For a very brief moment, his supporters might have had reason to hope for more. Mikołajczyk’s first forays into the Polish countryside were triumphant. Thousands came out to the airfield to greet him when his plane landed in Warsaw in June 1945. A mob followed his motorcade through the city, and then clustered outside the new headquarters of the provisional government in the southern suburbs, cheering him on. When he visited Kraków a few days later, his jubilant supporters actually lifted his car and carried it through the streets. Later, they picked up Mikołajczyk himself and carried him on their shoulders. But even these euphoric meetings took place against a background of menace. As he stepped out of his first meeting with party leaders in Kraków on the evening following his arrival in the city, Mikołajczyk encountered a barrage of machine-gun fire. It was not meant to kill him. It was rather intended to scare him, which it did. Later he discovered that everyone at that meeting was arrested after he had left.18
In the months that followed, Mikołajczyk and his dedicated followers conducted what was, in retrospect, an extraordinarily brave and amazingly blunt political campaign. He and his party fought first for the right to conduct open oppositional politics; then to make their mark on the first public referendum; and finally to obtain seats in the first postwar parliamentary elections. By 1947 they had lost all three battles, but not before scaring both the Polish communists and their Soviet advisers with the strength and scale of their support.
From the very beginning, the Polish communists did their best to isolate Mikołajczyk and the PSL. The electoral “coalition” that Stalin had off-handedly proposed to Mikołajczyk quickly came into being. This pro-Soviet bloc contained the communists, the somewhat reluctant Social Democratic Party, and, confusingly, two phony parties: an additional, ersatz “Peasants’ Party,” controlled by the communists and intended to create confusion among the voters, and a “Democratic Party” that was designed to do the same. The real PSL refused to join this deliberately muddled coalition, and thus became the only legal party to remain outside. As a result, Mikołajczyk attracted the support of every anticommunist in the country, from the mildest socialists to the most radical nationalists.
Within a few months, the communist leadership realized its mistake. At a meeting of the communist party’s Central Committee in the winter of 1946, Gomułka gave a speech openly attacking the PSL for the first time. He described the party leadership as the new reactionary “enemy,” in league with Western imperialists. The PSL, he hinted, might well be more dangerous than the anticommunist partisans still hiding in the forests.19 Włodzimierz Brus, at the time a young communist party economist, attended that meeting:
Many people were surprised by the ferocity of this message, first of all because they had the sense that their [own] support in the country is not strong enough, so they would prefer some sort of truce, and not a fight. And secondly they were tired after this long war and these sacrifices, losses and victims … I think that I myself was a bit surprised by the ferocity of this attack.
But, as Brus observed, others at the meeting greeted Gomułka’s message “with some satisfaction.” At last the party would “destroy the reaction.”20
Mikołajczyk himself kept track of the verbal and physical attacks on his party. Serious harassment—including police violence, torture, and murder—dogged his theoretically legal party from the beginning. As early as November 1945, he sent the first of what would be a long series of official complaints to the Polish secret police headquarters, complaining of “mass arrests of PSL members in Tarnobrzeg, together with confiscation of valuables.” In that same month, police functionaries and communist party officials physically prevented people from attending a PSL meeting in Trzebenice; they warned people in villages around Oleśnica that anyone who attended such meetings risked arrest; they stole documents from a party office near Łowicz. On January 9, 1946, Mikołajczyk compiled a list of eighteen of his activists who had been arrested in the city of Wrocław. Later that month he listed eighty arrestees in Łódź.21
Often, PSL members were arrested for the actions of the armed underground. In March 1946, for example, local communists organized a political meeting in the town of Łapanów, southeast of Kraków, to which the PSL was not invited. On their way home, several communist politicians and secret policemen were ambushed by partisans armed with machine guns. Seven men were killed and three injured in the exchange of fire. The next day the police began to round up local PSL members at random, on the grounds that they hadn’t been at the meeting so they must be responsible. They also set fire to the property of one local party leader, whose house and barn burned to the ground. Mikołajczyk complained that the functionaries “act on the line of least resistance, neither investigating nor trying to find the guilty … It’s unquestionably an abuse of power.”22
In the midst of this turmoil, the PSL began to publish Gazeta Ludowa (People’s Paper), an extraordinary achievement in its way. The publishers had very limited access to paper and didn’t have the capacity to mail subscriptions. Periodically, they asked readers to limit themselves to one copy apiece—they weren’t allowed to buy extras for friends—as there were always shortages. As Mikołajczyk remembered, “We had enough requests for subscriptions for a daily print of 500,000 copies of Gazeta Ludowa, but we were never given newsprint for more than 70,000. Hundreds of copies of our paper were sabotaged by communists in the distributing plants and services … individual subscribers were warned that if they did not cancel their subscriptions, they would be fired from their jobs.”23 Unlike the radio, Gazeta Ludowa clearly could not reach the vast majority of Poles. But its articles, appearing under frank headlines such as “The Mask Is Falling Off” and “The UB [secret police] Tortures Poles,” described reality in graphic terms for those who managed to get hold of a copy. Gazeta Ludowa printed names, dates, and descriptions of arrests, and its journalists complained about Mikołajczyk’s treatment during parliamentary meetings. Although his party allegedly controlled a third of the seats, whenever he spoke—or when any of his deputies spoke—the whole room would erupt in boos and catcalls, making it impossible to hear a word.24
