Poland: From the Lublin Committee to the United Workers' Party

Two Governments: The Lublin Committee and the Exile Government in London

On 22 July 1944 the Polish Committee of National Liberation issued its manifesto, dated at Chełm. The text had been drafted in Moscow, and the committee installed itself in Lublin on 1 August. Its chairman was Edward Osóbka-Morawski of the Socialist left; effective authority lay with Bolesław Bierut, chairman of the State National Council formed underground in Warsaw on 1 January 1944, and with Władysław Gomułka, general secretary of the Workers' Party. The committee declared itself the heir of the constitution of 1921 and called the London government "an illegal government based on the fascist constitution of 1935". The same day the Soviet Union and the committee signed an agreement handing the administration of the Soviet rear areas to the committee, and on 27 July a secret agreement on the Curzon line as the frontier followed. The committee had an army too: Zygmunt Berling's First Army, raised in the Soviet Union in 1943, was reorganised as the Polish Army in July 1944 under the commander-in-chief Michał Rola-Żymierski, and by the spring of 1945 it numbered some 400,000. Of the committee's fifteen members only a minority belonged to the Workers' Party, but security, defence, information and administration were the Workers' Party's portfolios.

In London stood the exile government led since July 1943 by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and at home its Home Army and government delegation. Mikołajczyk met Stalin in Moscow at the beginning of August, and in October, in Moscow again with Churchill, he was told to accept the Curzon line as the frontier. Unable to carry his cabinet, he resigned on 24 November and Tomasz Arciszewski succeeded him. From August to October, while the Warsaw Uprising ran, Soviet forces stood on the east bank of the Vistula; the course of the rising and the debate that followed are covered in the Warsaw Uprising entry.

On 31 December the State National Council turned the committee into the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, which the Soviet Union recognised on 5 January 1945. Soviet troops entered the ruins of Warsaw on 17 January, and on 19 January the Home Army's commander Leopold Okulicki ordered the Home Army dissolved. Poland had two governments and two armies, but only one government administered territory.

From Yalta to the Provisional Government of National Unity: Mikołajczyk's Return

At Yalta in February 1945 the three powers agreed that "the Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should be reorganised on a broader democratic basis" and that it should hold "free and unfettered elections on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot". The wording and its enforceability are discussed in the Yalta entry. A three-power commission of Molotov, Harriman and Clark Kerr was set up in Moscow for the reorganisation.

On 27 and 28 March sixteen underground leaders, among them the government delegate Jan Stanisław Jankowski and Okulicki, went to Pruszków for talks with the Soviet command, were arrested by the NKVD and taken to Moscow. From 17 to 21 June, while Mikołajczyk negotiated the new government in Moscow, the "Trial of the Sixteen" was held in the same city from 18 to 21 June. Okulicki received ten years, Jankowski eight, Bień and Jasiukowicz five, and three were acquitted. Okulicki died in a Moscow prison in December 1946.

The Provisional Government of National Unity took office on 28 June. Osóbka-Morawski was prime minister, Gomułka and Mikołajczyk deputy prime ministers, and Mikołajczyk also minister of agriculture. Those returning from London held a minority of the twenty-one ministries. The United States and Britain recognised the government on 5 July and withdrew recognition from London. On 22 August Mikołajczyk broke with the Lublin-line peasant party and refounded the Polish Peasant Party, which by early 1946 claimed 800,000 members. The Workers' Party confirmed Gomułka as general secretary at its first congress in December 1945; it had about 230,000 members at the end of that year. The coalition also held the Socialist Party of Osóbka-Morawski and Cyrankiewicz, the Lublin-line peasant party and the Democratic Party, and the Workers' Party pursued an electoral alliance with them under the banner of "unity of the democratic camp".

At the Peasant Party congress of January 1946 Mikołajczyk demanded the early free election promised at Yalta. In February the Workers' Party offered the Peasant Party a place on a single list with 20 per cent of the seats; the Peasant Party asked for 75 per cent and declined. That breakdown led to the decision to postpone the election and hold a referendum first. Meanwhile arrests of the Peasant Party's local organisations and killings of its activists continued; the party counted over a hundred activists killed by early 1947. The government attributed the killings to the underground, the Peasant Party to the security ministry.

Land Reform and Nationalisation: What the Coalition Passed Together

Land reform was the committee's first act in Lublin. The decree of 6 September 1944 took private estates over 50 hectares of farmland (100 hectares in total area) and German-owned land without compensation, for distribution. By 1949 some 6.1 million hectares had gone to 1.1 million households, more than half of it in the newly acquired western territories. Mikołajczyk's Peasant Party argued with the Workers' Party over the method of distribution and the share kept as state farms, but did not oppose the reform itself. Landowners were removed from their estates immediately after the decree, and most did not go to new holdings inside the western frontier fixed after Potsdam.

