BEHIND THE POLISH REVOLT

...Therein lies the real significance of the Polish strikes...

...In so doing, they have issued a challenge on a battlefield which has no place in the Soviet ideological terrain...

...This need not, at least at first, take the form of military intervention, for the official level of reality has its own brand of double-level agents, in the form of the secret police...

...and then there is the private level, a kind of semi-underground wherein the "truths" of the official level are derided with thinly-veiled, often bitter cynicism...

...Poland—indeed all of the Eastern European Soviet bloc—exists on two levels, much as the United States did during Watergate...

...For most of the workers in Lublin, meat shortages had become another trial they were being forced to face by the government...

...Western society breeds its own brand of official and unofficial cables who are rewarded for informing if they do their job with sufficient subtlety...

...The poet and Dan Shanahan was a guest lecturer last summer at a British-American seminar in Poznan, Poland...

...They have'affirmed for us all that even slavery does not extinguish the human spirit, that sham ideology cannot satisfy the human appetite for truth, and that even a people half-starved by a decades-long diet of deceit and fabrication will one day say, "Enough"—and demand meat...

...But when the Poles' revulsion at living on two levels provokes them to act as they have, the Soviets cannot offer a prepackaged response, for they cannot answer to a problem which, officially speaking, cannot exist...

...In fact, the strikes in Poland can be taken to prove one of Marx's fundamental assumptions: that a social order which refuses to hold the well-being of its constituents above its own dogmatic principles will ultimately face violent opposition from those it has deceived and cheated...

...It may be that the Poles are simply a headstrong David, challenging Goliath in a world where there is no God to ensure victory...

...Workers profess a belief in communist principles in public, but privately they criticize those principles with undisguised bitterness...

...Of course the Soviets can revert to primitivism and become brutally . repressive...

...But in an hour spent standing in a butcher shop line on a crowded street, few people who pass you by can claim to be untouched by the demands of living life on two levels...

...It was unlikely that this man's activities would send anyone to jail, the student said...

...There is the official level, the "party line," the level which has government sanction and approval...

...Soviet-style communism has predicated itself on the assumption that human beings are piano keys, and that proper adjustment of all the strings will produce a harmonious society...

...Everyone knows this man is a cable," the student said, "but no one really cares because he's such a nice fellow...

...A bloodbath might ensue—many people I talked to said, fearfully, that popular opposition to any Soviet military intervention would be more fierce than in Czechoslovakia or Hungary...

...At those words, the Poles in the room burst into laughter so loud that the rest of the story was inaudible, and I found myself thinking of the worst days of Watergate, when Americans faced with the fabrications of the Nixon Administration could find their only release in the same kind of laughter...

...Thus, there can be only two responses to the Poles' visceral demand for an end to duplicity...

...When Gierek pounded his fist on the table in an attempt to appear stern and forbidding, people let out cries of mock fear as though they were children taunting an angered playmate...

...Right-leaning commentators in the West have pointed— some with undisguised glee— to the strikes and the plight of the Polish workers as proof that socialism cannot deliver on the promises it makes to the working class...

...His friends consider him a friend, even though he is clearly an enemy...

...No one who has seen the newsreel film of Polish cavalry attacking Hitler's Panzer divisions with sabers, no one who has read accounts of the Warsaw Uprising, can fail to recognize that the Poles have in their national character more than a fair share of what Dostoevsky called "the irrational," the determination to prove, at all costs, that a human being is a human being and not a piano key...

...While the paint-canned ham story may be apocryphal, it illustrates, nonetheless, the real motives behind the strikes in Poland...

...Yet such is the nature of Eastern bloc communism that double- and triple-think have become the currency of everyone's life...

...one merely goes through various stages of confrontation and non-confrontation, and as long as the workers persist in their demands, the party leadership will be forced to walk a tightrope...

...Socialism cannot exist, they say, without widespread oppression—and even then it will always fail to satisfy the needs of its people...

...But Soviet communism can no more be taken to reflect the accuracy or inaccuracy of Marx than the Inquisition can be taken to reflect the spiritual insight of the Gospels...

...elections, the preservation of detente may become a dead issue for the Soviet leadership...

...For by succumbing to their frustration with the dual-reality mode of life required in Soviet bloc countries, by refusing to go on playing the fool in a charade staged by a virtual occupying force, and by challenging a previously unchallenged Soviet stone wall of economic domination in Eastern Europe, the Polish workers have struck at the heart of the matter from three sides...

