Writing Władysław Gomułka’s Life: Historiography of Władysław Gomułka’s Biographies

The Moment(s) and the Historians

The art of biography writing was not valued very highly in socialist Poland. As historian Eryk Krasucki argues, in accordance with Marxism, where historical processes and socioeconomic movements mattered, there was no space for the individual. “On a historiosophical plane, the history of humanity was nothing more than a realization of a certain plan.” ⁶ And even though this approach has evolved, and over time historians have become more predisposed to a discussion of the value of biographies, the biographical works from this time period mostly resemble hagiographies or were written à propos various anniversaries. ⁷

The first wave of interest in Gomułka fits this trend. Two events accompanied this interest: the emergence of Solidarity in August 1980 followed by Gomułka’s death on 1 September 1982. ⁸ In 1980, sociologist, historian, and former communist Maria Turlejska decided to begin conversations with Gomułka about their communist past. She viewed Gomułka as a comrade, from her same generation of activists and revolutionaries. ⁹ She considered writing a book based on these conversations but never did. The articles she wrote, however, illustrate that the communist past was gaining new significance. ¹⁰ The outbreak of Solidarity in 1980 was a juncture not only in the country’s life but also in her own life. Turlejska was entangled in the darkest aspects of postwar Polish history, from being a chief Communist Party historian to spying on Warsaw University professors. In the mid-1970s, she changed her political perspective and began working with the political anticommunist opposition toward revealing silenced aspects of postwar Polish history. ¹¹ In one article, she wrote: “And so came the year 1980. Not August yet, only February 1980. . . . It was just after the winter of the century, when everything started falling apart. But in the press thunders of victory still roared. The propaganda of success was at its peak, although Poland was swelling up.” ¹² Her motivation for revisiting the past was of an existential nature: Gomułka’s story functioned as validation or perhaps an explanation of why she and people like her spent their youth fighting for the communist cause. Was it all lost?

By the end of the 1980s, at least eight biographies—written by professional historians or amateurs—dealt with some aspect of Gomułka’s rule, especially the question of the Polish road to socialism. ¹³ The majority of the authors were communist activists and often close collaborators of Gomułka, such as Turlejska, but also Andrzej Werblan, Jan Ptasiński, and Eleonora Syzdek. Ożóg, Ptasiński, Syzdek, Turlejska, and Werblan served for years as party historians. While Werblan and Syzdek were trained as historians, Ptasiński, soon after completion of the Central Party School (Centralna Szkoła Partyjna)—an integral part of the party—began writing books that combined reportage and history, an activity that he continued for the rest of his life. ¹⁴

This emerging interest in Gomułka in the 1980s, one decade after he was demoted and fell into oblivion, was a response to the outbreak of Solidarity, a mass movement that significantly challenged communist rule. This oppositional grassroots movement, which amazed the world with an unparalleled force and spoke to the masses regardless of age, profession, and social standing, called for a reevaluation of the past. And while groups closely linked to Solidarity and various oppositional organization that developed at the time engaged in criticizing Gomułka in underground publications, for communist historians and activists, this was a moment to reevaluate the past that they had participated in creating. ¹⁵

Ożóg’s, Ptasiński’s, Syzdek’s, and Werblan’s retelling of Gomułka’s story played a major role in an attempt to revive communism—to reach back to its origins built in solidarity with disenfranchised workers, similarly to what Solidarity was doing in the 1980s. ¹⁶ This interest certainly was intended to renew the legitimacy of communism, which, by 1980, was a mere caricature of itself. In the midst of a decade that was questioning communist achievements, communist activists attempted to reinstate Gomułka as a positive hero. ¹⁷ In the introduction to his biography of Gomułka, Werblan wrote: “A desire to write about Gomułka has accompanied me for a very long time. I finally decided to write one in 1981. Against the background of the difficult moments of that time period, the valor of his personality and policy were becoming clear. The wave of total negation of the socialist past and an astounding ahistoricism of this criticism pushed me to attempt an objective evaluation of the past and the defense of its values.” ¹⁸ In Werblan’s view, the 1980s was a time of an ahistorical rejection of the socialist past that partially stemmed from a lack of its understanding. It was historians’ responsibility to re-create its meaning, which was supposed to happen via Gomułka.

