Communism's formidable institution-building capacities in non-Western settings in the grip of social turmoil have been recognized by many. According to Samuel Huntington, Communism, more than any other ideological alternative to liberal democracy, at times succeeded at “the broadening of loyalties and identifications from concrete and immediate groups (such as family, clan, and village) to larger and more impersonal groupings (such as class and nation).” As I argue in this chapter, the Polish Communist Party-regime was no different. Especially in the Stalinist years (1949–1955) it became a significant public authority-building institution in the country as a whole and in the Western Territories in particular. Above all, by rewarding asceticism and penalizing adventurism, it began to create broader frames of social identity and action among the western population, and to integrate the “varying mix” of settlers, expellees, and autochthones on a universalistic ethical basis. To the extent that the Party redirected western society away from adventurism, it unintentionally helped clear the ground for this society's evolution toward a more mature and culturally sustainable form of individualism (see section I of this chapter, below). But Communism was a double-edged sword. Its ideology and organizational ethos aimed to suppress all independent forms of thought and action and to substitute the collective entity—the Party—for the individual as the primary social actor and the exclusive locus of identity. Therefore, in the longer term the Communist rule was a threat to, not an ally of, individualism (section II).

If the western settlers’ habits of self-reliance, both intellectual and practical, survived nevertheless into the 1950s and beyond, it was, I go on to argue, largely in spite of and not due to the Party's efforts. These habits continued in part because, unlike elsewhere in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, the Polish regime never underwent a full or consistent Stalinization. They persisted especially in the cities, where the demands of the growing industrial and professional sectors allowed the most individuated elements of the western population to carve out certain niches of autonomy for themselves and their children (section III).