Word: gomulka
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...Khrushchev's sudden pilgrimage to Belgrade in September and Tito's journey to Yalta a few days later. It is now known that at Yalta Tito and the Russians discussed at length the "rehabilitation" of satellite leaders persecuted by Stalin for Titoism. In Poland there was Gomulka, not long out of a jail term for putting his country before his Communism, but courageous, tough and dedicated. In Hungary, the hangman had long since disposed of Rajk, but there was Erno Gero, who might bring off the act. If the crowds got too insistent, they could always bring back...
Things went askew in Poland first. Gomulka came to power, and though insistently a Communist, played so skillfully on the Polish national unrest that he was able to outwit and to outface Khrushchev himself (see below). Gomulka's success was just the spark the Hungarians needed...
...explosion in Hungary, and the mass hatred it exposed, were enough to scare Communists everywhere: not only the Muscovites but Poland's Gomulka, and Tito, whose nation borders on Hungary and has a minority of half a million Hungarians. Tito's distaste for the revolution in Hungary surprised those who fail to recognize that the disagreement among Communists is over which "road to socialism" to take, not whether to travel there. The Titos and the Gomulkas believe, in fact, that their Communism is purer and surer than the Kremlin's. To them Khrushchev & Co. are crude bunglers...
...week began, the people of Poland were headily engaged in a life-and-death gamble with their nation's future. They had for the first time made a hero out of a Communist: taut, bald Wladyslaw Gomulka. He promised only to take . them on the "Polish road to Socialism." Now everything turned on whether or not the U.S.S.R. would accept the new order peaceably...
...this deadly contest of wills, 51-year-old Communist Gomulka brought the twin advantages of an iron nerve and an unpleasantly intimate knowledge of Moscow's methods. This was Gomulka's second appearance as first secretary of the Polish party; his first tour wound up in his imprisonment in 1951 on charges of Titoism. And he had risen to party leadership in the first place largely because he was one of the few prewar Polish Communists of any stature available when Poland fell under the domination of the Red army at the end of World War II. This...