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Poland Defining the Military's Postwar Role
In June 1956, major failures of communist state
economic
policy brought a large-scale uprising of workers in Pozna
demanding "bread and freedom." Polish troops refused to
fire on
the workers, heralding a political upheaval that ended the
Stalinist era in Poland. The uprisings of 1956 greatly
alarmed
the Soviet Union and ultimately reduced Soviet control
over the
Polish military and internal security agencies. Poland's
Security
Service (Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa--SB), which had crushed the
Pozna
workers ruthlessly, was revamped in 1956. The widely
unpopular
Rokossovskii and thirty-two Soviet generals were recalled
to the
Soviet Union in spite of intense Soviet diplomatic
pressure. At
this critical point, Polish units went on alert in
response to a
massing of Soviet troops and tanks on the eastern border.
Incoming party chief Wladyslaw Gomulka skillfully
negotiated
Poland's position with the Soviets; backed by Poland's
demonstrated willingness to defend itself, Gomulka was
able to
avert an invasion. Just two weeks later, in October 1956,
Soviet
tanks would roll into Hungary. The Moscow Declaration and
the
Treaty of December 17, 1956 then stipulated the
sovereignty of
the Polish communist elite over the Polish military and
established limitations on the stationing and maneuver of
Soviet
forces in Poland.
Many of Gomulka's reforms proved short-lived, however,
and no
full offensive was mounted against Soviet control of the
military. In his campaign against "revisionism," which
began in
1957, Gomulka gradually returned pro-Moscow officers to
key
positions. Moscow continued to station troops in Poland,
train
Polish officers in the Soviet Union, supply Soviet-made
weapons,
and include Poland in regional defense plans. And in 1957,
Gomulka formed the Military Counterintelligence Service to
continue supplying the party information about political
attitudes in the military. At the same time, he refined
and
professionalized the Internal Security Corps, which had
been
discredited in 1956. Political officers received training
to give
them a higher level of professional military competence
and
credibility with the troops and their professional
counterparts.
Nevertheless, experts consider the events of 1956 a
watershed in
Polish military history. Because Polish forces had helped
the
Polish communist government to a new autonomy, the
military
regained some of its prestige and influence in society.
Gomulka's government sought to consolidate PZPR control
of
military policy, which in the Stalinist years had been a
tangled
combination of informal Polish and Soviet lines of
authority.
Gomulka replaced departing Soviet commanders with Polish
officers
who had served with him in the wartime communist
underground (as
opposed to the Soviet-controlled Polish First Army) and
with
commanders who had prepared their troops to resist the
threatened
Soviet invasion in 1956. Nominal control of military
affairs
rested with the Council of Ministers and its National
Defense
Committee (Komitet Obrony Kraju--KOK; see
The Communist Tradition
, this ch.). As in all other national policy
matters,
however, the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the PZPR had
the
final word in all important policy questions.
Personalities and
factions continued to dominate policy. Under Gomulka's
trusted
minister of national defense, General Marian Spychalski,
the top
grades of the officer corps were riven by political
conflict. A
conservative nationalist group known as the Partisans
became a
major force opposing military and political reform. Their
leader,
internal security chief Mieczyslaw Moczar, gained
substantial
power in the 1960s by playing factions against one another
and
purging reformist rivals. In 1967-68, using the June 1967
War
between Israel and its Arab neighbors as a pretext, Moczar
and
his faction instigated the purge of the remaining 200
Jewish
officers in the Polish People's Army and the ouster of
Spychalski. Moczar's methodology did not yield him
complete
control, however, because most of the purged officers were
replaced by young professionals uninterested in the
ideological
infighting of the military establishment.
One such figure was Wojciech Jaruzelski, the lieutenant
general who capped a rapid rise through the ranks by
replacing
Spychalski as minister of national defense in 1968.
Jaruzelski's
appointment began the retreat of the Partisans' influence.
In
1970 the military again was ordered to quell worker riots,
this
time in the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia. Jaruzelski
refused
to transmit the order, and the army generally refrained
from
action. Although army units inflicted some civilian
casualties,
the Internal Security Corps again was the main force
brought
against Polish demonstrators. The army's reaction
reinforced the
message of 1956 that the Polish military could not be
expected to
defend a communist regime from the people by suppressing
political unrest.
In the 1970s, the prestige of the military continued to
grow
while that of the PZPR plummeted because of the economic
failures
and corruption associated with the regime of Gomulka's
successor,
Edward Gierek. Through the 1970s and the 1980s, the
military took
a noncommittal attitude toward major episodes of civil
unrest. In
1976 Minister of National Defense Jaruzelski informed
Gierek that
Polish soldiers could not be expected to fire on striking
Polish
workers. The army remained strictly loyal to the communist
system, but it showed much less loyalty to particular
regimes
when they came under attack from the Polish population. In
1980,
when the Solidarity (Solidarnosc) union set off a series
of
large-scale strikes in the Baltic ports, the government
apparently did not consider using the military to quell
unrest. A
1981 poll showed the military behind only the church and
Solidarity in the level of respect afforded by Poles to
their
national institutions.
While the Polish military remained neutral in internal
affairs, it fulfilled completely the foreign duties
expected of a
Warsaw Pact member. Two Polish divisions took part in the
1968
invasion of Czechoslovakia that was precipitated by Soviet
alarm
at that country's experimentation with economic and
political
reform. In keeping with the Soviet Union's decision to
distribute
defense responsibilities more widely among Warsaw Pact
members,
the Polish defense industry grew rapidly in the 1970s and
early
1980s. Poland reached fifth place in world arms exports in
1987.
Data as of October 1992
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