On 3 January 1946 the State National Council passed the nationalisation of major industry. Property of the German state and of Germans was taken without compensation; Polish enterprises employing more than fifty per shift were nationalised with compensation promised. The Peasant Party voted for the law and asked in return for freedom for small and medium enterprise and for trade. Compensation was in practice hardly paid. In 1947 the minister of industry Hilary Minc declared a "battle for trade" that replaced private wholesale and retail with state and cooperative trade, and the three-year plan of 1947–49 aimed at restoring pre-war output.

In the western territories Poles from the east settled where Germans had left. Some three million Germans were expelled between 1945 and 1947, and about 1.5 million Poles moved from the eastern territories ceded to the Soviet Union. No party of the coalition opposed these transfers, and the western frontier became the third question of the 1946 referendum. The Ministry of Recovered Territories, created in November 1945, was held by Gomułka until January 1949, and settlement, land distribution and the expulsion of Germans passed through it. The western territories were where the Workers' Party built its organisation while carrying out land reform and settlement together, and where the government bloc's official vote in the 1946 referendum and the 1947 election was announced at its highest.

The Security Ministry and the Underground: The Sixteen, Augustów, Two Amnesties

The committee set up a public security department in July 1944, which became the Ministry of Public Security on 1 January 1945. Its minister was Stanisław Radkiewicz; in the party, security was overseen by the Politburo member Jakub Berman. The ministry had some 20,000 officers at the end of 1945, with the Internal Security Corps, the Citizens' Militia and, from February 1946, the Volunteer Reserve Militia under it. The Soviet NKVD kept its own units and advisers. Ivan Serov was in Poland in early 1945 as NKVD plenipotentiary for the rear of the First Belorussian Front, and his men carried out the arrest of the sixteen in March. From 10 to 25 July 1945 a Soviet sweep in the Suwałki and Augustów districts arrested some 2,000 people, of whom about 600 never returned; Poland's Institute of National Remembrance holds that they were executed and buried on Russian territory.

The armed underground outlasted the Home Army's dissolution. On 2 September 1945 former Home Army officers founded the Freedom and Independence Association (WiN) in Warsaw; its first president, Jan Rzepecki, was arrested on 5 November. Units of the National Armed Forces (NSZ) also operated. The underground attacked the security ministry, the militia and Workers' Party activists; the government called them "reactionary bands", and the underground called itself the successor of the Home Army. Since 1989 the name "cursed soldiers" has been used in Poland. Estimates of the dead on both sides differ and run to thousands each. Polish historians put the armed underground in 1945 at between 15,000 and 20,000; after the amnesty of 1947 small units of a few hundred remained active into the early 1950s. The government repeatedly asserted a link between the Peasant Party and the underground in trials and propaganda; the party denied it and insisted on its standing as a legal opposition. The assertion served as the ground for striking off Peasant Party lists in the election of 1947.

The government declared two amnesties. In the first, from 22 July to 15 October 1945, 30,217 people came forward. The second, passed by the Sejm on 22 February 1947 and in force from 25 February to 25 April, brought 76,774; by the ministry's own figures, 90 per cent of WiN's members and 60 per cent of the NSZ's. The statements written at registration became material for the arrests that followed.

The Referendum of 30 June 1946: The Official Count and the Archival Count

The government postponed the election promised at Yalta and held a referendum first. Three questions were put: whether to abolish the Senate, whether to write land reform and the nationalisation of major industry into the constitution, and whether to confirm the western frontier on the Baltic, the Oder and the Neisse. The Workers' Party and its allies campaigned for "three times yes", a slogan carried by the state administration, the army and the press. Official turnout exceeded 85 per cent. The Peasant Party supported the second and third questions and, to produce a vote distinguishable from the government's, urged "no" on the first.

The official result announced on 12 July gave 68.2 per cent "yes" on the first question, 77.2 on the second and 91.4 on the third. The Peasant Party, citing its own observers, announced that the real result on the first question was a majority of "no"; in Kraków, where observation was possible, "no" on the first question ran at around 70 per cent. After 1989 Andrzej Paczkowski found internal tallies in Polish party files showing 26.9 per cent "yes" on the first question, 42.0 on the second and 66.9 on the third. According to Nikita Petrov, working from Russian files, a team of the Soviet Ministry of State Security under Aron Palkin handled the rewriting of the count sheets. The government at the time announced the result as "the people's support"; the Peasant Party and Western governments protested falsification. Four days after the vote, on 4 July, forty-two Jews were killed in Kielce, and the government attributed the pogrom to the underground and the Peasant Party.

