from Germany in the aftermath of World War II and which had become a centerpiece of the early Stalinist propaganda. Although fired from his position at the Institute in 1949, Stażewski was able to carefully navigate the new socio-political ecosystem, avoiding the fate of his fellow avant-garde collaborators, Strzemiński and Kobro, who had been accused of reactionary cultural activities and whose careers had been effectively destroyed by the emergent Stalinist regime. Soon, Stażewski turned to Socialist Realism—a figurative art doctrine reliant on idealized depictions of life under socialism—that had been officially imposed by the communist regime in 1949. However, he had never fully committed to the naturalistic academicism expected of Soviet and Soviet-aligned artists. In 1950, Stażewski was named a member of the selection committee for the I Ogólnopolska wystawa plastyki (First Nationwide Display of Plastic Arts), the inaugural exhibition of Polish Socialist Realism organized at the National Museum in Warsaw. Between 1950 and 1952, he completed multiple figurative paintings to align himself with the demands of the state. Among Stażewski's surviving Socialist Realist works is an oil painting titled Na scalonych ziemiach (On the Recovered Territories) completed in 1950, in which a tractor driver is seen traversing the eponymous reclaimed land. While taking on various part-time projects working for the government, which included retouching official portraits of party members at the , Stażewski continued to organize regular clandestine gatherings for like-minded artists in his Warsaw apartment and wrote (at that time unpublished) texts about abstraction. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent political Thaw of 1956 precipitated the return of avant-garde art. While Poland had become one of the first countries among the Soviet satellite states to embrace the Thaw, the cultural shift was a gradual process. Toward the end of the Stalinist regime, he and Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska were commissioned to paint a worker-themed realistic mural at the new headquarters of state-controlled Metalexport company in Warsaw, which opened in 1954. In recognition for his artistic contributions to the Polish People's Republic, Stażewski received a Gold Cross of Merit in 1955. Reliefs (1956-1970s) In 1955, Stażewski became a member of Klub Krzywego Koła (Crooked Circle Club) in Warsaw, an independent cultural initiative for avant-garde artists, writers, and intellectuals. In 1956, Bierut died and Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the de facto leader of the USSR who had succeeded Stalin, delivered