POLAND: THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS

...Events in Poland are developing with unprecedented speed: official disclosures about the misdeeds of the Gierek regime, which in September and October strained the credulity of Poles and the world outside, now lost their piquancy, having been superseded by even graver and more electrifying exercises in "criticism and self-criticism...

...Dissent, Summer 1980, p. 318...

...If it does, it will live up to the noble old Polish revolutionary slogan: "For our freedom— and yours...

...It has clearly been divested of the power to rule—unless it shares that task with the rest of society...

...A precipitous expansion of heavy industry...

...Robotnik was designed explicitly to instruct workers on how to conduct their economic and political struggles...

...And this is why he may become the partner in a political compromise with the democratic opposition, but never its ally...

...Trade unions taking inadequate care of the interests of the workers...

...Finally—and again, as in no other country in Eastern Europe—the regime has tolerated pockets of autonomy within the intellectual community, such as the Writers' Union, some scientific organizations, and even a few departments within the universities...

...4. It also remains to be seen whether the workers will be able to maintain the extraordinary mixture of confidence, moderation, calm, and intransigence they have displayed during the strikes...

...Whether the workers will choose to believe party promises—that this time the necessary sacrifices will not be exacted from them alone, but from the whole society (including the "red bourgeoisie")— and indeed whether Poland's workers will pay heed to exhortations from authorities they despise remains to be seen...

...If in 1968 the Soviet Union finally—after considerable vacillation —embarked upon a military "solution" of the Prague Spring, it was in part because of its certainty that the Czechs would not resist...

...On September 5, Robotnik published a "Charter of Workers' Rights," which constitutes perhaps the first programmatic document of the nascent free trade-union movement...

...14 Moczar is not only the head of the Government Control Commission, which now is investigating charges of widespread corruption among government officials...

...This is not a matter of and scholasticism, for it still seems part of conventional wisdom to equate totalitarianism with communism—that is, with a one-party system...

...Both Michnik and Kuron made it emphatically clear that they were not opposing Poland's political system, the "leading role of the Party," or Poland's membership in the Warsaw Pact...

...Clearly, so long as the workers' movement survives, so will its alliance with the opposition...

...Kuron have periodically been accused of spreading inflammatory "antisocialist views," of inciting the workers to riot, of voicing "extremist" demands...

...Here a word must be said about the paramount importance of the Catholic Church...

...For, unlike in Czechoslovakia and in Hungary, there is no faction in the Polish party (however hidebound) that would cooperate with the Soviet army...

...Serious criticism of the party's policies and the coLntry's general political and economic plight began to emanate not only from outside the Establishment, but also from scholars and intellectuals within the party...

...On August 20, a number of oppositionists, including 14 KOR members, were arrested on charges made of whole cloth...

...Nor will they in the foreseable future...

...Lack of frankness, bureaucratic phrasemongering...

...Or take the practical advice Robotnik gave on May 30, 1980, under the heading "How to Defend Ourselves": One can distribute pamphlets from the highest landing of tall apartment buildings...

...Illusory promises made to the workers...

...At the recent Congress of that organization on All Souls' Day, Moczar gave the opening address...

...I also remembered, even more sadly, the many Czech intellectuals I spoke to back in June 1968, in Prague: their euphoria, too, was contagious—and cruelly aborted barely two months later...

...But the workers had been leaderless and, until recently, apolitical...

...Gierek's policy of rapid development of Polish industry, financed by Western banks and paid for by increasing exports of coal, copper, and other products, had come thumpingly to grief...

...Or that the Workers' Self-Defense Committee, KOR, periodically called an "antisocialist nest," would be described in the following terms by a Polish writer, a member of the party: It was KOR, not we, who declared support for the [striking] workers in 1976...

...While the means of production remain firmly in the hands of the government, some form of private initiative has been tolerated...

...It is enough to look through any issue of that newspaper (published with only one break since September 1977) to realize how closely the editors have addressed the problems of industrial workers, while at the same time stressing —in concrete detail—the relationship between workers' demands and those of other aggrieved groups...

...The implications of this tacit bond between the workers and the army in the event of a Soviet invasion are obvious...

...Perhaps it was the somber Christian holiday that brought about this jesuitical piece of oratory...

...Quite the contrary: Kuron even praised the government for its "sense of realism," saying, "We must work to increase the area of freedom and to diminish the area of totalitarianism, without exceeding the limits set by the Soviet tanks...

...At the October Plenum, Polish Minister of Defense General Jaruzelski told his comrades that both the enlisted men and the officer corps of the Polish armed forces would never again fire on striking workers...

...The authorities," said the editorial, must also "present a sensible and coherent program for the liquidation of poverty, in which over 3 million citizens, including about 40 percent of children and young people, are forced to live...

...Indeed, the causes of political unrest in Eastern Europe have been endemic to the area as a whole...

...and the first clearly the most desirable of all...