Of all the above-mentioned works, only Ożóg’s and Werblan’s were based on extensive research. Ożóg wrote one volume that ended with Gomułka’s imprisonment and intended to write a second one—a task she never accomplished. The majority of the other works were based on personal encounters with Gomułka: conversations and reflections on his behavior in certain historically significant moments. In this vein, the majority of biographies and biographical sketches ended with 1956 while only briefly mentioning his later successes and altogether omitting the end of his rule—years particularly difficult for him. This choice of selectively presenting his rule highlights goals from this time period: rather than critical evaluations of Gomułka’s life, they responded to the particular moment, when the authority of communism was being undermined by the growing authority of Solidarity. These hagiographic books, except perhaps for Ożóg’s and Werblan’s work, presented Gomułka’s leadership not only as a historical necessity but also as the reason the country emerged from the ruins of war. His struggle functions on a meta-level as a parallel narrative to what was unfolding with Solidarity.

The flood of books about Gomułka in the 1980s was not followed by a similar one after the fall of communism. In general, since the 1990s not many Polish historians have undertaken to write about the communist movement in general. Rather, their attention has been focused on the moments of crisis that symbolize the growing weakness of the system or the so-called blank spots (białe plamy) in Polish history, such as the role of the Soviet Union in the Katyń massacre or the establishment of the regime in Poland. In the mid-1990s, Paweł Machcewicz, a historian of a younger generation, wrote a short biography of Gomułka, which appeared for a mainstream audience. ¹⁹ This was Machcewicz’s second book, his first being a monograph of the 1956 events. ²⁰ A biography of Gomułka—an important actor of 1956—was a natural corollary to his earlier work. It was mostly based on Gomułka’s Pamiętniki (Diaries), published in 1994 and consisting primarily of archival documents already published by Andrzej Paczkowski years earlier. ²¹ Two decades later, Jerzy Eisler devoted a chapter to Gomułka in his book on the seven most popular leaders of socialist Poland. ²² This relatively light work is enriched with many anecdotes. ²³

Eisler’s ironic title, Siedmiu Wspaniałych (The magnificent seven), illustrates one direction that biographical writing took on Gomułka. Another more recent example of this direction is Piotr Gajdziński’s Gomułka: Dyktatura Ciemniaków (Gomułka: The dictatorship of the morons). ²⁴ Gajdziński, a historian and journalist of a younger generation, writes popular biographies that are often based on a sensational view of the protagonist’s personal life. The subtitle of his book on Gomułka reveals his stance: “Dictatorship of the Morons” is based on a surprise and mockery of how it was possible not to be more critical of the Soviet Union and to follow communism. In this interpretation, Gomułka is an aberration, a naïve politician infected with “a virus of power” who ruined Poland without providing anything in return. ²⁵ Though the book begins with a critical evaluation of Gomułka’s period in power, over time it turns into an anticommunist manifesto full of vulgar language and criticism that borders on hatred.

While reflecting on the ongoing conflict over the past in biographical writing, Wołowiec argues that there are two basic approaches to writing about Poland’s communist past: “consensual” and “antagonistic.” While the consensual approach seeks to reconcile the different views of the past, the antagonistic is more based on an attempt to purge public discourse of conciliatory interpretations toward the controversial past. He calls the first one “a comic scheme of narration,” based on the perception that gaining unity and building a community while neutralizing political differences is possible and even necessary. It is a story of common identity regained. The second approach, based on divisions and differences that are impossible to overcome, is essentially a tragic story of differences between various actors who cannot be reduced or turned into a story of success and unity. ²⁶ “Understood as something essential, outside of time and space, ‘eternal’ communism and communists, those from the past as well as those still present in the social fabric, are placed in a role of ‘constitutive outside’ and become a negative condition for Polish identity, while anticommunism is a foundation of political identification projects.” ²⁷

Wołowiec’s classification constitutes an interesting lens through which to view communism from the post-1989 perspective. While Machcewicz’s work could be situated as part of the consensual approach, Eisler’s leans more toward the other side and Gajdziński’s is clearly on the side of antagonists. Among recent works, only the one by Anita Prażmowska, a Polish historian based in Great Britain, takes a conciliatory approach. Prażmowska wrote her book to understand the motivations of people who joined the communist movement. She saw Gomułka as a sincere man who followed the simple rules in life. ²⁸ Interestingly, the translation of the book into Polish was critically reviewed by Jerzy Eisler, who argued that Prażmowska expressed affinities for the communist leader that revealed her political sympathies. ²⁹ The approach to communism remains a key element in this battle. Gomułka’s biographies serve as a form of meta-commentary on communism and its place in Polish history.

