Word: sejm
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Poland went to the polls last week to elect its first Sejm (Parliament) under the new constitution of the Polish People's [Communist] Republic. There was no fuss, no muss, and no opposition. Voters were handed pink cards containing the names of but one ticket, led by Communist President Boleslaw Bierut. Then they were told to fold and drop the card into an urn. An area was screened off where voters, if they wished, could go to cross off any names on the card. Few did, in the face of a warning: "Those who deliberately impair the unity...
...Witos watched his disciple with peasant skepticism. "Mikolajczyk is no peasant," he once growled. "He has neither the peasant's character, nor his sense of humor, nor his bad habits." But the peasants dissented. They kept voting for their Poznan farmer; in 1930 they sent him to the Sejm (Parliament) in Warsaw. When Witos was forced into exile, Mikolajczyk took over as chief of the Peasant Party, the largest of prewar Poland...
...acres. Also seized were all lands belonging to the Polish Government in Exile, to German citizens, to Poles convicted in Lublin's courts of treason or assisting the Germans. Seizure of property belonging to the Catholic Church or to "religious communities" would be decided on later when a Sejm (parliament) was elected...
...went into high gear with a Nazi propaganda campaign designed to persuade the Polish people to abandon all forms of passive resistance, "follow the wise example of France." Looking for a Polish Pétain, the Nazis approached the onetime Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Polish Sejm, tenacious and long-suffering Prince Janusz Radziwill. The landed, many-branched, internationally well-connected Radziwills, who trace their ancestry back to 15th-Century Ostyk Radziwill, are the Roosevelts of Poland...
...Finicky Westerners complained that Poland's democracy was superficial, Leftists bedazzled by propaganda about collective farms sympathized with its poor peasantry. But Poland had a record of social progress which, in terms of her initial difficulties, seemed as imposing as those of Europe's totalitarian States. Its Sejm, or Parliament, looked feeble compared to London or Washington. But it was Jeffersonian compared to the drilled and subservient Parliaments of Moscow, Rome and Berlin. Its foreign policy looked a little shifty, but it was clear as a brook compared with the secret diplomacy of Communist and Fascist States...