Khrushchev's ‘secret speech’ and polish politics: The spring of 1956

Abstract

STALIN'S PHYSICAL DEMISE had little immediate impact on Poland. Since deities do not die, the 'Stalin cult'l might have ended in 1953, but its embodiment in political practices and social structures of the Polish state meant that the euphemistic 'cult of the individual' could not be eliminated so easily.2 Its real demise followed Stalin's second death, the political one, at the XX Congress of the CPSU (14-25 February 1956). In one sense, Poland had already experienced a 'secret speech'3 through the revelations of lieutenant-colonel Jozef Swiatlo, who defected to the West at the end of 1953. His lurid tales of routine torture of political prisoners, the high-life of the communist elite, its links with Moscow and an ubiquitous system of police informing, began to be broadcast back to Poland from autumn 1954.4 Such adverse publicity extracted significant concessions from the political authorities. The Ministry of Public Security was abolished and the Third Plenum of the ruling PZPR (January 1955) set an apparently new course. It was accompanied by social pressure for change expressed in an anti-Stalinist poem-'there are Polish apples which Polish children cannot reach'-which caused a 'scandal' in August 1955,5 and the increasingly outspoken journal Po prostu, transformed by radical young intellectuals from a boring Youth Union (ZMP) rag into an important social institution.6 But the initiative from politicians soon petered out. The one, self-centred, concern of the PZPR elite remained the fate of its predecessors in the KPP, dissolved by Stalin in 1938. Their leader Bierut made a formal request to Moscow in late 1954 for the rehabilitation of 30 members killed or executed in the Soviet Union and asked for a search for any surviving relatives in the GULag.7 Khrushchev replied that the Polish communists had been arrested in 1937-38 'by the inimical leadership of the NKVD' and promised posthumous rehabilitation of the KPP.8 The CPSU added later that the dissolution 'on the basis of falsified materials, unmasked subsequently as provocations' had been groundless. An agreed formulation, endorsed by other parties to the original Cominter resolution (Italian, Bulgarian and Finnish) was finally promulgated during the XX Congress.9 Khrushchev's 'secret speech' was very much a personal initiative.'1 None of his contemporaries would have had the courage to face the party with a frank-though incomplete-catalogue of Stalin's crimes. Some were aware of the need to say