THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 441Criminal Law (1969) were instituted. But there was little attempt to restrain the
Party's unbridled liberties. Gomulka's regime was obviously more humane,
more flexible, more independent, and more popular, than its predecessor. But
those observers who expected that Gomulka would somehow 'liberalize' the
People's Republic on the lines of the western democracies were due to be cruelly
disillusioned.
In the affairs of the Soviet bloc, the Polish Party generally occupied a loyal,
orthodox position. Its nonconformist policies at home had to be safeguarded by
an ostentatiously submissive stance towards the USSR. Yet immediately after
October, when the Hungarian Republic suffered the fate which Poland had so
narrowly escaped, the Polish Red Cross sent medical supplies and blood plasma
to Hungary in the teeth of opposition from the authorities of the intervening
Czechoslovak Republic. In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the
Polish Delegation's abstention from the vote on 21 November 1956 on the
motion condemning Soviet intervention in Hungary, represents a solitary act of
defiance in thirty years of membership.^39
In the field of international disarmament, however, the Poles did take a num-
ber of important initiatives. On 2 October 1957, in the XII General Assembly of
the United Nations, Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki (1909-70) proposed a
scheme for creating a nuclear-free zone on the territories of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and the two German Republics - the so-called Rapacki Plan.
Three years later, at the XV General Assembly in i960, the Gomulka Plan pro-
posed an over-all freeze of nuclear arms in the same area. These plans, and their
numerous variants which were discussed off and on for six or seven years,
clearly underlined Poland's concern to halt the arms race and to defuse tensions
in Central Europe. At the same time, they represented a definite attempt by the
Soviet bloc to undermine the defences of Western Germany. After 1964, when
the Warsaw Pact began to enjoy military parity with NATO, attention was
switched away from Disarmament to the Soviet drive for a general European
Conference on Security and Co-operation - code named 'Detente'.
At home, in the period between 1961 and 1968, Gomulka gradually lost the
respect and the political impetus which he had gained in 1956. In the course of
the 1960s, the drive for economic self-sufficiency, especially in agriculture, ran
into difficulties. The promised rise in the standard of living was slow to materi-
alize. The Party bureaucracy prospered ostentatiously, to the disgust of ordin-
ary people. The First-Secretary surrounded himself with a closed circle of
cronies, and steadily lost contact with opinion in the Party and in the country at
large. In response to neo-Stalinist noises emanating from the USSR after the fall
of Krushchevin 1964, the Censorship was strengthened, and orthodox commu-
nist Philistinism reasserted in cultural affairs. Cultural figures were repri-
manded for maintaining foreign contacts; and a 'Letter of the 34' surfaced as one
of the early signs of public protest. The students, the intellectuals, the younger,
non-factional Party members known as the 'technocrats', all experienced a
strong sense of frustration and disillusionment. Behind the scenes, the old