The party-state's efforts to Sovietize Poland were as socially and culturally revolutionary as they were antinationally counterrevolutionary. The local authorities, and much of the population, believed that the collectivization of agriculture was the key to Poland's Stalinization, particularly in Poznań. Unlike most of Poland, however, where the party-state pursued collectivization with a slowness akin to sabotage, the authorities set high, yet specific, goals for Poznań, which they aggressively strove to achieve. In the imagined community of struggle that the PZPR created between itself and the “village rich,” the party-state waged a highly coercive, economically disastrous campaign against the peasantry that crippled the region's agricultural development for decades to come.

The party-state's Stalinizing cultural revolution was conducted differently. The authorities endeavored to create a new, Sovietized vision of their country in which Poles “would not know hate, except hate towards the class enemy.” Three elements in this revolution were particularly important in Wielkopolska: the party-state's antireligious campaigns, the struggle to control education, and the regime's effort to replace “nationalism” and “chauvinism” with “Socialist patriotism.” Even though the course of this cultural revolution, like collectivization, varied considerably between the newly created province of Zielona Góra and Poznań, in both places it suffered from the authorities' inability to escape the legacy of nationalist activism that they themselves had fostered in the immediate postwar period.