1956 — The Turning Point

Abstract

In this chapter I will look at the year 1956 in Poland in the context of the dynamics of post-1945 Polish history, and reflect on the role of the events of 1956 in the evolution of the Communist system in Poland. My general argument is the following: the year 1956 constitutes the turning point in the history of Communist Poland. Developments in Poland were determined by the country’s status as one of the Soviet Union’s protectorate states, formally sovereign but in fact subject to Moscow and more or less dependent upon the transformations in the Soviet Union itself. In this context, the year 1956 is a decisive divide cutting the post-war history of Poland into two periods, corresponding to two phases of the dynamics of the system established by the Communists — the ascending and the descending phase, the phase of growth and the phase of gradual decomposition. We are of course dealing in both these subperiods with significant fluctuations, but this does not, in my opinion, change the fundamental direction of developments — their gradient vectors.