438 POLSKA LUDOWA
About walls without mildew,
About the hatred of scraps of paper,
About people's precious, holy, time,
About a safe return to home,
About the simple distinction between words and deeds.
We should make demands on this earth,
which we didn't win in a game of chance,
which cost the lives of millions,
demands for the plain truth, for the harvest of freedom,
for fiery, good sense,
for fiery good sense.
We should make demands daily.
We should make demands of the Party.
36The clue to the poem's meaning lies in its sheer banality. In any open society,
where the faults and the shortcomings of government policy are openly dis-
cussed, it could have aroused no surprise whatsoever. But in the Stalinist con-
text, with Marshal Rokossowski still resident in Warsaw, it caused a sensation.
For the first time in seven years, it hinted that something was rotten in the
People's Republic and that official eulogies of the country's perfect progress
would no longer be accepted. By the time that First-Secretary Boleslaw Bierut
left Warsaw to attend the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party
in Moscow in February 1956, the Thaw was well advanced.
The crisis of 1956 which rocked the whole communist world was launched by
Krushchev's 'secret speech' to the Twentieth Congress recounting a limited
selection of Stalin's crimes against the Party and the people. In Poland, it was
compounded by the equally shocking news of Bierut's sudden death in Moscow,
apparently, though not officially, by suicide. No one could ignore the possibil-
ity that the two events were connected. No disciplined communist could over-
look the fact that what was happening in the USSR ought also to be happening
in the USSR's satellites. A steadying influence was provided by Bierut's succes-
sor as Party Secretary, Edward Ochab, appointed in March 1956. Faced on the
one hand by the demands of 'national communists' to shake off the Soviet yoke,
and on the other by the preparations of the Stalinists to defend their position, if
necessary with Soviet aid, he contrived to prevent open conflict. In April, the
Minister of Culture, Sokorski, was removed. In May, discredited by the stories
of tens of thousands of Poles returning from Soviet camps, the Party's ideologi-
cal leader, Jakub Berman, was dismissed. In June, when the communist work-
ers of the ZISPO Locomotive Factory in Poznan rioted in the streets, under
banners of 'BREAD and FREEDOM' and 'RUSSIANS GO HOME', the distur-
bances might well have been exploited by one faction or another for their own
ends, thereby risking a direct clash. In two days' fighting between workers and
the militia, 53 men died. But the workers were calmed by the intervention of
Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz, and the Army was kept to a supporting role. In