ABSTRACT
The revelation of Joseph Stalin's system of terror at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been particularly disturbing for Poland, a country placed under a similar system. The effect, as Edward Ochab, general secretary of the Polish Communist party, wrote two months later, was 'prodigious'. Polish nationalism had never, in its pride, come to terms with Russian predominance. The younger generation of Polish Communists, having fought as partisans during the war against the German occupation forces, had sought, under Wladislaw Gomulka's leadership, to find a 'Polish road to Socialism. The ferment which the congress evoked among the mass of the workers broke out in a grass-roots insurrection on 28 June 1956 in Poznan, one of Poland's largest industrial cities. The impetus came from a strike of workers in a large locomotive works, after their complaints against wage reductions were rejected by the government.
