forces are interested in strengthening this movement.’22
Why do the poets, writers and commentators – people like Woroszylski, Ważyk, and the then still greenhorn Kapuściński – who were the most passionate in the Stalinist era, form the vanguard of the anti-Stalinist movement? What causes them first to build a Stalinist order and then, a few years later, dismantle it with the same ardour?
In the account-settling literature written after the fall of communism, various explanations are offered, including that the years of stabilized Stalinism were a period of frustration for them, because the spontaneous movement for building a new order had been curbed by the iron fist of the Party, the secret police and the bureaucracy. To the dictatorship, anything spontaneous, grass-roots or outside their control – including these people – represented a threat.
Sociology professor Hanna Świda-Ziemba comments ironically that during the thaw and the events of October ’56, the former young Stalinists could once again stand at the head of the procession, leading the movement for change, once again believe in a utopia, once again experience their youthful enthusiasm and enjoy being on the side of dissent. She adds that the ‘Octobrists’ – both earlier as Stalinists and later as anti-Stalinists – are full of altruism; during the thaw and October they ‘return to being their real selves, with force and anger at those who have enslaved them, while at the same time wiping from memory the fact that they were co-creators of those times’.23
Adam Michnik, the legendary oppositionist who in the 1960s began as a young communist revisionist, calls the dissent of October 1956 ‘a furious reaction’ and ‘the shame of people’ who ‘had taken part in totalitarian destruction’. ‘Revisionism rejected totalitarian doctrine and practice, by citing Marxist language and the communist system of values,’ he writes. ‘In formulating its criticism, it took both domestic and international realities into consideration. In this way, it caused pain to deluded people who had followed the path of self-delusion.’24
Is it possible to explain this more simply, and without stern judgements? For young people like Kapuściński, who after the Second World War believed that communism was a new beginning for the world that would produce the just system of their dreams, the natural reaction to the newly discovered tragedy and deception of Stalinism was to attempt to right the wrongs, go back to their ideals, and oust those who had lied to them. They did not have to wipe anything from memory – they genuinely felt deceived.
October ’56 was a consequence of their earlier involvement, idealism and altruism. They had committed no crimes, although crimes were committed in their names. They had not necessarily deceived themselves; they quite simply believed that this time it was for real, that
