He ordered imprisonment and torture. He displaced whole nations and sentenced millions of people to death. He enslaved our country and deprived it of half of its territory. It is hard to imagine that this disgusting character could arouse any sympathy. And yet there were Poles who loved Joseph Stalin!
The first to love Josif Wissarionowicz with a deep and boundless love were the pre-war Polish communists, members of the Communist Party of Poland. Brought up in absolute obedience to the party, they had no doubts as to the correctness of the line drawn after Lenin's death by his successor, the secretary general. Moscow locuta, causa finita . In the communist mentality it was obvious that the Moscow headquarters was always right, and the most infallible is, of course, the leader of the world proletariat, Joseph Stalin. That is why the CPP, without murmuring, adopted in 1938 a decision to dissolve, incomprehensible to many activists, on the accusation that it had been infiltrated by the Polish secret services.
Love up to and including death
Stalin's purge of Polish communists was also accepted with humility. Executions and exiles to labor camps reached their apogee at the end of the next decade. The entire leadership of the CPP was summoned to Moscow and liquidated there. Later, more important activists were downloaded and systematically removed. The repressions also affected members of their families. Despite rumors about what the Red Tsar was funding his followers, the love and trust of Polish communists for Stalin was so great that it did not occur to them to rebel or oppose.
Though most of them knew what their fate was, they humbly rode to headquarters and took their punishment obediently. During the trials, they expressed self-criticism and at the same time expressed their deep trust in the party and its secretary general. Not only that, in the KPP itself, in order to please Stalin, comrades wrote denunciations on their colleagues who were not zealously praising the "Father of Nations" . The result of this blind love for the Red Tsar was the almost complete liquidation of the Polish Communist Party. Only those in Polish prisons survived. Russian historian, prof. Nikolai Ivanov concluded:
Of the nineteen members of the CPP Central Committee elected at the Sixth Party Congress in 1932, fourteen were brought to Moscow and killed. Four survived because they were in Polish prisons, one managed to survive in France. Out of eighteen deputy members of the Central Committee, only three survived, who were also saved by Polish prison bars. The punishing hand of the NKVD extended far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union .
Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (Polrewkom), early August 1920. Many members of the forming communist authorities in Poland did not suspect that they were going to die. And that's for faithful service.
Those who managed to survive were constantly suspected of treason. They were also commanded, God forbid, not to think of some arbitrary reconstruction of the party. So, of course, there was not a single act of disobedience or rebellion. The faith in Stalin was really great.
Waiting for the Red Army
A little strained by the events of the 1930s, the love of Polish communists for Stalin could flourish again after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. After all, it was the Soviet Union under his leadership that heroically fought against fascism and carried the entire burden of the war. It was also the Red Army that tied 160 German divisions, while the Western Allies did nothing. In addition, after the great defeats inflicted on the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and Kursk by the Soviet troops, the policy of the Nazis in the occupied Polish lands changed. The rigors were loosened and Poles began to be treated less brutally.
The closer the eastern front was, the more the occupiers tried to win over the Poles. No wonder that a large part of our countrymen thought with kindness and hope about Stalin and his soldiers. Especially those who did not experience the first Soviet occupation, and suffered Nazi atrocities, waited with hope for the arrival of Soviet soldiers. Prisoners of arrests, penitentiaries and concentration camps, as well as hiding Jews prayed for their arrival as soon as possible. The Red Tsar appeared as the liberator of Europe from the nightmare of Nazism. And indeed - contrary to the current version of history - in many Polish cities, the invading Red Army units were greeted with flowers (read more HERE).
The Soviet Union is our homeland
The Polish communists were also grateful to the leaders of the USSR. It was thanks to him that they now gained power. Before the war, people who were on the margins of political life had little public support, and as agents of a foreign state, they were surrounded by general contempt, now they have risen to the top of the political hierarchy. From prisoners, outcasts or subordinate communist activists at the mercy of Stalin, they turned into ministers, generals and prime ministers. Their previously unrealistic dream came true - now they ruled Poland!
They had abundance and could do anything. And the future was supposed to be even more beautiful. That is why their love and gratitude to the leader of the world proletariat have become immeasurably boundless. Blind obedience was one of the conditions for staying on top of the communist tops. The best example of such an attitude was Bolesław Bierut, who was loving Stalin and at the same time trembling in front of him. People who, like Władysław Gomułka, dared to have their own opinion and did not want to imitate Big Brother in everything, quickly became suspects and ended up in prison. The correct attitude was only to be as presented by Mieczysław Moczar at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the PPR:
The Soviet Union is not just our ally, that is a saying for the people. For us, for party members, the Soviet Union is our Homeland today I am unable to define our borders, today they are for Berlin and tomorrow for Gibraltar.
Freedom that intoxicates us ...