Wołowiec’s intuition is reminiscent of Hayden White’s conceptualization of historical monographs as literary artifacts carrying figurative meaning. According to White, various presentations take the form of epic narratives in which the protagonist struggles with larger forces: the results could be either tragic or comic. ³⁰ And unsurprisingly, in older works by his collaborators, Gomułka clearly emerges as a tragic hero—a man created by the socioeconomic conditions of prewar and wartime Poland, by poverty and lack of perspectives for a future—who accomplished a lot and then died in oblivion. In newer works (with the exception of Prażmowska’s), the view shifts from tragic to comical: Gomułka had moments of greatness, but in the end, he showed obstinacy and shortsightedness, which ruined his career as a statesman. Some of these problems perhaps stemmed from an inferiority complex linked to his social background. Schematic class thinking that he was unable to overcome might also have hampered him. Regardless of the nuances, both historical treatments of Gomułka speak to the tension between the freedom of an individual (or at least individual agency) and dependence on historical context (or structure). The result is a formulaic approach to Gomułka’s life, structured around the same questions. Despite the expectations of a shift occurring between the 1980s and 1990s in the way Gomułka’s life—or any key communist politician’s life—is told, the shift hardly exists. All the narrations are driven by meta-commentary on the place of communism in Polish society, resulting in works based on antagonism and binary relations: the governing and the governed, authority and society, communists and anticommunists. ³¹

The Polish Road to Socialism: Polish Communism

One of the most often evoked issues regarding Gomułka’s life and politics concerns the “Polish road to socialism,” a phrase Gomułka never used but that nevertheless was coined to represent his independence from the Soviet Union. His insistence on a selective approach to the Soviet model of communism and thinking about the connection between patriotism and Polish communism defined him. ³² There is consensus among historians, regardless of what generation they represent, that Gomułka was not Stalin’s trustee but someone who valued his own independence. According to those I view here as supporting a “consensual” vision (Prażmowska and Machcewicz, but also Werblan), Gomułka rose politically because of domestic circumstances beyond Moscow’s control. A vacuum of power created space for him, a politician of the second (or even third) tier, to rise to the top. ³³ Gomułka’s 1936 imprisonment helped him avoid the fate of the majority of Polish communists who died in the Soviet Union (as a result of the 1937 campaign during which they were accused of links with the Piłsudski regime). ³⁴ In the 1940s, with the arrest by the Nazis of many important communist activists who avoided Soviet purges, he rose to a leadership position—first in 1942 becoming a member of the Central Committee of the PPR, and then a member of the strict PPR leadership. ³⁵

Eisler notes that already at this point Gomułka was showing some independence from the Soviet Union by advocating in 1943 for the establishment of the National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa [KRN]), a political body aspiring to take control of the country after the war. In reality, however, from the beginning the council was dominated by communists. ³⁶ Eisler further argues that Gomułka continued this path after the war by rejecting attempts to collectivize agriculture, and, in 1947, at a conference in Szklarska Poręba, he criticized the Soviet plan to create the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform), which he saw as a Soviet way of constraining local communists. ³⁷ Where did this independence come from? How, according to historians, did he link internationalism with patriotism? For the older generation of historians, those who identified themselves with communism and the Soviet Union, this must have been a difficult dilemma, one that pitted their loyalty to the Soviet Union against their patriotic attachments.

Werblan is aware of how crucial this dilemma is. In his work, he describes in detail the conditions that formed Gomułka as a devoted revolutionary. For example, it is telling that until the end of this career, Gomułka maintained his conspiratorial pseudonym, “Wiesław.” Gomułka’s prewar years followed the model biography of a communist: arrests, imprisonment, trips to Moscow, and commitment to party work. ³⁸ He and his life partner, Zofia (Liwa) Szoken, a Jewish worker from Warsaw, lived as a couple of revolutionaries who found satisfaction in the party work that nearly completely deprived them of a personal life. They often lived separately. Their son was born in 1930, and after one of their arrests, Gomułka and Szoken decided to leave him with Gomułka’s parents. ³⁹ The working class was their responsibility and ultimately their home. But in Werblan’s view, that way of life only strengthened his understanding of the Polish working class and the depth of anticommunist sentiments among workers. ⁴⁰ Ultimately, Werblan perceives Gomułka as a realist who knew that to introduce communism in Poland he needed to stay attuned to the sentiments of the Polish working class. ⁴¹ Gomułka’s revolutionary activism made him more flexible.

