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

6. The Last Crusade, 1967–68

6 ||| The Last Crusade, 1967–68 Józef Piłsudski once remarked that he had alighted from the socialist streetcar at the stop called nationalism. Years later, Gomułka and his comrades decided to merge the communist and nationalist tracks, thus accelerating the metamorphosis of Polish communism. One of the outcomes of this process was the nationalization, or Polonization, of the communist party. The purge of Jewish members and veteran activists reached its climax during the 1967–68 anti-Semitic campaign, as Polish communists committed themselves to creating a nationalist alternative with anti-Semitism as “its main ideological principle,” to borrow a phrase from Leszek Kołakowski.1 By openly embracing chauvinism and authoritarianism at home and military aggression abroad—the Polish Army played a significant role in the invasion of Aleksander Dubček’s Czechoslovakia—Gomułka and his cronies built the “Polish road to communism” in a nightmarish fashion. This last offensive ultimately led to the de-ideologization of communist Poland and to its transformation into a nationalist-populist regime that failed to take its own ideological credo seriously. Piasecki’s fusion of nationalism with socialism made him the spiritual father to many of those communists who were calling for a system that was communist in form and nationalist in content. Piasecki joined in and to a degree instigated the witch hunt in 1968 with a fervor reminiscent of his youthful pursuits in the 1930s. After years of imposed conformity, humiliation, and insignificance, his time seemed to have come at last. But his appearance of strength was deceptive, his success short-lived. A turning point in the history of Polish communism, 1968 was also Piasecki’s swan song as a politician of real ambition. The Last Crusade, 1967–68 | 141 The Road to 1968 At a speech to PAX activists in June 1965, Piasecki described his election to the Sejm as a signal to “his political friends” that the “patriotic-socialist forces” were on the offensive.2 But who were Piasecki’s political friends? Did he mean the Partisans of Mieczysław Moczar—the ultranationalist faction within the party and the security apparatus—or the broad antireformist front that united Moczar’s men and Gomułka’s entourage? In fact, he may have been referring to both. By the mid-1960s, Gomułka’s regime had grown increasingly authoritarian and sclerotic. Gone from the establishment were the radicals of 1956 and the party reformers. Having lost their influence on the party leadership, the revisionists confined themselves to the circles of the progressive intelligentsia . One consequence of this withdrawal was the emergence of a strong anti-intellectual bias among Gomułka and his entourage. Gomułka’s regime also tolerated and at times approved of anti-Semitism. A complete treatment of anti-Semitism among Polish party leaders is beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the roots of the phenomenon reach far back into the history of the Polish communist movement. Gomułka, Zenon Kliszko, and other Polish leaders of the 1960s represented the second generation of Polish communists (the first having been liquidated by Stalin during the great purges). Plebeian, little educated, and ethnically Polish, they had made their way into the party elite during the war, which they spent in occupied Poland. Accused of “nationalist errors ,” they had been purged from the party in 1948 and were reinstated only in 1956. They often blamed the “Jewish comrades” for their misery.3 When Gomułka returned to power in 1956, some of the activists whom the first secretary might have considered his tormentors had become party reformers . Soon, Gomułka perceived them as part of the revisionist opposition. There was also an element of ordinary anti-Semitism and chauvinism. Kliszko lambasted journalists who “cannot write in Polish,” and Ignacy Loga-Sowiński accused the Jews of national nihilism—charges that echoed old anti-Semitic slogans.4 Unlike the activists of the old school, Gomułka and his collaborators were not internationalists. In fact, their belief system combined the nationalist credo with the communist formula. Thus, Piasecki was quite correct when he described Gomułka’s camp as “patriotic-socialist.” In all likelihood, Gomułka, Kliszko, and the others were sincere in their 142 | Between the Brown and the Red attempts to redefine the party as genuinely “Polish” and as the culmination of historical processes that promoted the...