The ineffectuality of the socialist system, which in literature was described as the shortage economy, could be observed even at a company level. Despite having no ef-fects, the system was maintained, which required constant political supervision. Its most important authority was the ruling party that used the nomenclature as the best tool to perform their supervising functions. Determining positions and decision-making bodies was only a part of the unofficial prerogatives of The Polish United Workers' Party. In each company there were party structures that were aimed at encouraging both the party members and non-party workers to obey to the system and to do the tasks which they had been allotted as a part of the planned economy. The party supervision system was sup-ported by a secretly acting organization called the Security Service. This article presents how the party supervision worked, what the forms of its action were and what effects they had. The study is based on the case of the “Stilon” Synthetic Fibres Plant in Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland.
Systemic transformation in Poland after the Second World War led to deep transformations within the economy. It did not, however, change the way people thought. Despite the chaos of the post-war period, in which all the negative features shaped in the period of occupation manifested themselves, it seemed that the conceptual leaders of the Polish political and economic life would create new quality. However, it soon turned out that old habits die hard and the system created by communists opened a field for many abuses. This was accompanied by a sense of impunity, as the most prominent personalities in a given region were also involved in economic scandals. All this resulted in the creation of “cliques” in which both prominent Party activists and people put by the Party in high positions (usually also members of the Polish United Workers’ Party, PUWP) played important roles. On the one hand, after 1956, surveillance by the Security Office (UB) or Security Services (SB) was not that strict anymore, and on the other, the so-called “private initiative” started to develop fast – therefore the more “entrepreneurial” individuals started to exploit the situation and gain wealth. Abusing one’s position to organize large-scale thefts was considered relatively normal. This happened in various forms: sometimes directly, but more often by supporting or even organizing private projects with the use of the national, though unsupervised, supply of raw materials or products. This way, the Party members grew richer at the expense of the companies they worked for. This business was relatively widely tolerated by ordinary citizens, who saw it as an excuse to also “organize” goods individually for their own purposes in the companies which employed them. This common belief that “everybody steals” allowed people to justify their own dishonesty. Any attempts to fight this problem failed to produce satisfactory results. The diagnosis, even if correct, had to face reality, in which the pursuit of a better quality of life by the Party elites collided with the officially promoted ascetic lifestyles of the “ideological communists”, who, like Władysław Gomułka, did not understood the new times.
The Culture Commission of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party – a “Child” of the Gomułka–era StabilisationThe Culture Commission was established in the summer of 1957 and replaced the Department of Culture at the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (CC PUWP). The Department had been composed of the employees the CC PUWP, but the Commission included both representatives of the Party and state bureaucracy as well as members of assorted milieus (under the condition that they belonged to the PUWP). In 1957 the CC PUWP created, alongside the Culture Commission, also a Foreign Commission, a Science Commission, a Publications Commission, etc. The notion to entrust public issues to institutions combining representatives of the apparatus of power and delegates of the interested milieus was characteristic for the Polish variant of the anti–Stalinist “thaw” and did not possess a counterpart in other states of the Soviet bloc. The Culture Commission emerged, if one were to perceive it via the prism of later events, during a transition period. The team created by Władysław Gomułka, who on a tide of de– Stalinisation assumed in October 1956 the function of First Secretary of the CC PUWP, attempted to rapidly stifle social emotions and, at the same time, to devise its own model of governance, a task that naturally required much time. Initially, the authorities regarded the question of culture as secondary. The Party intended to retain general control over this domain, but resigned from “control” and came to terms with pluralism within assorted forms of artistic expression. In 1958 there even emerged a pro–decentralisation conception, namely, to supplant the Ministry of Culture and Art with a Committee of Culture and Art composed of representatives of national councils, central offices, art associations, and social and professional organisations. Gradually, however, such tendencies waned, since the Party–state apparatus could not be itself within a social dialogue formula and preferred ruling by resorting to methods of prohibitions and injunctions. On their part, artistic circles, and men of letters in particular, called for expanding the sphere of creative freedom and, in particular, for a restriction of censorship. In this fashion a conflict between the two sides continued to grow. In the opinion of certain members of the Commission it was to represent the interests of representatives of the arts, especially as regards the freedom of expression and financial questions. Others perceived it as an expert institution assisting the Party leadership in formulating a cultural policy programme. The most permanent outcome of the functioning of the Commission involved numerous gathered data concerning cultural life in different parts of Poland. Otherwise, the Commission proved to be not very active and incapable of designating its realms of activity. In 1960 the Central Committee reactivated the Department of Culture and thus supervision over culture was restored to Party bureaucracy. The Commission was not dissolved but it gradually faded and the last traces of its existence come from 1964.
The article addresses rules of spelling popular graphic abbreviations in modern Polish. Numerous errors in this connection can be observed nowadays, e.g., d/s (instead of ds.), n/w (instead of nw.), w/ w (instead of ww.), and the like. On analyzing spelling and punctuation principles provided by several up-to-date orthographic dictionaries, and also grammatical and linguistic guide-books, the author of the article offers detailed orthographic rules concerning the abbreviations in question.
This article is an attempt at a fairly detailed analysis of the TV series Being Forty in its first version of the 1970s. The text proposes an interpretation of the film from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and in particular reconstructs the social sphere of the film’s protagonists, which consists of the intelligentsia elite, the nomenklatura, the lower intelligentsia, and medium-level technical personnel. In the picture produced by the filmmakers, the role of the intelligentsia, especially its multi-generational old elite, is dominant. This vision does not fully correspond with the real place of the intelligentsia in Poland during the Gierek era. The authors of the article thus interpret the film as the scriptwriters’ appreciation of the intelligentsia, both in respect to its lower technical staff and to the part of the nomenklatura that was less rich in cultural capital. The interpretative framework proposed in the text seems useful for analyzing other works of art in order to reconstruct the social relations of the times in which they were created.
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