“To run? Where? And from what?”: The experience of Stalinist repressions in the biographies of members of the Polish party-government elite, 1949–1956
“To run? Where? And from what?”: The experience of Stalinist repressions in the biographies of members of the Polish party-government elite, 1949–1956

Summary/Abstract: This article is devoted to a specific political experience of Polish communists – Stalinist terror against their leadership in the second half of the 1930s and the dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) following the resolution of the Presidium of the Comintern’s Execu¬tive Committee (16 August 1938). The study is based on the analysis of the biographies of 214 members of the Polish communist movement in the interwar period, 22 fellow travellers and five Red Army officers, all of whom were members of the Polish party-government elite in the years 1949–1956. The article presents the stories of seventeen people who were arrested and imprisoned during the Stalinist purges, as well as the cases of those who lost their significant others: spouses and relatives. The author shows how the com¬munists in Poland responded to the atmosphere of that time and how they reacted to the dissolution of the party. The last section of the article is devoted to the attitudes of members of the Polish party-government elite after the Second World War, when they actively participated in the establishment of the new socio-political order, and their collec¬tive memory related to the KPP’s fate. Going beyond the historical description, this paper makes an attempt to interpret the phenomenon under consideration as a generational experience and the key element of political socialisation which shaped their disposition to specific and ambiguous submissiveness to their Soviet patrons: an internalised faith in the system combined with an ability to accommodate.

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