THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT 409position in the politics of the so-called 'National Front', where several separate
parties and allied formations were allowed to exist so long as they admit to the
leading role of the Communists. It also hints at the persistence within the PZPR
of several informal but well-defined factions. In the first decade after the war,
observers were often content to distinguish between those comrades who were
thought to answer directly to Soviet commands, the so-called 'POPy' (Acting
Poles), and those who were not. But this distinction, though important, soon
proved inadequate. The 'old Communists', survivors of the KPP, provided a
tiny band of idealist elders, a living reminder of the Party's sad history. The
'Warsaw Core', centred on Gomutka, was drawn from people who had re-
created the PPR in Poland during the Nazi Occupation. The 'Partisans' headed
by Mieczyslaw Moczar, veterans of the Party's wartime underground, were
noted for their intolerant and philistine attitudes. The 'Patriots', veterans of the
ZPP, were led in the post-war era by General Alexander Zawadzki (1899-1964).
The 'People of the Oka', who came together in the Political Department of
Berling's army, had the reputation for a revolutionary Bonapartist temper. On
the ideological front, the Party could be divided between the 'Stalinists' and
their opponents who favoured more brands of flexible 'national Communism'.
The 'Stalinists' were themselves divided between those who sought to turn
Poland into a pale, Russified, imitation of the USSR and those who wished to
use Stalinist methods to create a fiercely independent, but uncompromisingly
dictatorial, Polish regime. Each of these factions and opinion-groups were to
reappear in the crises of the next thirty years.
To the impartial observer, many of the characteristic features of the
Communist regime can be seen to have some precedents in earlier stages of
Polish history. The leftist dictatorship of a narrow political elite, which manip-
ulates pseudo-democratic institutions in its own interest, was vaguely reminis-
cent of the pre-war Sanacja. So, too, were the Party's token gestures to social
radicalism, and to anticlericalism. The authoritarian stance of the Party, no less
than its sanctimonious rhetoric, resembled attitudes traditionally adopted by
the Church hierarchy. In a deeply Catholic country, the similarity between the
conduct of the Party, and that of the militant Catholic Orders, such as the
Jesuits, could not be overlooked. In historical terms, the 'dictatorship of the pro-
letariat' can be seen as the latest in a long series of dictatorships, which through
all the insurrections of the nineteenth century pursued avowedly democratic
goals by manifestly undemocratic means. The exclusive, intolerant approach to
the problem of national identity, which among other things had distinguished
the PPR and the PZPR from the pre-war KPP, marked the ultimate victory of the
basic ideas of Dmowski's National Democracy. The penchant for constructing
institutions of national unity, irrespective of whether such unity really exists or
not, was shared by the Communist authors of the 'National Front' and its suc-
cessor, the 'Front of National Unity' (FJN) with the designers of the pre-war
BBWR and OzoN. The Party's fundamental strategy of linking a defensive
alliance with one of Poland's stronger neighbours to economic and cultural