Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki

4. Under the Cross and the Red Flag, 1945–56

4 ||| Under the Cross and the Red Flag, 1945–56 Piasecki’s incarceration by the communists and his subsequent release were turning points in his life. The decision of Poland’s new rulers to exonerate and support a man whose credentials included chauvinistic nationalism , anti-Semitism, and anticommunism was in fact less paradoxical than it seemed. Elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe, after the initial wave of purges, numerous former fascists and right-wing radicals reentered postwar politics. In East Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Romania, thousands of them joined the respective national communist parties. The communists often turned a blind eye to these recruits’ fascist pasts. In Italy, where fascism had lasted for two decades, millions of people, including some wartime resisters, had ties to Mussolini’s regime. Memories of the civil war that had swept north-central Italy from 1943 to 1945 still loomed large in the minds of the country’s postwar leaders. Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communist Party and minister of justice in the postwar government, quickly understood that retribution would not facilitate the restoration of order. The fate of Greece, where a civil war brought military intervention from the British, victory for a conservative royalist regime, and a purge of the Left, show what could have happened to Italy if tensions had continued. In 1946, Togliatti pushed for an amnesty law that allowed the return of many fascists to normal life and politics, often in the ranks of the Italian Communist Party.1 While Togliatti’s strategy rested on caution, East German, Hungarian, and Romanian communists’ relative tolerance for fascist small fry reflected their own initial weakness and unpopularity. To put it bluntly, they had to expand the membership of their parties if they wanted to run local government , control the police, and take hold of the economy. Technocrats and 78 | Between the Brown and the Red seasoned veterans could facilitate national recovery and, by extension, a communist takeover. In Bulgaria, Kimon Georgiev, the leader of the Zveno group that had instigated two military coups and imitated Mussolini’s ruling style in the past, joined the communist-dominated government and remained in high posts until his retirement at the age of eighty in 1962. Some former fascists switched over to communism out of opportunism or fear of retribution. Yet ideology also played an important role, as both movements aspired to build an omnipresent state and a new society in opposition to liberalism, democracy, and capitalism. The communists’ use of the nationalist card, as evidenced in the expulsion of ethnic Germans and the lenient treatment of anti-Semitic excesses, appealed to large segments of societies that still harbored a fear of Germans and a loathing of Jews. In Western Europe, the revolutionary rhetoric of liberation soon gave way to a predominantly conservative mood and programs favored by Christian Democrats and other anticommunist moderates. National consensus often necessitated collective amnesia. All these developments undermine the “hour zero” myth and point to significant political continuities in post– World War II Europe. Enter Piasecki, who benefited from the communists’ readiness to experiment with nationalism and to accept its right-wing adepts. Unlike nationalist elements in Western Europe or in the Balkan countries that had joined the Axis powers, the Polish Right largely escaped the stigma of having collaborated with the Nazis. Because Poland’s communists faced strong opposition, they sought supporters from outside their ranks as a way of adjusting to political realities in a hostile country. In addition, Piasecki and the Polish communist leader Władysław Gomułka shared some common ground: both men were nationalistic and believed in a unitary Polish nation -state. Indeed, they would cooperate for many years to come. For Piasecki, postwar Poland had much to offer. The old classes had vanished from the scene, and few Jews remained. It fell to the communists to execute the Polish nationalists’ long-standing goal of transforming Poland into an ethnically homogenous and predominantly Catholic country. It was clear to Piasecki that the Soviets were there to stay. In a conversation with Ryszard Reiff in 1946, Piasecki stated that the power of the Red Army and the directives of Soviet leaders would shape political reality in Poland. The country could regain its independence only on two conditions: First, it had to rebuild its devastated economy and infrastructure. Second, communism had to be eroded away. Piasecki anticipated that the Soviet Under...