Word: gomulka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WITH a new if not precisely fresh face as its leader, Poland last week struggled to recover from the week of bloody riots that tumbled Wladyslaw Gomulka from power after 14 years as First Secretary of his nation's Communist Party. From comrades on all levels, fraternal messages of support poured into Warsaw for his successor: Edward Gierek, 57, the tall, burly boss of the Silesian mining area. Russia's Leonid Brezhnev hailed his new opposite number in Poland as "a sincere friend of the Soviet Union and a staunch international Communist." Germany's gruff old Walter...
Although fragmentary reports of the riots' extent were still seeping out of Poland, there was strong evidence that the death toll probably exceeded 300 -far more than the figure "in the teens" officially admitted during the protests. The sudden replacement of Gomulka by Gierek after hasty meetings of the Politburo and the Central Committee clearly indicated how worried the party was by the sweeping nature of the revolt, as did Gierek's initial, conciliatory moves. He ended the state of emergency, under which police and the army had been sent into the riot zones along the Baltic seacoast...
Considering the explosive quality of the revolts, it was all but inevitable that the party structure would undergo a drastic purge; few Western observers, however, expected that it would be so soon or so severe. In addition to Gomulka, who ostensibly resigned his post for reasons of health (in fact, he has long had a heart condition), four of his close associates were dropped from Poland's twelve-man Politburo. President Marian Spychalski, 64, felt so completely disgraced that he never even appeared before the Sejm (Poland's rubber-stamp parliament) to resign from office in person...
After World War I, he began to work as a Communist labor organizer and in 1932 received the first of his many jail sentences from a right-wing Polish government. All told, Gomulka has spent about ten years of his life in confinement or prison. When Warsaw surrendered to the Germans at the onset of World War II, Gomulka joined the resistance movement under the Soviet aegis. At war's end, he became First Secretary of the party and a minister in Poland's new Communist-dominated Government of National Unity. But Gomulka, an ardent nationalist as well...
Initially hailed as a Red liberal, Gomulka proved to be far more complex than that easy description suggested. True, he brought about a period of liberalization in the late 1950s that, for a time, made Poland the most open of the East bloc nations. After he brought some Stalinists into the Politburo in 1959, he began gradually to snipe at the church and the intellectuals. Conditions reached their worst in 1968 after the suppression of the student demonstrations...