Gajdziński presents a more antagonistic point of view. He questions the idea that circumstances helped Gomułka rise to power. According to him, in the midst of war, Gomułka was “uncompromisingly attacking everything that he associated with former Poland and the London underground.” ⁴² Gajdziński says that he “was certainly well aware that he was giving himself over to one of the occupiers. If he cared for an independent Poland, he would have sought contacts with the London underground, which was ideologically diverse and it was not difficult to find a leftist group in it.” ⁴³ Although he may have had some doubts, Gomułka was (in this reading) a convinced communist eager to follow Stalin.

The early biographies rarely mention Gomułka’s criticism of the Soviet Union or Stalin. Glossing over the differences between Gomułka and Stalin, Ptasiński emphasizes the friendly relationship between the two, and Stalin’s reliance on Gomułka’s opinion. He includes an anecdote that depicts Gomułka raising a toast to the Kremlin and in fluent Russian arguing that every good communist had to be a good patriot. Interestingly, Ptasiński claims that Gomułka spoke fluent Russian, but that is not confirmed by other historians. ⁴⁴ At the end of the story, Stalin embraced Gomułka and kissed him while saying молодец, a phrase that could be translated as a sign of approval. ⁴⁵ As Ptasiński continues, soon before Gomułka’s arrest, he supposedly returned to the issue of patriotism and internationalism. In a personal letter to Stalin in which he argued for the necessity of supporting internationalism, he noted that cosmopolitism and national nihilism were dangerous for the people’s movement in Poland. ⁴⁶

In contrast, authors of more recent works on Gomułka claim the lack of trust or even dislike toward the Soviet Union as one of his defining features. Machcewicz tells his readers that in his diaries Gomułka admitted that what happened to the Polish communists in the Soviet Union as well as Stalin’s collaboration with Adolf Hitler in the aggression against Poland weakened his faith in Stalin’s orthodoxy. Further, he claims that the Red Army’s behavior in Poland soon after the war helped to solidify Gomułka’s distrust, which eventually translated into strategic distance. ⁴⁷ Also more recently, Werblan has stressed that while visiting the Soviet Union, Gomułka was growing increasingly critical of what he observed. ⁴⁸ For Gajdziński, the fact that Gomułka, despite his criticism of the Soviet Union, remained a communist means that he saw himself first of all as a functionary of the world communist revolution. To follow these revolutionary ideas, he was ready to ignore even his doubts. ⁴⁹ If he refused to follow some Soviet directives, it was because he understood Polish society well. His flexibility was not, however, a sign of respect for Polish society but rather a strategic choice to gain better control of it. ⁵⁰

Gomułka is, hence, portrayed as a realist who needed to stay attuned to Polish interests to ensure the establishment of communism in Poland. But different historians see the nature and strength of that commitment differently. Ptasiński argues that regardless of Gomułka’s commitment to Poland, party interest prevailed. ⁵¹ For Werblan, it was the revolutionary ethos that he developed under conditions of conspiracy and his commitment to the working class that defined his patriotism but also its limits. In this perspective, communism was more than an ideology or a worldview. It was a way of life and a formation that provided its followers with practical knowledge of how to attain communist goals. ⁵² Similarly, Prażmowska argues that for Gomułka communism was a method of governing and ensuring that the minority would not rule over the majority. For him, the party was an arm of the working class. ⁵³ Unsurprisingly, according to Gajdziński, Gomułka was driven by an unstoppable quest for power, and communism provided a means for that quest. ⁵⁴

In this light, it is useful to discuss the place of Gomułka’s conspiratorial years. Eisler perceives Gomułka’s formative years as conditioning him negatively. They became lessons in mistrust, soldiers’ discipline, lack of nuance in interpreting the world, and the use of violence or coercion as political tools. Eisler quotes Jerzy Morawski—a Polish communist once close to Gomułka—who provided interesting insight:

It is worth remembering the historical role of Puritanism—the ethos of work, saving, aversion to all forms of life over the state. This seems to me the most important in the characteristics of Gomułka. He came to everything by himself, with hard work, with suffering and self-denial, with stubbornness and self-help, with the iron will of a revolutionary activist. So, when he stood at the top, he wanted to instill these principles into the whole nation. ⁵⁵

For Eisler and Gajdziński, Gomułka was a politician with a narrow vision.

