THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT 407(1909-1942). In view of the terrors of the recent past, and the horrors of the pre-
sent, it was no mean feat of nerves and dedication to persuade the Soviet com-
rades that an independent Polish party should be recreated, and then to organize
it under the noses of the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Yet the feat was
performed. On 5 January 1942., the central core of the new Party was conspira-
torially assembled for the first time. The name of 'Polish Workers' Party (PPR)
was adopted. By the end of 1943, after Nowotko's mysterious assassination and
Finder's arrest by the Gestapo in suspicious circumstances, Wladyslaw
Gomulka (born 1905) emerged as First Secretary. The diminutive 'People's
Guard' took the field alongside the Home Army in the battle against the Nazi
occupation.^14
The personality of Wladyslaw Gomulka, or 'Comrade Wieslaw' as he was
known, reflected many of the fundamental characteristics of resurrected Polish
Communism. His official biography omits to mention the most formative events
in his career; but reliable unofficial sources have revealed that an unwavering
commitment to Communist ideals and a lifelong revulsion to Soviet practices
provided the mainsprings of his political action. As a young man in the 1930s,
sent for training at a Party School in the USSR, he saw the collectivization cam-
paign in the Ukraine at first hand, and decided at an early stage that the same
inhuman methods were never to be applied in Poland. In 1938-9, as an official
of the Union of Chemical Workers, he had the good fortune to be arrested by
the Polish police for illegal political activity, and thereby survived the Soviet
purge of the KPP which carried off most of his comrades. At the outbreak of
war, when the prisons were opened, he found himself in the Soviet zone of occu-
pation, in Lwow, but characteristically declined the chance of an interview with
the GPU, and fled to his own home town of Krosno in the Nazi-controlled
General-gouvernement. From there, in complete isolation from the Soviet
authorities, he renewed his conspiratorial life. Moving to Warsaw at the height
of the German Terror, he was at hand to step into the vacant post of General-
Secretary of the PPR in November 1943. His appointment coincided with the
publication of the full text of the Party's Manifesto O co walczymy} (What are
we fighting for?), which gave equal prominence to the twin goals of national
independence and social revolution. Despite its Marxist-Leninist language, this
shift of emphasis brought the broad strategy of the Communist movement
closer to the old PPS than to the KPP, and promised to give the Party a reason-
able chance of popular recruitment. In most other matters, Gomulka remained
an orthodox, disciplined, and philistine comrade. He had little time for intellec-
tual theorists, or for artistic pursuits, and no interest whatsoever in liberal ideas.
The stubbornness of his nature, forged in prison and in the underground, was
to prove a stumbling-block not only to Soviet designs for manipulating Poland
to their own uses but also at later date to misguided hopes for 'liberalization'.
Gomulka headed a group of men who believed that hard-line Polish
Communism offered the one sure guarantee for Poland against Soviet imperial-
ism. For the next twenty-seven years, his outlook stamped itself on the basic