ABSTRACT
The antagonism is fuels by rival territorial claims and the competing dogmas of Polish Roman Catholicism and Russian Greek Orthodoxy. The vast majority of Poles doubtless viewed as a Soviet puppet the Communist-led government which Moscow set up in country at the close of World War II. An economic crisis was brewing in Poland for several years. The command methods of running industry were a main source of a steady decline in production and growing shortages of goods. An erosion of Party power was traced from the toleration of free-wheeling intellectual roundtables to the capture of mass media by enemies of the regime. V. I. Lenin later advised Shotman that “a fist in a dispute over principle is the most senseless ‘argument'". The Soviet paper approved of Kania’s promise “to continue consistently our religious policy,” but it excised a description of that policy as “enriched by the new experiences which have serve them fatherland well”.