An important emphasis made by Eisler, Machcewicz, and in his later work Werblan is that, regardless of how liberally historians interpret Gomułka’s ideological flexibility, this flexibility never translated into how he ruled the country. “We must not forget that Gomułka, with his authoritarian character, could be referred to as anything but a democrat,” says Eisler. ⁵⁶ Eisler often evokes excerpts from Gomułka’s speeches to show his ruling philosophy. “Once we have power, we will never give it away. Not because anyone of us would like the power for himself. . . . We will not give it away to protect the Polish nation from the bane of the false political agenda that the reactionaries’ attempt to impose on the nation. . . . We shall destroy all the reactionary villains without scruple. You may keep shouting that the blood of the Polish nation is being shed, that the NKVD rules Poland—it will not cause us to turn in our course.” ⁵⁷ Whether he is seen as a realist or a strategist, Gomułka was all about strengthening his power as a socialist leader of Poland, regardless of societal opinions and demands for widening the freedoms of citizens.

Historian Marcin Zaremba explains the phenomenon of Gomułka’s attachment to Poland. Zaremba never wrote a biography of Gomułka, but in his book on communist legitimacy in Poland, he devoted plenty of attention to Gomułka’s thoughts about his position as a Polish leader and his commitment to Poland. The premise for Zaremba’s reflection is the assumption that even though terror is often used as a means to legitimize power, it was insufficient. Utilitarianism should not be the only category used to evaluate communist politicians’ efforts in legitimizing their rule. Their attachment to the Polish tradition of independence, for instance, should not always be treated as a strategy: they were often sincere patriots, including Gomułka, according to Zaremba. ⁵⁸ Zaremba quotes Gomułka’s diaries in which he evaluated changing attitudes of Polish communists, who, according to Gomułka, were becoming increasingly oriented toward Poland. Even if Gomułka was overly optimistic in his diagnosis, his opinions show that communism did not exclude patriotism or even nationalism. ⁵⁹ Zaremba believes in Gomułka’s sincere commitment to Poland, which, however, does not deny the strategic importance of gaining legitimacy for communists—for doctrinal and psychological reasons. ⁶⁰

What led to Gomułka’s imprisonment in 1951? This is uniformly seen in the context of losing Stalin’s support. In 1948, during a party bureau meeting, Gomułka gave a speech in which he emphasized the importance of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) in the struggle for Polish independence and called for a reevaluation of the traditions of the Polish workers’ movement. ⁶¹ This call was critically received by the meeting participants, who, as Eisler notes, led the attack on Gomułka for his nationalist deviation and neglect of internationalism; hence, it was a lack of support rather than an attack from the Kremlin that led to Gomułka’s weakening political position in Poland and his removal from party leadership in December 1949. Gomułka did not even fight back; he yielded to the situation, assuming that in light of the purge of old communists in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, there was nothing he could have done. ⁶²

Werblan sees it similarly; he depicts Gomułka as a tragic figure who defended Polish interests when different points of view—one circumscribed by the internal situation in Poland and the other defined by sentiments among Stalinists—inevitably conflicted. ⁶³ Gajdziński is unsurprising in his insistence that Gomułka was obsessed with power. “He saw himself as the most important—of course, the most important in Poland . . . and the wisest one. Power almost always has such an effect on people. And since he was the wisest and the most important, he wanted to impose his opinions on others.” ⁶⁴ Here lies the biggest difference between historians who present consensual versus antagonistic points of view: For historians who embrace a consensual approach (such as Werblan, Machcewicz, and Prażmowska), Gomułka is either a visionary realist or a stubborn and rigid ideologue but nevertheless a politician who took Polish interests into consideration. Taking an antagonistic approach, Gajdziński, and to a lesser extent Eisler, present Gomułka as someone who lost a sense of proportion between his possibilities and the power of Stalin and his supporters; he therefore tightened the noose around his own neck. ⁶⁵

What was the “Polish road to socialism”? Historians of the older generation, like Werblan, insist that the Polish road to socialism that Gomułka initiated in the first decade of socialist Poland did not end with his imprisonment and continued to affect the development of socialism in the country. ⁶⁶ Prażmowska thinks about the problem similarly to Werblan by emphasizing that even though Gomułka never used the term, his decisions were driven by what he believed to be most beneficial for Poland. ⁶⁷ In contrast, Machcewicz argues that the belief in Gomułka’s Polish road to socialism is exaggerated and even mythologized. Gomułka rejected Soviet intervention in Polish internal policies because they interrupted the process of stabilizing his power. For Machcewicz, the Polish road to socialism was more about the monopoly of political means in securing power than a concrete vision of Poland’s future. In the early years after the war, Gomułka ruled as an autocrat distrusting everyone and rejecting any vision of a future Poland other than his own. ⁶⁸