...The strikes were an expression of the deepest and most debilitating kind of frustration, the kind that comes when one reluctantly agrees to take part in a charade, only to discover that one has been given the role of the fool...

...for the strikes were not, as they are in the West, simply forceful and effective tools for bargaining with management...

...In that case the Polish strikes may prove themselves to have been just another cavalry charge led against tanks, another small arms uprising fought against saturation bombing...

...In the West, we might call it duplicity, or simply two-facedness, but by any name the existence of two parallel realities has been a fact of life within Eastern bloc countries for thirty-five years...

...As he gave his August 20 speech, the room was filled again and again with the nervous, derisive laughter that had greeted the Afghan story...

...The Soviet Union could regard the Polish frustration and discontent as an outright threat to its own social order and unleash a wave of reactionary repression that would send all of Eastern Europe into an ideological ice age...

...The Soviet Union can refrain from responding altogether, accept its own over-extension, bemoan having played the Afghan card too soon, and look for other areas in which to recoup its losses...

...Unlike Czechoslovakia in 1968, where an intellectual elite tried to establish a progressive social order and the Soviet Union simply moved in and cut off the new order's head, Poland's strikes were a grass-roots movement, a sociological and psychological shudder of revulsion that passed through the society from the bottom to the top, a kind of religious experience that surpassed even Polish Catholicism in its ability to bring spiritual conviction and determination to succeed to a people pushed to the limit of their toleration for duplicity...

...Narrating film of "typical" street scenes from Kabul— workers going calmly to and from work, shoppers moving about the business district—tKe newscaster said the Afghan people were enjoying "yet another day of freedom from the yoke of capitalist imperialism, under which they had labored for so long...

...In Eastern Europe, one never escapes the specter of Soviet domination...

...The Soviets can argue, endlessly, about the economic underpinnings to socialist society, and in the process prove the Poles "in error" according to Marxist dialectics...

...But it is a measure of the workers' frustration that a change in leadership has not brought with it a wave of nationalistic unity...

...Widespread strikes in a socialist country are cited as proof that Marx was wrong in both his analysis of world economics and his discussion of world politics...

...Behind the Polish Revolt: A rejection of life lived on two levels Dan Shanahan On the night of August 20, as I waited with seventy-five Polish university students and staff members in Poznan for Edward Gierek, secretary of the Polish Communist Party, to address the country on national television, the Polish nightly news ran a "filler" story on Afghanistan...

...They can insist that any socialist country has the right and the duty to fight "anti-socialist" forces within its own borders and within the borders of its allies, and thus justify Soviet military presence and interference in Polish affairs...

...Of course, the new leadership in Poland can do little more than Gierek himself did ten years ago: give the appearance of open-mindedness and sympathy with the workers' plight, while hedging against the dictates of the Soviet leadership...

...What took place in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk and in the wave of sympathetic walkouts that subseDuplicity has pushed Poles to the edge quently swept Poland was, however, a rejection of the two-level mode of living...

...On the economic side, the Poles have held up true Marxist principles— the right to strike, the right to freely elected trade unions, and an end to press censorship—next to the caricatured Marxist principles brandished by the Soviets and their East European caretaker governments...

...managers praise the success of economic planning, while they resent the low standard of life which economic failures have given them...

...Demands for the easing of censorship and freedom for imprisoned dissidents were not so much a reflection of the political character of the strikes as they were an indication that the Poles have reached the limit of their capacity to swallow and digest a diet of half-truth and deception...

...By exposing the failure of Soviet economics to a watching world, they have struck a serious blow at the foundations of Soviet Marxism...

...Given the conservative sweep in the U.S...

...that kind of work was entrusted to the real undercover police...

...When meat appeared in butcher shops at all, two- to five-hour waits in line were not uncommon...

...But most importantly, the Poles, rebelling against the frustration of weaving two distinct realities into one, have given politics and economics a human side...

...ten years of growing duplicity under Gierek have significantly diminished the Poles' ability to suspend judgment and hope for a better future in time...

...But in fact, Milosz goes on to say, the Soviet system has created duplicitous opportunists, Julien Sorels who play both sides of the fence and use a variety of rationalizations to justify their fence-hopping...

...Thirty-five years of Soviet-imposed communism have created a psychological dynamic that is a far cry from the automatonism envisioned by most Westerners: There are few zombies walking the streets of Eastern Europe—perhaps even fewer neurotics than one finds in the West...

...The Poles would be seen in strict beha-vioristic terms: as anti-socialist psy-chotics treatable only through shock therapy...

