Kosciuska's• Heir
Poland, Hungary, CzeChoslovakia, Roumania, 'Yugoslavia. Edited by Oscar Halecki. Mid- European Studies Center of the Free Europe
Comr ittee. (Atlantic Books, £3 10s. each.) GOMULKA'S Poland is still authoritarian. But it is no longer totalitarian. The one great breach in the system of rule developed interdependently (though without acknowledgment) by the Fascists and Communists is that in Poland there is now free- dom, not indeed of publication, but at least of speech. What is more, this has meant that the Big Lie is no longer viable : it is impossible to main- tain, for instance, that the collective farms were either profitable or popular. that the standard of living was (or is) high, that all was (or is) well.
This breach with the Stalin-Khrushchev tradi- tion was possibly only as the result of the estab- lishment of that precarious and limited indepen- dence which is at the moment under such gross pressure. Gomulka has no abstract love of the present Polish freedoms. But he is keen On national independence, and he is opposed to policies which bring the leadership into conflict with the population, the Party membership itself, and the laws of economics. Freedom of speech is the great regulator which secures avoidance of those excesses. His regime's chance of survival depends on the feelings of the Polish people. And so a book like Mrs. Hotchkiss's which treats these adequately may be more significant than the cold fact and documentation which this reviewer, for one, usually prefers.
Mrs. Hotchkiss was sponsored by the Reader's Digest, and she is a little inclined to give us that rather bright and cosy, mom-to-mom style we are so used to in its pages. But it is by no means unsuitable to the subject, nor does she reproduce its slicker extreme& Her book is lively, personal, clear—and intelligent, .too, in an unpretentious fashion. She is a Pole married to an American, and for years had no hope of seeing her homeland again. One of the results of Poland's 'October' was that a visit like hers became possible. Though she sticks to her light and individual touch, it is notable that her facts are almost always com- pletely accurate—an extreme rarity in books of this sort even by experienced journalists. Her description of conversations with peasants in Southern Poland about the recent dissolution of the local collective farm tells us as much about the reasons for the failure of the Soviet-type agrarian system as anything I have seen. And much the same applies to her anecdotes of city life. What is more, her approach is remarkably objective. Though she sympathises she • does not palliate. Her chapter on the situation of the Jews in Poland, for instance, is all the sadder for that..
The Mid-European Studies Center has pro- duced a new set of 600-odd-page volumes on the countries of Communist Europe. These are encyclopaedic compilations, and have a great deal of useful economic and demographic information. The political and cultural sections are tackled descriptively and so are perhaps a little loose if the books are considered as works of reference. The Polish volume was unfortunately completed in May, 1956, and events since then are dealt with only in a short chapter. This means that, with all its merits, the bulk of the work is about a situation which has radically changed. Moreover, much even of the early economic information had to be rather precariously and laboriously deduced from inadequate and inaccurate sources. Now that true official information about the past period has been made available some of this is a bit supererogatory. Much the same applies to the Hungary volume, though here the editors have had the excellent idea of covering the period of the revolution mainly with extracts from the United Nations report. The layout of the books varies slightly, but it seems peculiar that the Czechoslovak volume should be so arranged as to have no place for the workers' riots in Pilsen and elsewhere in 1953, events of great importance on any view. But these are small points, and the industry and energy of the compilers have produced a series which is as indispensable as they come.
J. E. M. ARDEN
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