THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 443thousand. It was a shameful episode which could be presented abroad as a
resurgence of Polish 'anti-Semitism'. For if the initial wave of expelees con-
tained a genuine core of ex-Stalinists and of former political criminals who had
been purged from the Party with good reason, the purge soon turned into an
undisguised attack on all persons of Jewish origin, irrespective of their
conduct. Sadly and ironically, many of the victims were people who for one
reason or another had voluntarily chosen to stay in Poland when most of their
relatives and co-religionists had left at the end of the war. There was only one
redeeming aspect. Unlike the political purges which had been commonplace in
the USSR and the Soviet Bloc throughout the Stalinist period, and which in
some instances had been organized by individuals expelled in 1968, no one was
actually killed.
Gomulka was aided by events in Czechoslovakia. In so far as public opinion
influenced the progress of the Polish crisis, the only comment relevant to
Gomulka's succession was enshrined in the popular jingle:
Cala Polska czeka
Na swego Dubczeka
(The whole of Poland awaits its own Dubcek)
Yet Moczar's interest in 'socialism with a human face' was still less convincing
than Gomulka's. What is more, the Soviet Government, alarmed by develop-
ments in Czechoslovakia, would not have considered the moment ripe for addi-
tional changes in Poland. In the summer, the manoeuvres of the Warsaw Pact in
Czechoslovakia, which brought several Soviet divisions through southern
Poland, served to divert attention from the Polish Party's internal problems;
whilst the Invasion itself, in which Polish Army units participated from bases in
East Germany, called for the strictest political vigilance. As a result, opposition
to Gomulka faded. At the 5th Congress of the PZPR in November 1968, his
leadership was reconfirmed.
This same Congress was attended by the Soviet Party leader, Leonid
Brezhnev, who used the occasion to expound his views on the relations between
socialist states. Far from apologizing for the recent invasion of Czechoslovakia,
Brezhnev ominously underlined the duty of all the fraternal parties to come to
the aid of any country where 'the gains of socialism' were threatened. In effect,
in the clumsy euphemisms of Kremlinese, Brezhnev was signalling Moscow's
determination to crush any other member of the Soviet bloc whose obedience
might falter. Any fraternal party which dared to follow Dubcek's example
would pay the same penalty. That this so-called 'Brezhnev Doctrine' should
have been formulated in Warsaw - in the capital of the USSR's largest and most
suspect ally — was lost on no one. The echoes of that speech reverberate round
Eastern Europe for twenty years.
Poland's fundamental economic and political malaise, however, had not been
cured. It was merely a matter of time before Gomulka would again be chal-
lenged.