The Polish historian Isaac Deutscher is best remembered for his classic biographies of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. But Deutscher was also a political activist in the Polish workers’ movement: first as a member of the Polish Communist Party, then, after his expulsion in 1932 for opposing Stalin’s policy, as a supporter of Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

In 1956, Poland attracted the world’s attention when a protest movement emerged to challenge the Stalinist regime that Moscow had imposed. That movement brought Władysław Gomułka, an independent-minded Communist leader who had been imprisoned on orders from Stalin, to power in Warsaw. Deutscher hoped that Poland’s new rulers could lead their country toward an alternative, non-Stalinist model of socialism. The abridged extracts that follow give a sense of Deutscher’s hopes and subsequent disillusionment with the Gomułka experiment.

The first extract is drawn from an interview with the Polish journalist K. S. Karol, conducted in 1957. Deutscher wanted to help educate the younger generation of Poles about the suppressed history of the prewar Polish Communist Party, which Stalin had forcibly disbanded in 1938. Here, he discusses the party’s origins, how it came to be subordinated to direction from Moscow, and why Stalin ordered a purge of its exiled leadership.