Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gomulka took no part in this. But when the Germans attacked Russia, he petitioned Moscow to be allowed to form a Communist underground in Poland. Moscow did not answer, but after Stalingrad, Stalin put his own plan for a Polish Communist underground into operation. The Communist Party was to be reconstituted as the Polish Workers Party. New leaders, Poles who had been living in Moscow, were dropped by parachute. But like all Stalin's undergrounds, this one had peculiar duties: it was more interested in liquidating the political opposition, i.e., the Home Army underground, than the Germans. At least...
...they gave Poland its independence under Pilsudski, on condition that it fight Russia. Germany was defeated, but the Allies at Versailles recognized the Republic of Poland. The Bolsheviks also recognized Poland, but a couple of years later Stalin bared Soviet imperialist policy in a speech to the Polish comrades in which he insisted that they must understand "the Russian problem," and consider Russia's dominance "primordial to the entire revolutionary movement . . . because Soviet power is the basis and backbone of the world revolution...
...luckily in jail in 1937 when Stalin, mistrusting the Polish Communists, ordered the Polish leadership to come to Moscow. None of them ever got back alive. Gomulka was likewise in jail when the Nazis and Communists invaded Poland. His jailers fled, and he was free. He went to Warsaw, rescued his wife and child, and headed for Lvov, the outpost of the Soviet army...
...legal government of Poland had its own plans for continuing Poland's fight, and ably executed them. During World War II, some 250,000 Poles and Polish soldiers, escaping through neighboring states, put on Allied uniforms and fought with the French, British and U.S. armies with great distinction and one of the highest casualty records of the war. In addition, the exiled government, resident in Britain, set up an underground Home Army which numbered 300,000 men and women, organized on a military basis, with courts to try collaborators...
Because of Western insistence on "free, unfettered elections" and party government, Stalin arranged that the provisional government (Deputy Premier: Gomulka) should include the Polish Peasant Party and the Social Democrats as well as the Communists, but he had his men ceaselessly working to surround, isolate, blackmail, and even to murder, the democratic politicians. "Poland's secret government,'' wrote Polish Peasant Party Leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, "is headed by a man few Poles have ever seen-the Russian general Malinov. His name has never appeared in a Polish newspaper. He has never made a public appearance in Poland...