412 PARTIA
Italy or Spain than to those dictated by Lenin's Revolution in pre-industrial,
autocratic Russia. The instinctive hostility of Polish society to the organs of
state power, irrespective of the regime of the day, would seem to indicate that
the prime Leninist concepts of Democratic Centralism (i.e. centralized Party
Autocracy) or of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (i.e. the Dictatorship of the
Party over the People) were not well suited to Polish instincts. In foreign affairs,
the Poles' extended knowledge of Partition, and their familiarity with the mech-
anisms of imperialist realpolitik, must necessarily have aroused their suspicions
about an international system where the world was increasingly divided into the
rival, but interdependent spheres of the superpowers. The Poles had seen it all
before, from the receiving end, and no amount of Soviet pressure could persuade
a thinking Polish Communist to admire what he saw.
For all these reasons, a sovereign Polish Communist Party, freed from its
Soviet chains, would have been the first of the parties of the Soviet Bloc to give
serious examination to the views of Tito, Togliatti, Dubcek, Berlinguer, Carillo,
or Mao. It would probably have favoured some limited concessions to parlia-
mentary democracy. It would probably have favoured some form of European
integration, and of European disarmament, as a means of ending the partition
of Europe. It would possibly have cultivated its contacts with China and the
Third World, as a contribution to the struggle against the eventual partition of
the world. Undoubtedly, ideas of this sort were discussed in the innermost
recesses of the Party's sancta; but they could never be publicly aired. The Polish
comrades could draw on their recollections of the anti-Tsarist, revolutionary
underground; of Roza Luksemburg; of the international brigades in the Spanish
Civil War; and of their brief experience of Popular Front tactics in the wartime
Resistance. But ever since August 1944, when they joined the Lublin Committee,
they had been firmly hung on the Soviet hook. They always sensed that any open
debate of divergent Marxist opinions would be regarded in Moscow as trea-
sonable heresy, and would provoke the brutal retribution of the superpower on
whom, in the last analysis, they ultimately depended. They had to choose
between holding their tongues, or being silenced by force. The dictates of ideo-
logical honesty had to take second place to the instinct of political survival.
Theoretical argument had to yield to practical requirements. Polish
Communism had always differed in important ways from the Russian variety.
But so long as it could not speak its name it was bound to be viewed by the aver-
age Polish citizen, and by the world at large, as the creature of foreign masters
and bureaucratic opportunists. The PZPR may well have contained its share of
patriots and of idealists. But their face was not seen, and their voice was not
heard. In this way, the ruling Party of post-war Poland relieved the pains and the
humiliations of most Polish regimes in every period except one in more than two
and a half centuries.