...However, one has a little more trouble imagining how the friends of this "nice fellow" can carry their own duplicity to the point where they accept as a friend someone whom they can never fully trust...

...A story circulating among my students alleged that the first Polish strikes, by railroad workers in Lublin, began when gallon cans of paint in boxcars headed for the Soviet Union were damaged and found to contain not paint but canned ham...

...A cable is simply a monitor by means of which people in positions of power can obtain profiles of various individuals and decide on their fitness for social advancement—or retardation...

...Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz has called this living on two levels "Ket-man," after the Islamic belief that deception of one's enemies about what one truly believes is essential to survival...

...Fear or resentmenf would seem to exclude even the nicest of cables from the social company of non-cables...

...Reports of isolated strikes throughout the Eastern bloc countries, and even in the Soviet Union itself, have been filtering into the West for almost a year...

...He is on the faculty of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California...

...That eruption has such far-reaching implications that it could mark the beginning of the end for the official reality—or it could precipitate a hardening of the official surface into an ice age for human freedom in Eastern Europe...

...However, the dissonance between the official harmony and the deeper discontent has been a fact for many years, and it has begun to grow louder in recent months...

...One student from Wroclaw told me about a friend of his parents who was a "cable"—an informer who received everything from money to limited-supply Western consumer goods in return for his willingness to pass on information about his co-workers and friends...

...Or they may be trumpeting in a new order for Eastern Europe...

...The cable considers himself a loyal Pole, even though he is an instrument of the police state and, ultimately, of Soviet domination of his homeland...

...With the initial Western interest in Polish unrest flagging, a concerted wave of arrests could take place, followed by a reshuffling of the Party itself, all of which could ensure that the workers' demands are never met...

...The official explanation for the meat shortages was a classic of Watergate-style obfuscations: Production levels, international debts, poor feed crops, and so on, had conspired to create a scarcity of meat, the workers were told, and the generally poor state of the Polish economy had forced the government to stop subsidizing meat prices...

...But after ten years of deteriorating conditions in Poland and a steadily decreasing standard of living, the Poles had come to see Gierek as simply another mouthpiece voicing ideological rationalizations for failure...

...Over a period of a few months, the message could be sent out to-the rank and file that "disturbances" would be met with force, and a gradually increased Soviet military presence could, by then, be in a position to put muscle behind the message...

...Western response to police There have been strike reports from Russia, too action within Warsaw Pact countries would then be a low-priority consideration in Kremlin deliberations...

...In fact, these damaged cans of "paint" told the workers what they already knew too well: The shortages were a result of Poland's continuing role as a prop to sustain a shaky Soviet economy...

...Soviet communism seems to be facing a crisis of the same proportions that Western capitalism is facing...

...but time and the secret police would allow the Soviets to muffle the cries heard in the West...

...The Soviets are capable of pragmatism, and short of an outright break with the Warsaw Pact, Polish reforms may be tolerated, if only for the present...

...The cries for Gierek's resignation were as much a demand that the duplicity he symbolized be cast aside as they were a demand that a more effective manager be found...

...On the political side, the workers have thumbed their noses at Soviet domination in Poland, have refused to go on supporting the Soviet system at their own expense, and have asserted their intention to take their fate into their own hands, whatever the cost...

...The wave of strikes which rocked Poland during the summer represents an eruption of the private reality of dissatisfaction and frustration through the superficially placid, "official" surface...

...Ironically, Westerners have little difficulty imagining a "nice fellow" who resigns himself to the idea that Soviet-style communism, at least in his lifetime, is in Poland to stay, and who tells himself that his informing is a way of putting necessary patches on a badly shredded social fabric...

...Such a non-response is perhaps too much to hope for, but it is possible...

...Soviet economists and dialecticians have no solution to the problem of living on two levels, for they can only recognize the official level—any other level is an anti-socialist aberration, a holdover from the capitalist past, an impurity in an alloy which is still being purified...

...In The Captive Mind, Milosz points out that Soviet communism is bent on creating a "new man" who will follow dogma unquestioningly and pursue "the good of the state" unhesitatingly...

...But whichever the case, by refusing to accept lies and half-truths as their daily bread, they have done something that should rekindle faith in humanity in an age when faith is a rationed commodity...

...When Edward Gierek replaced Wladyslaw Gomulka after the bloody riots of 1970, he was respected by the people and hailed as a leader who could make reform without offending the Soviets...

...The second possible response is more frightening, and some would say the more probable of the two...