...The pragmatist knows full well that instead of solving the problem, repression simply forms the basis of further outbreaks of popular discontent, with unforeseeable consequences...

...He survived nevertheless...

...Intellectuals and students would periodically protest excesses of censorship or demonstrate for freedom of expression or social justice, usually getting thrown in jail for their pains...

...For the majority of Poles, the Soviet Union is heir to Czarist imperialism, and the Communist party little more than its agent...

...If other methods fail, one can resort to strikes...

...6 Adam Michnik, "The New Evolutionism," Survey (London), no...

...The episcopate, too, found that its attempted "dialogue" with the regime benefited neither the Church nor its faithful.' When in June 1976 the government again announced a precipitous rise in food prices, and when workers—for the third time in 20 years—again struck for "bread and freedom," the disparate elements of the opposition came together...

...In time both Pax and Znak split off into factions, some closer to the totalitarian philosophy of Pax, some closer to the liberalism of the original Znak, and all vying for influence among the Catholic population, in the episcopate as well as in the party—and all thus contributing to the "pluralization" of Polish life...

...A few weeks ago, the party's credibility 26 seemed to be at an all-time low...

...Independence, diligence, expertise, and the initiative of people were not appreciated, but subservience, obedience, and even kow-towing to higher-ups were...

...And so, for the fourth time in three decades, Poland again seems to be teetering on the brink of disaster...

...At no time has the party been willing to share its decision-making power with any other social groups...

...My thoughts went back to my first visit to postwar Poland in 1958: then Gomulka had already embarked on his so-called little stabilization strategy, yet the atmosphere was still charged with hope and excitement...

...See "After Gdansk: Two Interviews," New York Review of Books, October 9, 1980...

...Cardinal Wyszynski has openly thrown his support behind Solidarity: "I am with you," he told a visiting trade-union delegation on October 19...

...The quotation above was drawn from the Action Program adopted by Dubcek's reformed CP in April 1968...

...Problems and Prospects ONCE MORE, TO THE PRESENT-AND TO THE FUTURE...

...6 This assumption was held as much by secular intellectuals, many of whom had broken with Stalinism but refused to abandon their dream of "socialism with a human face," as by liberal Catholics, whose overall strategy was to obtain political concessions in exchange for loyalty to basic party policies...

...13 As striking proof of the importance that the worker-intellectual alliance now has in Poland, Lech Walesa, head of the "Solidarity" Union, made the release of all political prisoners one of the conditions for signing the agreement with the authorities on August 31...

...5. Enough has been written on Poland's economic plight to make clear that this is perhaps the most crucial and intractable problem facing Poland today and in the foreseeable future...

...Still, following the Plenum there were massive personnel changes, many of them of a potentially salutary character...

...It may, of course, yet be aborted—or may take unexpected forms...

...As for the future, then, there are, as I see it, three possibilities...

...We [the union] are not going to build chapels or propose religious services...

...Those forces within the ruling elite (not bornagain "liberals" but, to use Michnik's and Kuron's term, "pragmatists") who understand that the party can save itself and the country only by acceding to the basic demands of the society—and by working with it, rather than against it—are not having an easy time of it...

...The evidence is, to say the least, contradictory...

...Michnik and...

...it was not KOR that disorganized our economy, involved the country in debts that have brought it to the verge of bankruptcy, that has patronized thieves and spendthrifts...

...Nevertheless, the party thus far has not shown any readiness to decentralize its economic system, introduce any meaningful market mechanisms, or remove the discriminatory restrictions on private farming that have had such disastrous effects on Poland's agricultural production...

...I began writing this article in late October...

...2. "Genuine pluralism" is no longer a slogan, a dream, or (to those who dread it) a nightmare, but part of evolving reality...

...agricultural production was again declining...

...The censorship apparatus was exposed to public view (and ridicule), 10 students, farmers, and workers began to organize themselves into the kind of pressure groups that Kuron and other opposition spokesmen were advocating...

...The era of seeking to change the nature of the party from within, of placing "too much hope on the intelligent `leaders' of the Party," of succumbing "to the specious argument that one must not make life too hard for the existing leaders in case their successors prove to be worse"—all this came to an end...

...Or perhaps from a speech by the trade union leader Walesa...

...Faced with all these contradictory signals, one can safely venture only this—that the internal party strife is going to continue...

...Solidarity, he declared in an interview published in the Warsaw newspaper Kierunki (October 5), will be open to believers and non-believers alike...

...the second potentially dangerous...

...A bloodbath, followed by a massive, indefinite and transparent military 29 occupation...

...Why else would Janos Kadar join with Moscow's Czech satrap Vasil Bilak in issuing a condemnation of the "antisocialist forces" in Poland...

