Poland’s externally implanted party never built mass committed membership, unlike Czechoslovakia’s.

Evidence

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Polish party regarded its newly recruited members as unreliable and uncommitted. Party members were as suspect in their loyalties as they were irrelevant to the takeover. Polish party officials did not even know how many members the party had in late 1945. While the chaos at the end of the war may be partly responsible, their Czech counterparts had precise figures by that point. Nor did the Polish leaders treat the party membership as a source of legitimization of their power. Instead, they complained that any increase in numbers weakens the party, and argued that past mass membership drives were “inseparable” from loss of quality. As a result, the party never pursued the sort of mass, committed membership that the Czech party did – by 1948, the Polish PZPR managed to recruit only 4.3% of the population, and subsequently averaged about 5.4% of the adult population as its members (see Table 1.4). — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 242

Categorization

• XREF: Empirical base for the reader’s comparison: organizational rootedness tracks whether the party depended on a foreign sponsor rather than society. — connects to: Czechoslovak communists rejected reform while Polish and Hungarian parties pursued it — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 172

Broader Connections

• Czechoslovak communists rejected reform while Polish and Hungarian parties pursued it #expands (0.75) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 172