THE CRISIS IN COMMUNISM
as
East and to the West. They became the leaven of new thinking in our
own camp and in all Communist parties.
But this was not the most important thing. The most important
thing was the coming together of the party and the people. This process,
which had been brutally interrupted in 1949, was resumed. And then
came Poznan.
It was as though we had been hit over the head with a club. The
tragedy was not merely the fact that blood was shed. Many of us
lost the hope that it would be possible to bridge the gulf between the
leadership and the people; the gulf seemed to reopen, and this time for
good. But the despair proved unjustified. Poznan had a sobering effect.
Actually the Poznan tragedy gave a new impetus to the struggle for
socialist democratization. The bitter lesson was: One more Poznan and
it will be too late.
The wall separating Party members and those who belonged to no
party crumbled. The division that followed was along different lines:
what mattered was the attitude toward Stalinism and its Polish variety.
We have heard a thousand tirades about the struggle of the new against
the old, but this time, in the course of the last few months, we have
actually experienced this struggle. It was a struggle for the Party and
its new leadership. But to the same extent it was a struggle for Poland
and for true friendship with the Soviet Union and the people's democ–
racies-a friendship on the basis of freedom, equality, and mutual
respect.
In this struggle the Polish Left was reborn, not in name only,
and not in the mere sense of a party badge. It all began with "evening
talks of close friends." There followed many hour-long discussions within
organizations-the first discussions to which no one had to be dragged.
And then meetings of workers and the youth spread over Poland like
a revolutionary fire.
Many of us, men of little faith, thought that Stdinist education
had corrupted our youth. We had often written that this youth was
cynical and without ideals, and among ourselves we whispered that it
was reactionary. That was false! The overwhelming majority of our
youth are equally ardent in their patriotism and pitiless in the face
of all forms of hypocrisy. But it is a youth loyal to the fundamental
ideas of socialism. The fact is that in these difficult moments the youth
sought support among the factory workers. The heart of Warsaw beat
in the same rhythm at the Polytechnic School and at the Zeran
automobile plant.
In the course of these last months all the masks have dropped.
