Word: gomulka
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Coming to power last October on a wave of popular resentment against the Soviet Union, Party Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka had been forced to promise that the postponed Polish general election would be "free" and held forthwith. Gomulka arranged that the 459 seats in the Sejm (Parliament) would be contested by 723 candidates (chosen from a list of 60,000 names), about half of whom would be members of the Polish Workers (Communist) Party. Although the slate was rigged in such a way that the Communists would obtain a majority, for the first time in a Soviet country the electorate...
Cross-Questioning. As the election campaign proceeded, grave dangers assailed Gomulka's experiment in limited democracy. Communist candidates were greeted with such cries as "What did you do to prevent the bad years?" and "I'm for Gomulka, but right after he came in prices went up." Listening coldly to candidates' ingratiating speeches, voters debated which was the better way to manifest their disgust with Communism: to boycott the elections, or to cross off all the Communist names at the top of the ballots. Their defiance was subtly encouraged by the Stalinist Communist leaders whom Gomulka supplanted...
...danger was that the number of cryptodemocrats hiding beneath the Communist Party label threatened to produce non-Communist combinations in the new Parliament. A non-Communist Polish government now, to judge from Hungary's experience, would be an open invitation for Soviet armed intervention. To avoid this possibility, Gomulka last week ordered the electoral commission to remove from the approved list any candidates who "are weak of character and have shown lack of responsibility." He had another worry: What if thousands of voters boycotted the elections...
...everything he did, Gomulka was being pulled one way by his own people, another way by Moscow. Last week, faced with a chaotic farm problem, he retreated farther than any avowedly Socialist or Communist country ever has before from the doctrinaire Marxist position on land ownership. To encourage those collective farms still operating (some 7,500 of 10,-ooo have been abandoned since Gomulka took power) he will reduce by one-third the state requisitions from them, and pay twice as much for what the state does get. For other land, restrictions will be removed from ownership, leases, purchases...
...Matching these concessions by trying to reassert Communist control over the farmers, Wladyslaw Gomulka appointed Politburo Member Edward Ochab (once called "a Communist with teeth" by Stalin) to take over the Ministry of Agriculture. Tough and toothy Ochab would have much to chew...