Word: gomulkaism
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...last time the Polish Communist Party held a congress, back in 1954, Wladyslaw Gomulka was in jail-a Communist leader long out of favor with Stalin. But this time, as 3,000 delegates from all corners of the country gathered in Warsaw's ugly Palace of Culture and Science, Gomulka was plainly running the show and the country. His rasping, 200-page, seven-hour keynote speech was a catalogue of past achievement and future confidence, and if any in the audience still doubted the wizened little man's survival power, their doubts vanished before the week...
...gathering were delegations from every Communist nation except Yugoslavia. Their presence was a solid sign that Gomulka is a member in good standing of the world Communist club, despite his highly unorthodox approach to Communism in Poland...
...until the very end of the turgid sessions did Comrade Gomulka uncork his surprise: he had edged 14 of his most bitter enemies off the important 75-member Central Committee. These were the hardcore, Moscow-First group who had tried to keep Gomulka out of office in the first place, and determinedly opposed the bloodless revolution that brought Poles a measure of freedom in 1956. Gomulka also beefed up the party's nine-man Politburo by adding two of his friends to its ranks...
...putting down the Moscow-First crowd, Gomulka gave no encouragement to those Poles who urge more and more freedom, more and more separation from Russia. Denouncing the "intellectual nonsense of political romanticists," he faithfully echoed all the claptrap of Russian foreign policy. But this orthodoxy gave him Moscow's support for a highly unorthodox domestic regime. Delegates from other Communist nations found themselves in the freest society behind the Iron Curtain, where the press still takes liberties (though less and less); where talk is comparatively free; where the secret police are all but gone, and the Roman Catholic Church...
...least partly by Poland's Cardinal Wyszynski during his recently-completed 22-month visit to Rome. As the church's highest-ranking prelate who deals with Communism at first hand, Wyszynski is said to have made this case to Pope John and Cardinal Tardini: Polish Premier Gomulka is increasingly dependent on Poland's Catholics (82.4% of the population) to keep him at least partly independent of Moscow's smothering embrace, and the situation might be used to pry from Gomulka some additional concessions to Polish Catholics. But one of Wyszynski's embarrassments in such maneuvers...