The attacks on the PSL did not succeed in eliminating the party. On the contrary, funerals of murdered PSL members began to attract large and rebellious crowds. Priests—at that time still free to speak their minds—began to preach openly against the government. At one parish church, a priest purportedly declared that if “someone were to ask who is the so-called reaction, we must declare clearly that we Christians are the reaction and we will win the battle with Marxism.” One Central Committee member carefully noted, in remarks to his colleagues, that “the idea of a bloc [the left-wing coalition] has not been made popular enough among the masses.” Even the normally weak and cowed Social Democratic Party began to complain that the secret police were treating the PSL with too heavy a hand.25
Aware that they were losing support, the Polish communists tried a delaying tactic. Instead of holding elections in the autumn of 1945, as did the Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Yugoslavs, Jakub Berman, the party’s top ideologist, convinced Bierut to hold a referendum in the early summer of 1946. The point, he said years later, had been to “survey” public opinion, to “separate the grain from the chaff,” and to force people to make a simple choice for or against Mikołajczyk.26 The questions put to the public were designed to elicit a positive response. There were three: Do you support the abolition of the senate [a prewar institution without much of a function]? Do you support land reform and nationalization of large industry while preserving private property? Do you wish to keep Poland’s new territories and its new western border?
The correct answer to all of these questions was yes. Thus did the communist electoral campaign have a simple slogan: “Three Times Yes!” Mikołajczyk took up the challenge and instructed his followers to vote yes on the second two questions. As Berman recognized, it was hard for him to argue against the western territories, and both nationalization and land reform were th
en popular, especially since the question included the contradictory phrase “while preserving private property.”27 But Mikołajczyk did call upon his followers to vote “Once No” on the meaningless question about the senate.
In truth, no one cared in the slightest whether Poland did or did not have a second parliamentary chamber. Instead, the vote became a proxy contest between the communist party and Mikołajczyk’s PSL, and the party did its utmost to win. Poland has probably never had an election campaign like it either before or since: the communist party printed 84 million posters, leaflets, and brochures, an extraordinary quantity of propaganda at a time when there were still paper shortages. An order went out to paint every wall and fence across the country with the slogan “Three Times Yes!” Appeals were made on the radio and at public events, and they were aimed at all sectors of the population: women, peasants, workers, intellectuals. Sometimes they were crudely nationalistic—“Three Times Yes does not appeal to the Germans” or “Yes is the mark of your Polishness.” Others were populist and sentimental. Poles were told to vote “Three Times Yes—if you don’t want the landowners to return” or “Three Times Yes—in the name of our children’s prosperity and happiness.”28
As the campaign reached its height, threats began to follow the propaganda. The Kuibyshev-trained secret police boss in Łódź, Mieczysław Moczar, told the local PSL leader that he would arrest anyone who dared to campaign under the slogan “Once No.” The regime also decided the referendum campaign might be an opportune moment to conduct open and heavily publicized trials of Home Army leaders, during which prosecutors hinted darkly at links between the partisan underground and the PSL. Of course all opponents of the regime, both armed and unarmed, were indeed supporting the PSL (though the PSL kept itself at a distance from the remaining partisans) and some of them were covertly going further, campaigning for a “Twice No” or even “Three Times No” vote. The regime grew alarmed by this. As voting day approached, both military and paramilitary organizations—the army, the border guards, the People’s Militia, and the secret police—were sent to organize meetings and demonstrations. Anyone suspected of supporting the “wrong” vote risked arrest, interrogation, or worse.
But the propaganda backfired. On the night before the vote, some 20,000 fans gathered in Warsaw to watch a soccer match between Poland and Yugoslavia, one of the first international matches to be held since the war. During the halftime interval, a handful of communist politicians stepped forward, intending to encourage all present to vote. Realizing that yet another neutral occasion was about to become a political event and angered by the boring, stilted language of one of the speakers, the spectators began clapping and whistling—signs of disapproval in Poland. Someone started a rumor that Mikołajczyk was in the stadium, and the crowd began chanting his name. The Yugoslav team appeared disoriented—“flabbergasted” in the words of a spectator—but the match proceeded (Poland lost). Toward the end, two truckloads of young activists, members of the Union of Fighting Youth, suddenly appeared outside the stadium and began to shout “Long Live People’s Poland and Long Live the National Army” as the crowd left for home, earning themselves nothing but jeers.29
The following morning—June 30, 1946—more than 11 million people, 85.3 percent of eligible voters, turned out at the polls, an extraordinary number. At first the party rejoiced, believing that the high numbers meant the nation had swung behind them. Brus, the young economist, was on duty, receiving reports on the results from the provinces. He remembered that as his comrades heard the numbers, they turned from “cautious to extremely enthusiastic.” There had been no boycott, as some had feared. If the working classes and the peasantry were turning out, that had to be good news. Immediately, the party leaders began to talk of holding a snap parliamentary election.30
The euphoria vanished quickly. Millions of people had indeed turned out, but the majority had followed Mikołajczyk’s advice. The results were devastating. According to archival documents now available, only a quarter of the population had actually voted “Three Times Yes.” A decisive majority had voted “No” to at least one of the questions.31 The communists pondered these distressing results for ten days. Finally, they released a wholly falsified set of figures that put the proportions the other way around. The PSL protested the obvious falsification. They didn’t have access to the real numbers, but they knew from their informal exit polls that the majority had certainly not voted “Three Times Yes.” The communists stood stonily by their fake result. The stage was set for an even nastier parliamentary election, which would not be held right away but rather would be delayed for six more months.
