ABSTRACT
Stalin’s Russia was determined to turn Poland into an obedient Soviet-controlled state; all vestiges of democratic influence were to be swept away. A Tito-like defiance could not be tolerated in Poland, which was strategically far more vital to the USSR than Yugoslavia. Fearful that the orthodox communist but nationally minded Polish first secretary of the Communist Party, Wladysav Gomulka, could cause trouble, Stalin had him removed and imprisoned. Gomulka’s rival for power, the president of Poland, Boleslaw Bierut, a former Comintern man, was placed in the crucial position of first secretary. To make doubly certain, a Soviet general, Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski, installed as deputy premier and minister of defence, ensured that Poland did not stray from the Soviet fold. Rokossowski could call on a Polish army of 400,000 men and on the Soviet divisions stationed in Poland, which was ruled by the party rigidly on the Stalinist model. Fears of West German demands for the recovery of Germany’s ‘lost’ territories of Silesia and East Prussia could be used to make Poland the most important member, besides the Soviet Union, of the Warsaw Pact alliance, which the Russians had set up in 1955 to counter the formation of NATO in the West. Economically, too, Poland was closely linked to the Soviet Union through bilateral treaties. It was also a member of Comecon, the Soviet-dominated Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, set up in 1949. In its early years Comecon hardly bestowed ‘mutual’ benefits on
its members but was largely inactive, a propaganda answer to Western cooperation and Marshall Aid.