1956 and the Beginning of the End or Permanent Dogmatism

Gomułka’s imprisonment followed by his spectacular return to power is interpreted either as the peak of his popularity or the beginning of his end. Gomułka was arrested on 2 August 1951 and charged with treason, cooperation with foreign intelligence, and espionage. ⁶⁹ He was released from prison in December 1954. Two years later, on the wave of increasing societal discontent with the political situation in the country, his popularity began to grow. On 20 October 1956, he gave a speech on the radio, which people received as the most severe public critique of the system to date. A day later, after six years of absence from Polish political life, Gomułka was elected first secretary of the PZPR and became a political player again. As Prażmowska notes, “By being truthful, Gomułka appealed to the people for support.” ⁷⁰ Throughout the entire country, a spontaneous cult of Gomułka was born. Zaremba argues that thanks to Gomułka—in particular, to the way he addressed the masses and communicated with the Soviets during the 1956 crisis—communism for the first time in Poland’s history gained social legitimacy. ⁷¹

The majority of biographies, especially those written in the 1980s, end with Gomułka’s arrest or his release, underscoring mainly positive moments, and omitting negative ones. For example, Werblan ends his book with a discussion of the reasons that led to Gomułka’s imprisonment, a brief reference to his greatness in 1956, and a mention of the overall courage and moral strength that he showed after his release from prison. ⁷² Ending in 1956 allows seeing that particular year as a watershed moment during which Gomułka was granted enormous social trust that provided him with social capital. With that narrative strategy, Gomułka turns into a former prisoner unjustly accused during the Stalinist period and a person capable of leading the party through a self-healing process. He does not come across as one of the creators of People’s Poland, who was responsible for everything that happened in the country between 1944 and 1948, years that many see as the cruelest period of building the new political and social order. ⁷³

Perhaps Ptasiński’s strategy is the boldest attempt to turn Gomułka’s life into an epic story. Ptasiński was supposed to write three books on Gomułka but published only the first two: Pierwszy z trzech zwrotów, czyli rzecz o Władysławie Gomułce (The first of three turns, meaning the thing about Władysław Gomułka ) and Drugi Zwrot: Gomułka u szczytu powodzenia (The second turn: Gomułka at the peak of his popularity). While the first turn certainly implies his conflict with Stalin, the second is his return to power in 1956. It is not clear what the third turn would have been as Ptasiński never wrote the third book. While discussing the first turn, Ptasiński briefly explores various accusations leveled against Gomułka that led to his imprisonment, and then to his successful rise to power. He ends his first book on a section titled: “What Poland did he find, and what did he leave?” He starts with a reference to a Polish saying according to which Casimir the Great, one of Poland’s medieval kings, found Poland “wooden” (meaning primitive) but left it “built in brick” (meaning advanced in its development). In the immediate postwar period, Poland had to deal with significant war devastation. The underlying assumption that Ptasiński makes is that Gomułka’s efforts lifted Poland from this destruction. ⁷⁴

Already a few months after October, however, it was becoming clear that all hope for democratic change had been thwarted. As the majority of younger historians emphasize, 1956 was a symbolic year but not a breakthrough meant to bring about significant change. Gomułka rose to power not because he was a reformist but because, at that particular moment, he was perceived as a symbol of deviation within a system that the Polish October wanted to put an end to. He also was the symbol of the Polish road to socialism, hence of a certain independence. ⁷⁵ In the same vein, in a conversation with Modzelewski, Werblan made a statement that resembled his earlier arguments about Gomułka’s political realism. While noting that Gomułka’s approach to democracy was rather pragmatic, Werblan stressed that in Poland of that time, a democratic decision would stir anti-Soviet sentiments and demands toward the Soviet Union to return parts of the eastern territories that Poland lost as a result of the Second World War. “A rebellion against geopolitics would have taken place.” ⁷⁶ And a fear of this potential rebellion excluded pluralism.

In this light we can perhaps understand Eisler’s question: why, after his release, did Gomułka not decide to investigate those responsible for his imprisonment? Ptasiński’s answer is in line with a Marxist interpretation: Gomułka was compelled to provide the nation with steady direction amid the democratization process. Despite ongoing chaos, the party needed to stay strong and united as the avant-garde that led the nation. The demands of history required him to abandon personal grudges. ⁷⁷ Werblan sees the problem similarly, explaining that Gomułka did not want to appear vengeful. ⁷⁸ Eisler and Gajdziński point to the nature of communism and the relationships it created among its followers. In Eisler’s opinion, investigation and a potential trial would have resulted in unprecedented risk for many other PZPR comrades. ⁷⁹ Gajdziński takes this hypothesis even further: “Gomułka was a communist. Hard-hearted and deeply dogmatic. . . . And the communist dogma said that the party is never mistaken.” ⁸⁰ In this view, Gomułka was too dogmatic to investigate on his own behalf.