What had happened? In its postmortem discussion of the failed referendum campaign, the communist party bitterly concluded that the mass production of leaflets had backfired, and the mass painting of slogans had annoyed people. The propaganda had been overwhelming and too crude. As one inspector in the new Ministry of Propaganda wrote in an internal report:
After the announcement of the People’s Referendum, the most important thing should have been to maintain moderation and caution while supporting the three positive answers, which were as obvious and clear as the sun in the sky. The out-of-control agitation for “yes” created the suspicion that there must be something else going on.32
In the future, they told one another, agitators had to be better trained to answer the two most frequently heard public complaints: Why had Poland’s eastern territories been taken away? And why were Soviet soldiers still on Polish soil? Incompetent agitators were to be fired immediately. Conversations, not posters and leaflets, were to be used from now on.33
Even allowing for the “mistakes” of propagandists, the communist party still found it hard to understand how workers and peasants could reject them in such numbers. Profoundly wedded to an ideology that was supposed to bring them victory—workers were supposed to support the workers’ state, after all—they struggled to understand their countrymen. Even Poles living in the new western territories had voted no to their annexation.34 One member of the Warsaw party committee concluded his countrymen were infected by “confused thinking” on an inconceivable scale:
This is connected with some kind of incomprehensible spirit of resistance and complete ignorance, even on the part of those individuals for whom democratic rule has been a blessing. Why, for example, did the districts with the most workers in Radom vote three times no in many cases? Why did the peasants of Iłża and Jędrzejów vote no for the most part? How can it be explained that even the army and the police, in many cases, gave negative responses?35
The referendum was an important turning point, even more so than the parliamentary elections that followed. For one, it represented the dawning of a realization that would still take many years to sink in: propaganda had its limits. Not only Polish communists but communists of all kinds would eventually conclude that more did not mean better. More importantly, Poland’s communists now knew they had no chance of a “clean” electoral victory of any kind. Either they would have to threaten and intimidate Mikołajczyk’s supporters, or they would have to falsify the election results altogether.
In the end, they did both. During the six months between the failed referendum and the parliamentary election in January 1947, the secret police arrested all of PSL’s Kraków leadership; they searched and sacked the party’s headquarters in Warsaw; they interrogated and then arrested the entire PSL press department. The American ambassador in Warsaw wrote in a diplomatic cable that “even meetings arranged by PSL [that] are devoted to Polish–Soviet friendship have been broken up.”36 All public electoral meetings were organized directly by the army because, as Brus put it, “an army uniform is much more effective than a propagandist in civilian clothes.”37 Under the guise of promoting security, detachments known as “propaganda security groups” were sent out around the country to “protect” the public from armed partisans.
As the vote grew closer, the regime’s tactics grew more brazen. A week before the
election, PSL candidates were struck from the ballot in ten out of fifty-two electoral districts—mostly in the rural southeast, a traditional Peasants’ Party stronghold. On the final evening, the communist party sent thousands of fake telegrams to PSL officials, all identical: “MIKOŁAJCZYK KILLED LAST NIGHT IN A PLANE ACCIDENT.” In his memoirs, Mikołajczyk described voting day, January 17, 1947, as “a black day in Polish history”:
The millions who were ordered to vote openly gathered at their factories, offices and other appointed places, and with band music in the air were marched by armed guards to their polling places … They were commanded to hold their voting slips—all number three [the number of the communist bloc] high over their heads as they stood in long queues in order that their guards might see.
And yet, he related, not everyone obeyed: “Hundreds of thousands of these courageous people had concealed ballots with Polish Peasant Party numbers on them, and as they approached the ballot boxes, they managed to crumple the number three slips and insert slips of their own choice into the envelopes …”38 Others ducked out of the line and returned later when the soldiers were gone. Not that it mattered. According to the official results, 80 percent of Polish voters cast their ballots for the “democratic bloc.” Only 10 percent voted for the PSL. Mikołajczyk resigned from the cabinet in protest. The parliament selected Bierut to serve as the Polish president, and Józef Cyrankiewicz, a social democrat who wanted his party to be unified with the communists, as Poland’s prime minister. The British and American ambassadors lodged official protests and boycotted the opening day of parliament, but to no avail.39
Iron Curtain Page 29