254
PARTISAN REVIEW
illi the constitution of May 3, 1791, offered their services to Catherine
the Great, and the partition of Poland was largely due to their intrigues.
The Soviet ambassador in Warsaw today plays a part similar to that
played by Repnin, the Czarina's envoy to the court of Stanislas Augustas.
The "former" Stalinists are gathered around
him.
Only a few execu–
tioners of the political police, Tozanski for instance, have been im–
prisoned. Others lost their jobs. But a number of Stalinists have re–
tained their posts in the ministries and in the factories. It is the latter–
who still exert real influence-that the Natolin group is trying to
organize into a body whose tasks will be to foment discontent by taking
advantage of the economic crisis to remind the population of their
own promises to raise the standard of living; to undermine confidence
in the present leaders by emphasizing their "Stalinist" past; to exploit
the anti-Semitism that is deep-rooted in the Polish populace, directing
it primarily against the intellectuals and militants of Jewish extraction
who were in the vanguard of the fight against Stalinism in Poland.
It is of course easy, in Poland as in Hungary, to hurl the charge
of "Stalinist" at Communists who opposed the party line only between
1949 and 1956. A striking illustration of this is provided by certain
difficulties that took place in the Warsaw party committee. The secretary
of this committee, Staszewski, had contributed greatly to the success of
the October revolution. He was one of the men who had alerted the
population overnight, and distributed arms to the workers' committees;
and he had supplied bodyguards for Gomulka before the Central Com–
mittee meeting. After the October revolution some of his colleagues
accused
him
of being a Stalinist, and a bureaucrat. This was before
the January elections, and Gomulka's personal intervention saved him.
But hardly a month after the elections, Gomulka, now secure in his
position, forced Staszewski to resign. The political game often involves
such bargains. No Stalinists hold key posts in the new Council of State
or in the new government. Yet Zenon Nowak, one of the leaders of
the Natolin group and a sworn enemy of Gomulka, who in the course
of the seventh meeting of the Central Committee, in July 1956, had
openly put forward anti-Semitic slogans at the prompting of Khrushchev,
has retained his post of Deputy Premier.
It
is true that he has no
actual power. But it is the intellectuals who feel most strongly the
effects of Gomulka's realistic policies. The writer Leon Kruczkowski,
author of
Julius and Ethel,
a wretched melodrama based on the tragedy
of the Rosenbergs, the man whom the poet Jastrun has recently called
"the last social-realist of Poland," and who was forced to yield the
presidency of the Writers' Union to the liberal Antoni
Slo.nimski~
hall
