Wladyslaw Gomulka and the Dilemma of Polish Communism

Abstract

Wladyslaw Gomulka, a worker, trade unionist and Communist activist during the interwar period, became the foremost figure of the Polish Workers' Party and the left-wing resistance movement during the war, and subsequently the outstanding political figure in the People's Republic of Poland. He was the author of an original conception for the gradual and evolutionary introduction of the socialist system, known as "the Polish road to socialism." In 1948, because of the Cold War and Stalin's policy of "uniformization" of the people's democracies, Gomulka's conception fell, the Party was dominated by a dogmatic line, and Gomulka was accused of a rightist-nationalist deviation and imprisoned. He regained freedom and power with the tide of de-Stalinization in October 1956, and introduced in Poland a number of significant reforms whose consequences proved to be stable: he abandoned collectivization, limited industrialization, improved relations with the Church, pursued a pragmatic cultural policy, and eliminated glaring cases of lawlessness. In the domain of foreign policy, he successfully realized his model of a partnership with the Soviet Union, and won full international recognition of the Polish western frontier. Breakdown of Gomulka's policy at the end of the 1960s was due to exhaustion of the creative elements of his conception and his helplessness in the face of new economic and social problems emerging in Poland.