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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 47, 21 November 1949, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The spectacular events now taking place in Poland make it clear that the Kremlin has broken the political truce in that satellite and taken the offensive. Three weeks ago, it was reported that a purge of minor government officials was in process. Last week, the Kremlin dictated the appointment of the Russian army’s Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky as Polish minister of defense, marshal of Poland’s armed forces, and member of the central committee of the Polish Stalinist party (called the United Polish Workers Party).
This week the Warsaw regime officially announced the ousting of the former vice-premier, Wladyslaw Gomulka, from the central committee of the Stalinist party. Rumors are rife that Gomulka and his supporters will suffer the fate of the Hungarian Stalinist, Rajk – liquidation via a highly publicized trial as “agents of Anglo-American imperialism and the fascist Tito.” Whether Gomulka is put on trial or not, the fate of the “Polish Tito” is sealed by this latest blow which also indicates the political content of Stalin’s latest moves.
Until September 1948 Gomulka was a shining star in the Polish Stalinist firmament. An obscure trade-union and party functionary in pre-war days, he emerged to prominence in 1944 as the secretary-general of the Polish Workers Party (created by the GPU to replace the Polish Communist Party which Stalin liquidated in 1937). In 1944 the Stalinist Lublin Committee entered Poland behind the Russian army’s bayonets.
When the Lublin Committee transformed itself into the Polish government, Gomulka became a vice-premier and was pushed by Stalin to the forefront of the stage as his emissary and advocate of the “new popular democracy.” Gomulka together with Bierut, the GPU agent and “president” of the puppet regime, helped liquidate the democratic and socialist underground, the other parties, in Poland, such as Mikolajczyk’s Populists, and insure the complete triumph of the Stalinist machine in Poland.
By September 1948, however, Gomulka found himself in the unenviable position of being in opposition to Stalin. In a long statement, the Polish Stalinist party denounced Gomulka for “failure to understand Russia’s role in the struggle against Imperialism,” for “supporting Tito” and for “opposing collectivization.” At that time Gomulka was ousted from his position as secretary-general of the Polish Stalinist party and as vice-premier.
In January 1949 Gomulka was ousted from his position as minister of the regained territories (the former German lands lying west of the 1939 Polish frontiers to the Oder and Niesse rivers). It was well known that Gomulka was opposed to Stalin’s plan to restore a “unified” Germany and was apprehensive that Stalin would .restore some of Poland’s new territories to the future “unified” Germany.
Today the pro-Stalin faction inside the Warsaw regime, whose leading members are Jacob Berman, Hilary Mine, Roman Zambrowski, and Gomulka’s successor, Alexander Zawadski, have carried their struggle against Gomulka one step further by formally ousting him from the party central committee.
The continuing attack on Gomulka has a more than personal significance, however, and coupled with the appointment of Rokossovsky as Russia’s proconsul in Poland, indicates the aims of the present Stalinist offensive in Russia. The “Russification” of Poland is dictated by the following considerations:
More than anything else, the insolent appointment of Rokossovsky (whose infamous role in the defeat of the 1944 Warsaw insurrection the Polish people will never forget) is Stalin’s warning to the Polish people that he will spare nothing and nobody in maintaining and strengthening his regime in Eastern Europe, and that he is ready to spill more rivers of blood at the slightest sign of resistance to Russian imperialist exploitation and policy.
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