In 1966, after the period of Great Novena, the celebrations of the Millennium of Poland’s Baptism, organized by the Catholic Church, took place in Poland. One of the more important elements of the celebrations was the peregrination of a consecrated copy of Our Lady of Częstochowa’s icon. Communist authorities made various attempts to reduce the scope of church festivities by organizing a rival secular celebration for the Millennium of the Polish State. However, the peregrination of the image quickly became a “dangerous” element from the point of view of the authorities of the time, triggering religious enthusiasm and ardour in the society, resulting in mass gatherings of parishioners in front of churches, and unifying the faithful around the Church. Hence the state leadership’s decision to ban the peregrination. The authority that was supposed to enforce that decision was the Security Service, who were given the task of capturing the image by force several times. The arrest and capture of the icon in the Warmia diocese near Liksajny on 20 June 1966 was one of the most controversial, as it took place in the presence of Primate Stefan Wyszyński. Materials generated by the Security Service prove how extensive the measures used for the task’s execution were, and thus how significant the fight against the Church and its influence on society was for the authorities. At the same time, the society’s response to the actions of security agents described therein clearly show that that policy resulted in the opposite of the intended effect from the point of view of the state leadership.
One of the negative consequences of the Stalinist agricultural policy in Warmia and Masuria was the outflow of peasants from the countryside. Leaving and the arbitrary abandonment of homesteads were a response to administrative coercion used during collectivization and high benefits. Many peasants who refused to join production cooperatives were then convinced that they could not exist in the countryside. As a result, the offices of the local agricultural administration began to be flooded with applications for leaving homesteads. These decisions were also reinforced by the hampered process of enfranchisement that caused a sense of temporariness among agricultural settlers. The scale of resignation from running homesteads was so large in Warmia and Masuria that it caused the threat of a decline in agricultural production. The authorities took actions aiming at stopping this phenomenon. However, the difficulties applied towards peasants filing applications for leaving homesteads together with unrelenting fiscal oppression inclined some of them to make a decision of leaving agricultural workshops arbitrarily. After 1953, the scale of abandonments weakened partially as a result of an adjustment in the economic policy. The authorities did not manage to eliminate this phenomenon until the change in the agricultural policy caused by the October Plenum of the Central Committee of the PUWP in 1956.
Along with the change in the agricultural policy in 1948 that was inspired by the Kremlin and imposed during the 2nd Cominform in Bucharest, the collectivisation of the rural area became a doctrinal issue in the agricultural policy of Communist states. Apart from the direct methods of collectivisation that concerned strong administrative and economic pressures towards the peasants, the authorities also undertook actions that were to introduce the production cooperatives in a more clouded manner. These included, among others, establishing self–help villages, joint agreements between the villagers and State Machinery Centres (Pol. Państwowe Ośrodki Maszynowe, POM) for machinery services for their fields, developing simple forms of agricultural cooperation in the arbitrarily created units for cultivation, grassland, farming, etc. These activities, aided by a system of concessions and preferences, brought certain results, especially towards the end of the discussed period. They prove the wide array of measures and methods used by the Communist authorities in their attempts at collectivisation.
Recenzja pracy Ryszarda Tomkiewicza "Ułomna samorządność Polski Ludowej. Warmia i Mazury 1945-1990", Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego, Olsztyn 2016
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