The Rape of Poland: Pattern of Soviet Aggression by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk

Author:Stanislaw Mikolajczyk [Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Arcole Publishing
Published: 2017-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen — REFERENDUM

The police state emerges

Demonstrations against fraud

We win but are counted out

Communists inspire pogroms

Stalin is weary

He demands a stolen election

THE Polish Referendum of June 30, 1946, was both a fraud and an acknowledgment by the government that it was operating a police state. Above all, it was a memorable demonstration by the Polish people against both fraud and terror.

The Referendum ballot contained three deceitfully chosen questions. The wording was innocent enough:

1. Are you in favor of the abolishment of the Senate?

2. Are you for making permanent, through the future Constitution, the economic system instituted by the land-reform and nationalization of the basic industries, with maintenance of the rights of private enterprise?

3. Are you for the Polish Western frontiers as fixed on the Baltic and on the Oder and Neisse?

Examining these, we of the Peasant Party felt we might use the first question as a weapon for a gigantic demonstration against the police state.

The other questions offered little opportunity for a show of independent thought. Regardless of political belief, a vast majority of Poles were in favor of land reform, nationalization of basic industries, and maintenance of the rights of private enterprise. As for the third question, all Poles wanted their country to regain their historical land in the west and to compensate for the 70,000 square miles lost in the east.

Subtle possibilities were lurking in the first question. It was true, certainly, that even the more conservative pre-war circles in Poland had favored abolishing the Polish senate. Many Poles had a feeling similar to the feeling of some of the British people towards the House of Lords.

The Communists, however, hoped to kill the senate in order to make it easier to stuff Kremlin-dictated regulations down our throats. They knew, too, that under the 1921 constitution the senate shared the right of parliament to choose a Polish president, and they wanted to dispense with the irksome task of clearing the Communist candidate through two waves of legislative opposition.

We decided to vote “No” on the first question as a “protest against political terror, against dissolving local units of the Polish Peasant Party, against false arrests and censorship, and against the Referendum itself, as an illegal change in the Constitution of 1921.” The Polish Peasant Party slogan became, “If you vote ‘Yes’ on the first question, you are giving a vote of confidence to the police methods of the Provisional Government.” Though I was a Deputy Prime Minister of that government, I prayed for the day when I might see it dissolved and its tyranny scattered forever.

The pressure on the Polish Peasant Party quickened as soon as we announced our plans to vote negatively on the first question. Articles containing our point of view were censored out of the Gazeta Ludowa, and the circulation of the paper was held down to 70,000—one-eighth of its potential—by scant allocations of newsprint. There were Communist demonstrations in front of our Warsaw headquarters. Communists on the floor above us blocked off our view by lowering signs in front of our office windows.

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