“Clergy in our province has a very masked activity”. Faces of the battle of censorship with religion in the years of Stalinism in Gdańsk Pomerania. Based on the documents of the Voivodship Office of Press Control, Publications and Entertaiment in Gdańsk

Abstract

The activity of preventive censorship in the People’s Republic Poland was clearly part of the confrontation between the Polish United Workers’ Party and the Catholic Church. After 1945, the communist party built a monopoly on propaganda in the spirit of Stalinism shaped in Poland, clearly imprinting its mark on the life of society. Hence the scope of activity and the activity of censorship increased steadily until 1956.

The article is an attempt to show in what ways the communist authorities tried to limit or even completely remove the presence of the Church, customs and values of the Catholic religion in various spheres of society. In this process, censorship played a role of a completely subordinate communist, usually unusually useful, orthodox guardian of the unreal image of the constitution and the new human being, in which the Catholic Church, its institutions and supporters were located at the level referred to as “reaction”.

The article presents censorship in the People’s Republic Poland in its local dimension, in Gdańsk Pomerania, from the perspective of local press control, with its regional specificity, but also as a supervisor over any form of printing and image published in the region or its dissemination by the Church. The topic was prepared on the basis of documents of the Voivodship
Office for Press, Publishing and Entertainment from the years 1945–cenzura956.