(^428) POLSKA LUDOWA
compensatory gesture. This appeared in the Trade Treaty of 28 January 1948,
which provided for Polish—Soviet co-operation worth 2 thousand million roubles
over 4 years. Marshall Aid had been rejected out of hand.
As the countries of the Soviet Bloc withdrew into their shell, an attempt was
made to strengthen the bonds between the ruling Parties. Ever since 1943, when
Stalin had abolished Comintern, the Soviet Communist Party had exercised
direct and undivided control over all the others. There was no forum in which
they could meet and share ideas. So a new organization, the Communist
Information Bureau or 'Cominform', was launched. It was well suited to the
mood and interests of the Polish comrades, especially of the more wayward
figures like Gomulka, who chafed under the suffocating attentions of Moscow.
The opening conference was organized in September 1947 at the Silesian moun-
tain resort of Szklarska Poremba. The initiative did not last long.
From the communist viewpoint, the cancer in the Republic's economic life lay
right at the centre, in the Central Planning Office (CUP). Here the expertise was
largely western trained, and was connected with the old PPS. In February 1948,
a discussion meeting was convened to review its activities. To the amazement of
the staff, the discussion turned into a full-scale Soviet-style pillory of their work.
The Minister of Industry, Hilary Mine, denounced their efforts as 'bourgeois',
'un-Marxist', and based on false analysis. For the first time in Poland, a public
debate was conducted on the basis of who could recite the most quotations from
Lenin and Stalin. It has been called 'the birth of Polish Stalinism'. Henceforth,
all planning was to be undertaken in slavish imitation of Soviet methods. The
Central Planning Office was abolished. Economic statistics became state secrets.
Free debate ended.^24
As the Planning affair hinted, the main crisis was looming in the ideological
sphere. In the summer of 1948, a major split appeared in the ranks of the Party
and government. This is sometimes explained as a rift between the advocates of
the conservative 'Polish Road to Socialism' centred on Gomulka, and the adher-
ents of a radical 'Moscow Line', headed by Bierut. Although, of course, there
can be no certainty, it does seem that the standard analysis is faulty on at least
three important scores. For one thing, it ignores the complexity of viewpoints
and factions. Within the PPR itself in this period there were at least five
main groupings. There were also the Party's clients, especially the PPS
of Cyrankiewicz and the NRVD's 'progressive Catholics'. On the Soviet side,
one can identify four or five separate interests — from the Kom-mandatura of
the Soviet Army and the security organs, to the state interest of the Soviet
Ministries, the party interest of the CPSU, and last but not least the personal
suspicions and whims of Stalin himself. If one perms the five or six Polish
groups against the similar number of potential Soviet patrons, one immediately
arrives at twenty-five or thirty important connections, some known, some hid-
den. The one man who does not appear to have had a definable position was
Bierut. Bierut was a stool-pigeon of the most obvious ilk, quite incapable of
forming a power grouping in Poland except at the end of someone else's strings.
jeff_l
(Jeff_L)
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