Gomułka and Antisemitism

The difficulties of the 1960s ultimately led to Gomułka’s demise. The decade began with failing the hopes for continued democratization, was marked by a sharper turn against the Catholic Church, and culminated in the antisemitic campaign of 1968 and an attack against protesting workers in 1970. The December 1970 treaty of the normalization of bilateral relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the German Federal Republic that recognized the Polish–German border was clearly his biggest, if not only, success of that decade. ⁸¹ As stated earlier, many older historians, such as Ptasiński and Werblan, chose not to engage with 1968. Werblan sees this decade through Gomułka’s difficulties with adapting to changing circumstances. For him, Gomułka remained a Marxist who believed in a centralized command economy, restricted consumption, and the need for full societal mobilization to defend communism, if such a need arose. His ideological stance did not put him in a position to react to ascending problems differently. ⁸²

The year 1968 marked one of the two most difficult crises of Gomułka’s rule. It was a result of several factors and trends that had been accumulating in Poland over several of the previous years. The crisis brought repression against select intellectuals, pacification of the outburst of students’ unrest, personnel changes in the party, and an antisemitic campaign. As historian Dariusz Stola convincingly shows, the crisis stemmed from ongoing conflicts in the party, social tensions related to the low standard of living, and a need to strengthen the weakening legitimization of the regime. Notions of the fifth column and Zionism—which spoke to antisemitism deeply embedded in society—served as tools to create the image of an internal threat and spin the spiral of suspicions and hate. ⁸³ People of Jewish origin were attacked as “Zionists,” “firebrands,” and “revisionist intelligentsia.” ⁸⁴ The events often called March ’68 developed in two acts: first, as an anti-Israeli campaign that began with the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which then quickly shifted to an anti-Zionist and consequently antisemitic campaign that found its culmination in March of 1968. Stola explains that the authorities launched a massive hate campaign against alleged internal enemies dubbed Zionists in response to student protests. ⁸⁵ On 19 March 1968, in an atmosphere “when anti-Zionist slogans have been conjugated in every way at hundreds of rallies and thousands of meetings,” Gomułka gave his most controversial speech, widely broadcast on the radio. ⁸⁶ In it, he claimed that

a certain number of Jews, in various forms, showed their willingness to go to Israel to participate in the war with the Arabs. There is no doubt that this category of Jews, Polish citizens, is not emotionally and intellectually connected with Poland, but with the State of Israel. . . . In our time, we opened our borders to all those who did not want to be citizens of our country and decided to go to Israel. And today, we are ready to issue emigration passports to those who consider Israel as their homeland. ⁸⁷

The speech clearly challenged the people of Jewish origins to leave the country. However, as Stola emphasizes, although the speech sanctioned the antisemitic campaign, it was conducted in a relatively moderate tone. The text divided the Jews into different categories, an effort that however primitive was nevertheless “subtle in face of the total condemnation of all Jews under the name of the Zionists.” ⁸⁸ “Moreover, in the last paragraphs of the speech, Gomułka called to reject unverified news . . . coming from harmful rumors or even the subversive political activity of the enemy.” ⁸⁹ In Stola’s view, Gomułka was trying to calm the heated atmosphere in the country.

Interestingly, the majority of historians, even including Peter Raina, argue that Gomułka was not an antisemite. He used antisemitic rhetoric and began antisemitic strife only as an element of political struggle. ⁹⁰ Historians have maintained that since he had a Jewish wife, who came from an influential Jewish family, he could not have been an antisemite. ⁹¹ Scholars from younger generations, such as Eisler and Machcewicz, use the category of “political antisemite,” someone who was willing to use the concept of Zionism to wage war. In this interpretation, Gomułka did not understand the seriousness of the issue when starting this antisemitic storm. ⁹² Recently, Werblan asserted that Gomułka was surprised with how well his words resonated with crowds. He did not expect it. ⁹³ Prażmowska’s stance is unclear. On the one hand, she notices the antisemitic tones in Gomułka’s speeches, yet, on the other hand, she argues that Gomułka’s use of antisemitic rhetoric was his way of reinstating his authority in the party. ⁹⁴ Further, she notices that Gomułka spoke to those Polish Jews whose “sense of identity clashed with their employment in Poland,” the ones who had to choose whether to stay in Poland or leave. She underlines that “at the same time, Gomułka warned that antisemitism would not be tolerated. Antisemitism and Zionism are the same manifestations of reactionary nationalist chauvinism.” ⁹⁵ Prażmowska clearly has difficulty taking a position on Gomułka’s antisemitism. Interestingly, it is Gajdziński who argues that Gomułka had some antisemitic predispositions: he sees him as a nationalist who considered people who did not see Poland as their priority as being suspicious. ⁹⁶