The Election of January 1947 and Mikołajczyk's Departure

The election was held on 19 January 1947. The Workers' Party, the Socialists, the Lublin-line Peasant Party and the Democratic Party ran on the single list of the "Democratic Bloc". Mikołajczyk's Peasant Party ran alone. Before the vote several hundred of its candidates and activists were arrested, and in ten of the fifty-two districts its lists were struck off for "links with the underground". On polling day factories and army units marched to the polls in formation, and open voting was demanded in many places. Afterwards the United States and Britain sent notes of protest citing the Yalta agreement, and the Soviet Union replied that the election had been held as agreed. The official result gave the Democratic Bloc 80.1 per cent (394 of 444 seats) and the Peasant Party 10.3 (28 seats). The Peasant Party announced from its own count that it had won a majority. From files opened in the 1990s historians confirmed that the same method as in the referendum was used; the true vote was not recorded and only estimates exist.

The legislative Sejm met on 4 February; on the 5th it elected Bierut president and on the 6th the Socialist Józef Cyrankiewicz prime minister. On 19 February the "Little Constitution" defined the powers of the Sejm, the president and the Council of State. Mikołajczyk was out of the government. From the spring of 1947 a current favouring cooperation with the government grew inside the Peasant Party, and Mikołajczyk's followers were pushed out of the local organisations and the party press. The party split from within, its pro-government wing forming a "Peasant Party Left", and on 20 October Mikołajczyk left Warsaw hidden in a United States embassy truck and sailed from Gdynia to Britain. The remaining party was led by the cooperating wing and merged with the Lublin line in November 1949 as the United Peasant Party.

From the "Polish Road" to "Rightist-Nationalist Deviation"

In speeches and articles from 1945 to 1947 Gomułka said that Poland would reach socialism by a road different from the Soviet system: without the dictatorship of the proletariat or agricultural collectivisation, keeping a multi-party coalition and a parliament, and continuing the tradition of Polish socialism. At the founding conference of the Cominform in September 1947 he expressed reservations about creating the body at all; that conference is covered in the Marshall Plan entry. At the Central Committee plenum of 3 June 1948 he gave a report affirming the independence tradition of the Polish Socialist Party and criticising the line of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania on the national question.

The criticism began after the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia in June 1948. The Central Committee plenum of 31 August to 3 September condemned Gomułka's "rightist-nationalist deviation", and after self-criticism he was removed as general secretary on 3 September. Bierut took his place. "Rightist-nationalist deviation" was the term of Bierut's camp; Gomułka went through the form of accepting it while explaining in later recollections that his objection had been to mechanical application of the Soviet model. He remained on the Central Committee after the unification congress, but the plenum of November 1949 dropped Gomułka, the former deputy defence minister Marian Spychalski and Zenon Kliszko from it; Spychalski was arrested in 1950. Gomułka was arrested in August 1951 and held without trial until December 1954. Why he was never brought to trial is discussed by comparison with the Hungarian and Czechoslovak cases, with Bierut's judgement, Soviet instruction and Gomułka's refusal to confess each cited as reasons.

The Unification Congress and 1949: What Was Fixed

The merger of the Socialist and Workers' parties gathered pace after Cyrankiewicz discussed it with Stalin in Moscow in March 1948. In April the Socialists removed opponents of the merger from their executive, and in October they carried out a second vetting of members; on the eve of the merger the party had shrunk to 531,000 members, and those expelled in the vetting included much of the pre-war Socialist leadership. The Workers' Party went through its own re-registration of members the same year. The unification congress, held at Warsaw Polytechnic from 15 to 21 December, founded the Polish United Workers' Party, with Bierut as chairman of the Central Committee and Cyrankiewicz as general secretary. Its programme defined people's democracy as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat; The new party had about 1.5 million members, two thirds of them from the Workers' Party. The history of that formula is in the parent entry.

What remained was settled in 1949. In November the Soviet marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky was appointed minister of national defence and given the rank of Marshal of Poland, and several hundred Soviet officers entered the Polish command. The same month the two peasant parties merged as the United Peasant Party; the Democratic Party remained a separate party. The constitution was adopted on 22 July 1952.

The official account of the Polish People's Republic called these five years the "people's democratic revolution"; the London exile camp and Polish historiography after 1989 called them the imposition of a system. Krystyna Kersten's The Birth of the System of Power (1985, in underground print) and Paczkowski's research added the archival tallies to the debate. Other readings stand between them. Jan Gross holds that occupation and war from 1939 to 1945 had already dismantled the old elites and property relations of Polish society, so that the measures after 1944 fell not on a blank page but on a society the war had changed; Kersten and Paczkowski, from the same material, stress Soviet decision and the role of the security ministry. That the two accounts name the same events differently shows that the judgement on what was built between 1944 and 1948 is still divided.