434 POLSKA LUDOWA
Persian Court to the world at large, 'there were no true Moslems in Persia'.
According to Milosz, there were very few true communists in Poland.^29
Ideological argument was swamped by the cult of Stalin's personality. Stalin's
crude parodies of Lenin's deformation of Marx, as summarized in the Short
Course ... (1939) and his Problems of Leninism (1940) were translated into Polish,
and adopted as the True Word. All discussions were brought to a close by a timely,
or untimely, quotation from 'The Great Leader'. Writers of genuine talent, such as
Wladyslaw Broniewski, were reduced to writing poetic puffs and jingles:
How beautiful to know that Stalin lives,
How beautiful to know that Stalin thinks, etc., etc.In the political sphere, the 'one Party state' was subject to direct Soviet con-
trol. To this end, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Konstanty Rokossowski
(Rokossovskiy, 1896-1968), a Russian of Polish descent who had spent his
entire career in the Tsarist and Soviet service, was installed in Warsaw in
November 1949 as Vice-Premier, Minister of Defence, and member of the
Political Bureau.
Militarism reared its unmistakable head. On the doubtful pretext that the
socialist bloc was about to be attacked by the forces of American imperialism,
the whole of Eastern Europe was turned into an armed camp. Frontiers were
closed. Security was returned to wartime footing. The economy was converted
to military priorities. Military conscription, carefully avoided since 1945, was
reintroduced. The Polish Army, closely schooled by Soviet advisers, received a
permanent establishment of 400,000 men. The General Staff was politicized
through the Army Political Academy created in 1951. For several years, the earl-
ier stage of development of the satellite armies prevented the formation in
Eastern Europe of a Soviet military bloc in response to NATO. This short-
coming was remedied on 14 May 1955 when the Warsaw Pact, in which the
Polish Army was to take second place after the Soviet Army, was formed.^30
Although Poland was spared the most intense Terror, which had gripped the
Soviet Union before the War, the People's Democracy possessed the same sort
of Soviet-style security services; and it gave them free rein to practise the same
repertoire of preventative arrests, investigations under torture, show trials, and
savage repressions. For ten years after 1944—5, judical murder was an estab-
lished feature of state policy. The principal victims were pre-war politicians,
wartime resistance fighters, members of the post-war opposition parties, dissi-
dent Catholics and intellectuals, and deviant Communists. Some of the more
spectacular cases involved hundreds, if not thousands of arrests, and scores of
verdicts. The Z-L Case of 1948, for example, targeted pre-war military officers,
as did the Tatar Trials of 1951-2. In 1948-9, the Zoszka Case was designed to
eliminate former Warsaw insurgents; and the Zhegota Case decimated members
of the wartime Council for Aid to Jews. The Field Case of 1949-51 involved a
fellow-travelling American fugitive, Noel Field, a colleague of Alger Hiss, who
was falling foul of the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the USA at the same time. The