In a short documentary that engages a group of scholars and Gomułka’s close collaborators with the question of his antisemitism, the producers turned the issue from his antisemitism to that of his wife. Szoken had to distance herself from her family because of their disapproval of her communist engagement. Supposedly, from that moment, she actively fought against any manifestation of traditional Jewish life as well as the overrepresentation of Jews in Poland’s politics. The question of Gomułka’s antisemitism was hence shifted onto his wife. ⁹⁷

***

Gomułka’s demise was long in coming and yet his last weeks in power came unexpectedly. On a Saturday evening, 12 December 1970, less than two weeks before Christmas, Gomułka increased basic food prices, leading many Poles to take to the streets. In the following days, violent clashes began, resulting in a massacre on 17 December during which forty-one people died. ⁹⁸ For Gomułka, what happened on the streets was a counterrevolution that had to be crushed. According to Machcewicz, Gomułka most likely was not fully informed about how the situation unfolded, but he accepted the use of force against the workers. ⁹⁹ The man who over a decade earlier had argued that workers must have had good reasons to raise their hands against the government was turning against workers. This provoked perhaps the biggest crisis in the relationship between the governing and the governed in postwar Poland. Already on 18 December, the party’s political bureau decided to replace Gomułka with Edward Gierek. ¹⁰⁰ Gomułka’s health was also deteriorating: he suffered from a stroke and a few days later resigned. ¹⁰¹ He spent the remaining years of his life reading and writing.

Conclusion

In his review of Prażmowska’s book, Eisler notices that it is curious that a debate about Gomułka never seriously took off despite the discussion and controversy around his figure. ¹⁰² Similarly, Wołowiec argues that the biographies of politicians or people involved in building communist Poland do not occupy a prevalent place in the debates about the communist past. He calls this a conflict of “permanent inconclusiveness,” an ongoing conflict between two different points of view: people who weave the communist past into Polish history and those who treat communism as an aberration. ¹⁰³ Incidentally, this conflict overlaps with the authors’ experiences with communism and often marks more than just a scholarly interpretation of sources. These two points of view also suggest certain existential choices and generational experiences that perhaps only deepen the inconclusiveness of that debate. From my reading of various writings about Gomułka, the conciliatory attitude was represented either by an older cohort of historians, many of whom shared with Gomułka ideological leanings (such as Werblan and Ptasiński), or historians (such as Machcewicz and Prażmowska) who tried to weave his biography into Polish history, seeing it as an element of a complex twentieth-century history rather than a period that stands out as unique and even bizarre. Earlier historians create an image of Gomułka as someone who turned from a revolutionary romantic in the 1930s and 1940s into a tragic figure in the 1960s and 1970s. They agree that the narrow vision that defined the later decade of his long tenure was a problem, but it was also an element of his formation, something that he could not have escaped. His commitment to Poland is reconciled with the tragic dimensions of his political decisions.

More recent biographies have different problems. While Machcewicz’s work is simply too short and too general, Prażmowska’s engages almost more with the historical context than with Gomułka himself. On the other end of the spectrum is certainly Gajdziński, and to a lesser degree Eisler, who sees Gomułka as part of a movement that failed. Paradoxical cycles of history that seemed to trap Gomułka are identified not as a source of drama in his life but as an ironic laughter of history: the tensions, distrust, and constant class confrontations that built his communism turned out to form contingencies that he was unable to escape. While Werblan emphasizes his agency in struggling with a modest beginning and difficult and conflicting political circumstances, Gajdziński and Eisler perceive the same conditions as limiting his agency and incapacitating him from seeing beyond ideology. These two broad generations of biographers reveal how Gomułka’s story has been used for different purposes and to ponder different tensions in Polish history through different historiographic frames. Nevertheless, the man himself is essentially a pawn in these historical—and historiographical—debates. Despite the multifaceted nature of his tenure in power and the clear importance of his agency, these treatments have yet to challenge us about the world he lived in and the world he created. They nevertheless demonstrate how historians themselves have become political actors, encased in the questions of their own times.