But not only the communists benefited from the change of the political system in post-war Poland. Large numbers of Poles benefited from social advancement - work, free education, holidays, access to culture and health care. They too - or at least some of them - were sincerely grateful to the Soviet Union and its leaders for this.
The communist authorities took care of the development of culture, and the artists who supported it could count on prizes, privileges and money. Another thing is that the circulation of books in the Polish People's Republic in comparison to those pre-war (and also those after 1989) was huge - there were books with a cosmic number of 300,000 copies. 13 volumes of "Works" by Joseph Stalin were published with a total circulation of 1.8 million copies . No wonder that many artists wholeheartedly supported the new regime. Poems about the Red Cara were written, among others, by Władysław Broniewski, Wisława Szymborska and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński. He was praised by, among others, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Kazimierz Brandys, Stanisław Dygat, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Julian Przyboś.
And my new steel lyre, and proudly transformed muse, clear eyesight of citizens, voice and breath, thought and step, and freedom that intoxicates us, - it's Stalin! - wrote Stanisław Jerzy Lec.
Polish writers and intellectuals often wrote praises to Stalin not out of coercion, but out of genuine "love". The photo shows Stalin with the coat of arms of the Republic of Poland in 1944.
Stalin, thank you for the borders!
Stalin was loved not only by writers and poets. Many Poles believed that he was the guarantor of our new borders in the west. It was thanks to him that Poland now reached the Odra and Nysa and could count on the support of the USSR in a possible conflict with the Federal Republic of Germany, which did not recognize its post-war borders . It was this factor that made many Poles to some extent accept the new geopolitical position of Poland after 1945, agreeing to a pragmatic arrangement:Soviet guarantees for the western borders in exchange for loss of independence. For example, Władysław Gomułka was an advocate of such political realism.
Adoration of Stalin was constantly intensified by official propaganda. The leader of the proletariat was surrounded by an almost divine cult. This became especially apparent in December 1949, when it was the 70th birthday of the secretary general. The Politburo decided to fully publish the works of Lenin and his "most faithful student", Józef Wissarionowicz. The figure of the red tsar was supposed to be presented in the "Short biography", published in August 1949 in 100,000 copies, written for the purposes of propaganda and falsifying in some places the biography of the leader.
Under the leadership of Bolesław Bierut, the "National Committee for the Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Birth of Józef Stalin" was established, and the event itself was planned in detail at the Central Committee level. The instruction recommended organizing meetings of party organizations with papers devoted to Stalin. There were calls for competition to work in each province. The wall newspapers were to be devoted to the anniversary. The action was accompanied by a "grassroots" initiative to write letters and send gifts to the Kremlin. A whole train with gifts for Stalin went from Poland to Moscow, and 563,400 letters, postcards and laurels came from all over the country ...
Tears after Stalin
After Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, literal hysteria ensued. A wave of mourning massages, academies and rallies swept across the country. Everywhere portraits of the secretary, black and red flags and occasional slogans like:"Stalin's immortal name will always live in the hearts of the Polish nation and all progressive humanity" were hung everywhere. Mournful texts appeared in all press titles; writers and poets wrote memoirs and poems about the Leader of the Proletariat.
The death of Stalin caused a real sadness in many Poles. Some fainted with despair… The picture shows the funeral of the Soviet leader.
On March 7, the authorities decided to rename Katowice as Stalinogród. On the day of the commander's Moscow funeral, a national mourning was announced in Poland. Rallies were held in workplaces, schools and institutions, a procession passed through the streets of Warsaw. The supremacy of the party forced the Church to ring the bells by priests - in Krakow, even the Sigismund Bell sounded ... The mourning was largely staged, but according to the testimony of witnesses, many people were really deeply affected by the leader's departure. There have been cases of fainting and hysteria, many people have cried. There was also one reported case of a fatal heart attack caused by emotion.
Stalinism is always alive
Stalin's ideas outlasted him. The Stalinist current associated with the so-called with the Natolin group, then with the Katowice Forum, the Rzeczpospolita daily and - to some extent - with the group of Mieczysław Moczar. A fan of the red tsar and Mao Zedong, former minister Kazimierz Mijal founded the illegal Polish Communist Party in 1965 and emigrated first to Stalinist Albania and then to China. From there, he promoted fundamental communism of the Stalinist type.
Other hardliners of orthodox communism were active in the party until the 1980s. Today these traditions are to some extent continued by the new Polish Communist Party and other marginal neo-communist organizations founded in 2002.
***
If you think it couldn't be worse, Jakub Kuza in his latest novel " Battle for Poland 2020 ”(Bellona 2018) shows that the specter of the dictatorship lurks behind our backs. In the presidential race, there are unexpectedly two candidates that Poles would like to forget:Józef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.