THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 459rect Party control by supervision from above was supplemented by direct control
from within, through disciplined cells of Party activists operating in every gov-
ernment ministry and enterprise. Most importantly, the all-pervasive system of
the nomenklatura or 'official nomination list' ensuredthat every single appoint-
ment, whether in Party, State, Armed Forces, or in social organizations such as
Trade Unions or Co-operatives could only be filled on the prior recommendation
of the Party. All officeholders were thus Party nominees; all elected officials and
parliamentary deputies owed their position not to their election but to their nom-
ination by the Party as candidates: all so-called 'non-party' figures were subject
to Party approval. Not surprisingly, some analysts have dismissed the entire con-
cept of 'the socialist state' as an official fiction.
Local government was firmly controlled by higher authorities. As with the
central institutions of the Republic, democratic procedures at the local level
were designed to perpetuate the dictatorship of the Party. There were three main
administrative divisions - the wojewodztwa (voivodships or departments), the
powiaty (districts), and after 1973, the gminy (communes). In the post-war
period, the centrifugal tendencies of the individual departments had begun to
grow alarmingly - so much so that Gierek's Silesia, for example, was dubbed the
'Polish Katanga'. These tendencies were checked by important administrative
reforms - in 1973 by the replacement of the former gromada (village) and
osiedla (settlement) by the larger communes, and in 1975 by increasing the total
number of departments from 17 to 49.^60 (See Map 23.)
The Constitution of 1952 survived largely intact. The creation in 1957 of the
Supreme Chamber of Control (NIK) had enabled the Sejm to exercise closer
control over the organs of central and local government; but the Sejm in its turn
was directly controlled by the Party and by the Party's Front of National Unity
(FJN). After the slight increase of Party-sponsored 'non-Party members' in
1957, representational patterns in the Sejm were fixed for twenty years:
Front of National Unity Non-Party
Term
I. 26 Oct '52
II. zo Jan '57
III. 16 Apr '61
IV. 31 May '65
V. Jun '69
VI. 15 Feb '72
VII. 21 Mar '76
VIII. 23 Mar '80
PZPR
273
239
256
255
255
255
261
261ZSL
90
118
117
117
117
117
113
113SD
2.5
39
39
39
39
39
37
37members
37
63
48
49
49
49
49
49Total
425
459
460
460
460
460
460
460
Amendments to the Constitution which were voted in February 1976 aroused
widespread misgivings, not so much because they changed existing practices, but
because they gave the role of the Party and the Soviet Union binding and perman-
ent legal force. By declaring the Party to be 'the Guardian of the State', nothing
of substance changed in the way that Poland had been ruled since 1948; and by
raising the 'alliance with the USSR' from the realm of foreign policy to that of