Bierut at mass, Gomułka at Easter breakfast, free market economy and a close alliance with ... Great Britain. It's not political fiction! This is exactly the vision of reality created by the Polish authorities immediately after the war.
When the Polish communists took over the reins in 1944, they did not have the support of the public, but only Soviet rifles. At the beginning it was enough, but in the long run, in order to maintain power, it was necessary to convince at least part of the population to cooperate, and most - to passivity.
For this purpose, a surprising mixture of covert terror and official… reconstruction of the Second Polish Republic was used. In fact, it was the latter that the demands of the ruling camp boiled down to.
Bierut and other leaders of the PPR did not want to admit that they were communists for a long time.
Firstly, the leadership of the Polish Workers' Party (which later formed the PZPR) demonstratively emphasized until 1948 that did not lead the communist party and did not intend to introduce communism in Poland.
In order to be credible, the long-standing communists openly criticized, for example, the traditions of the pre-war Polish Communist Party, in which most of them ... they used to be active in the past.
New Poland - initially the Lublin one, and from 1945 Warsaw - was to be a socialist state, but in the best sense of the word! The authorities restored most of the pre-war legal system, from the law on counteracting alcoholism, to the name of the country and the March constitution, to ignore it.
Bolesław Bierut became president, the prosecutor's office was rebuilt, the tripartite division of power and all mechanisms for balancing it were still officially functioning. Even former Home Army soldiers were admitted to the army. The PPR assured that it would carry out a revolution, but - ladies and gentlemen - it was to be a bourgeois revolution !
Another frame from the same Film Chronicle. Priests, the church, godly people… they were still reasons to be proud of the communist media!
As Andrzej L. Sowa, the author of the book "Historia Polityczna Polski 1944-1991" reminds, in the Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation
industry nationalization was not envisaged . All property seized by the Germans, i.e. large industrial, commercial, banking, transport and forest enterprises, was to be temporarily taken over by the state to be returned to the owners. Freedom of economic life was announced , supporting cooperatives and private initiative, as well as introducing universal social insurance and labor protection . In a word - a real idyll!
However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The authorities were so anxious to camouflage their true intentions that they even officially retained the position of religion and the Catholic Church in the state. State ceremonies were usually preceded by Holy Masses , party elites knelt and said prayers without hesitation, and the Polish Film Chronicle devoted a lot of attention to the religious meaning of Christmas, Easter and Corpus Christi and even completely mediocre holidays.
Observing all this, ordinary people joined the PPR without realizing what kind of party it was. They believed that it was a patriotic, national or even Christian formation. This has led to absurd situations many times. For example, in Muszyna in June 1946 a member of the PPR asked the starost: why is the PPR banner not being sacrificed and why is there no image of Christ on it?
This is not the end yet. The authorities not only ensured that they were building a free and democratic country, but also an internationally completely independent country. Although the alliance with the Soviet Union was to be in the first place, the PPR argued that his priority was also an alliance with the United States and Great Britain .
To win people's sympathy, Bierut did not mind attending mass in person.
Did the people believe all these lies? Former soldiers of the Home Army and remnants of the intelligentsia probably did not. But at least it must have seemed to millions of simple people that it would not be as bad as it could be. And that was enough for the communists to establish their power. As a result, after 1948, they no longer had to pretend.
Sources:
Basic:
- Andrzej Leon Sowa, The Political History of Poland 1944-1991, Wydawnictwo Literackie 2011.
Complementary:
- Antoni Dudek, Zdzisław Zblewski, Utopia on the Vistula , Park Edukacja, 2008.