Word: gomulkaism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Wladyslaw Gomulka was swept into power in the 1956 Warsaw upheaval, one of his first concessions was to abolish forced collectivization of agriculture and let peasants go back to farming their own land in their old individual way. So swift was the rush to private ownership that within weeks collective farms had all but disappeared from the Polish countryside...
Ever since, Communist Gomulka has been trying vainly to lure the peasants back into what his government calls "cooperatives." Biggest lures: fat, long-term loans to any group that wants to socialize itself; cut-rate machinery and fertilizer, plus state money to buy livestock and state land if needed. As a result, 499 collectives were formed in 1958-but in the same year 470 were dissolved. Typical example: five farmers near Warsaw announced that they intended to form a cooperative farm. The government lent them funds to buy pigs and offered land to raise them on. Starting with eight brood...
Awkward as all this was, State Visitor Ulbricht and his hosts did their dogged best to ignore the fact that even 13 years of joint servitude to Moscow has not wiped out the ancient hostility between Poles and Germans. Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka, bundled up against Warsaw's icy wind, greeted Ulbricht with the promise that "we will do all in our power to strengthen the international position of the German Democratic Republic.'' In return, Walter Ulbricht declared that he brought with him "the indestructible friendship of the German people...
Behind this insincere reconciliation lay not the dream of Marxist brotherhood but power politics. What moved Gomulka to embrace Ulbricht's seedy puppet regime was one of the most powerful levers in Central European diplomacy-the future of the Oder-Neisse frontier between Poland and Germany. It is a question that agitates both sides of the Iron Curtain, and will play a large part in any future Western dickering with Khrushchev...
...undeclinable offer." But in the bazaar haggling of the cold war, it might be a first price to indicate a willingness to bargain. The direction that such bargaining would take is already fairly clear. In recent weeks both Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko and Polish Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka have emphasized that the only way Germany can be reunified is as a "confederation...