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eliminating reference to Mao Zedong Thought from the Party constitution
and strengthening the powers of the party’s secretary general. Mao resented
this attempt to diminish his status and power. He was beginning to think
about using his immense authority as China’s Stalin to eliminate, just as
Stalin had, the rightist opposition among both the CCP elite and the peas-
antry to the drastic acceleration he envisioned for China’s socialist industri-
alization process. Events in Eastern Europe in 1956 further divided the CCP
leadership and pushed Mao’s thinking leftward.
The CCP and the East European Uprisings of 1956
Within months of Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin, the Polish and
Hungarian communist parties seized on Khrushchev’s opening to begin
moving toward more humane forms of socialism. China would play a sig-
nificant role in both episodes, initiating a period of perhaps twenty years
during which China played a role in the Eastern European socialist camp in
rivalry with Moscow. Events in Poland and Hungary would also help inten-
sify disagreements within the CCP elite over investment priorities and speed
of industrialization. These East European events of 1956 also illustrate some
of the problems of post-Stalinist communist rule that would plague the CCP
thirty years later when, after Mao, it abandoned Stalinism and opened to
the world.
In the spring of 1956, the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP—Poland’s
communist party) and the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party (HSWP—
Hungary’s communist party) began to release political prisoners and rein in
the previously ruthless political police. Many cadres purged earlier on phony
charges were rehabilitated and, in some cases, reassigned to important posi-
tions. The scope of permissible speech, publication, and association was wid-
ened. An atmosphere of greater toleration and liberality developed. There
was a sense that both countries were at a new point of departure, leaving
behind the repressive form of socialism imposed by Soviet armies after 1945.
The PUWP rehabilitated Władysław Gomułka, purged in 1954 for rightism,
and elected him first secretary of the party. The HSWP rehabilitated Imre
Nagy, purged in 1955 for a premature move toward de-Stalinization, And,
Nagy too was made first secretary of his party during an anti-Soviet uprising
of October 1956, Moscow feared that both Poland and Hungary were slipping
out of control. But Khrushchev also realized that armed intervention would
run counter to his push for reduced tension with the West and might even
risk war with the United States.
Events in Poland reached a head somewhat before Hungary. In June 1956,
protests by Polish workers erupted over shortages of food and consumer
goods, declining real wages, and shipments of commodities to the USSR.