POLAND: The Bad Old Ways

No nation can long exist with an economy half Communist and half free. And yet this is what Wladyslaw Gomulka has tried to bring off in Poland. Being a Communist, he did not intend it that way either, but had to react to the situation of Poland's arrested revolution of October 1956. His compromising never sat well with the diehards of the Stalinist era, who believed in tough and tidy centralized control. Gomulka allowed more local authority for factory managers and town bosses, and peasants were permitted to abandon the collective farms to till their own plots—and did so...

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