Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Unforgotten Crimes. The mistakes Moscow has made in Poland date back to 1938, when Dictator Stalin liquidated almost the entire leadership of the old Polish Communist Party. The Stalin-Hitler pact, by which Germany and Russia partitioned Poland for spoils, the massacre of 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1940, the failure of Russia to aid the underground Polish armies, and the deliberate stand-off by the Red army during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944, are Russian crimes which Poles do not easily forget. Nor, apparently, do Polish Communists. The recent downgrading...
Instead of cautiously downgrading the "cult of personality," the Polish Communist press has called Stalin almost every name in its considerable vocabulary of vituperation. It has accused him of murdering Polish leaders. His record as a war strategist has come in for contemptuous reappraisal, his pact with Hitler bitterly criticized, and suspicion cast on his (or Russia's) failure to help the Polish Home Army. In the course of explaining why they had not exposed the Stalin evil earlier, young Polish Communist intellectuals have self-accusingly described in detail their previous efforts to twist historical facts into the party...
Reported TIME'S Correspondent Flora Lewis from Warsaw last week: "At the center of the new movement are Polish intellectuals, either Communists or sympathizers, most of them fairly young. Behind them are amorphous groups of youngsters, university students and veterans of the underground war against the Nazis, whose pent-up resentment needed only a pinhole through which to escape." Last week the pinhole threatened to become a full-sized blowhole as letters poured into newspapers from agonized young Poles describing how they now had "no foundations for believing anything." Typical was a moving letter from an 18-year...
Ochab is not the only top Polish Communist to fear that relaxation of controls may be getting out of hand. Some older Communists are continually putting the brakes on; others do not agree that the past was wrong, and although they are willing to accept some changes, they are still clinging to the old line...
Jakub Berman. a onetime Stalin hatchetman, was one of the leading old-line Communists. Round-faced, quick-witted, Berman served on the Moscow end of the Polish Communist apparatus until the end of World War II, when he moved into Warsaw. Multilingual Berman lied smoothly to Western reporters in four languages, while he masterminded the ousting of Peasant Party Leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk in 1947 and the later disbanding of some 100,000 Socialists. It was not clear last week how far Berman has been downgraded, but the effect of his official firing is a victory for the younger party members...