...The assumption that Communist systems are immutable is also shared by some prominent authors of East European "revisionism" who had at one time subscribed to the (perhaps equally untenable) view that Communist regimes can evolve into genuine forms of social democracy: thus Leszek Kolakowski's recent quip that "the concept of nontotalitarian communism seems to many of us like the idea of fried snowballs...

...Poland, then, is different, and while there are parallels with other East European Communist countries, no understanding of the current situation and future prospects is possible without an examination of the factors that make Poland, in some essential respects, sui generis...

...November-December 1957, and Lucjan Blit, The Eastern Pretender (London: Hutchinson, 1965...

...In October 1956 Piasecki warned that any attempt to bring Gomulka back to power would endanger the country's "raison d'etat" (that is to say, Moscow would be annoyed...

...Since that formidable enemy, the Catholic Church, could not be crushed, the state settled for a policy of attempting to contain its public activities while refraining from interfering in its purely internal affairs...

...An excerpt from a KOR leaflet...

...One, the labor unions (and other organized groups) will preserve their elan and cohesiveness, and eventually force the authorities to pay heed to reasonable yet firm demands...

...Revisionist" faith in the possibility of the party evolving toward greater democracy had been shattered by the events of 1968, when protesting students were set upon by the police and by groups of workers incited by demagogic and anti-Semitic slogans...

...Yet in retrospect Kuron's proposals seem like rather weak tea...

...inflation was reaching astronomic proportions...

...The basic objective, according to Adam Michnik, is to achieve the gradual democratization of Polish society by compelling the system to enter into a dialogue with the society...

...Its current policy, predictably, is to stress Poland's "moral" obligations to Moscow and to issue shrill attacks on "antisocialist elements...

...and in his final speech Kania promised greater cooperation with labor unions, nonparty people, other social groups, and the Catholic Church...

...Yet what are we to make of the many conflicting signals...

...In January 1971, during the workers' uprising in Gdansk, the Church in effect cooperated with the party, urging the workers to preserve calm and order, go back to work, and not endanger the existing political order...

...6 Another leader of KOR, Jacek Kuron, further elaborated strategic principles proposing as the optimum form of opposition national self-defense based on solidarity: 24 Open protest, synchronized in a number of centers unites the country and becomes a social movement...

...This statement is surely remarkable as much for its political sagacity as for its open-mindedness...

...People unlawfully condemned and persecuted...

...How relevant will my closing comments be five weeks hence, when they finally reach the reader...

...Piasecki died two years ago, but Pax—under the leadership of one of his prewar fascist henchmen—marches on...

...It is probably this very policy that brought the country to the present state of collapse, and triggered the explosion of mass discontent...

...Walesa's attitude is no less relevant...

...It is also disturbing that he old practice of scapegoating still prevails, as demonstrated at the October Plenum, where much more was said about the "guilt" of Gierek & Co...

...For the party has not merely lost its credibility...

...Above all, Michnik argued, "the duty of the opposition is to participate continually and systematically in public life, to create political facts through collective action, and to propose alternatives...

...In October warnings by so stalwart an official "liberal" as Mieczyslaw Rakowski, editor of the influential weekly Polityka, that the party must keep its promises to the workers and allow them "to participate in the political process," or else face "a catastrophe," were eagerly quoted by Western observers (including myself) as evidence of remarkable candor as well as of an internecine struggle whose outcome could not be predicted...

...In March 1968 Piasecki's newspaper provided the most perverse "justification" for the anti-Semitic campaign led by Mieczyslaw Moczar, then Poland's minister of the interior, by arguing that "international Zionism" had entered into an unholy alliance with West Germany in order to discredit Polish communism, and that the striking student leaders—only some, incidentally, of Jewish origin— were agents of that sinister conspiracy...

...Nothing has been the same since...

...That Moscow is concerned about the developments in Poland, that the growth of autonomous social groups and institutions challenging the Communist party's monopoly of power—and forcing the party to deal with them—is viewed with the greatest alarm by Moscow is beyond a doubt...

...Certainly, by summer 1978 there were plenty of signs that social tensions were nearing a breaking point...

...KOR and Robotnik have exerted enormous influence on both the unions and the behavior of striking workers...

...With understandable pride, the editor told me that the weekly now appeared in 20,000 copies," but he candidly admitted that the goal of organizing parallel trade unions could hardly be realized within the foreseeable future...

...By 1976 the situation had changed drastically...

...Another useful way to protest is to paint slogans in aerosol—it's faster that way—in public places...

...Still, the party had to acquiesce to a de facto private sector and contending centers of influence...

...If economic aid is to be extended to Poland—and it is mandatory, lest Poland completely disintegrate—it must be given on condition (subject to continuous supervision and verification) that it be used not only to feed the population, but also to enact sweeping economic (which is to say also political) reforms...

...The latter term, however, should not be misconstrued...

...But the primate—and the episcopate—may also be expected to warn against excessive zeal and militancy, to urge moderation and, indeed, given the immense moral stature of the Church, to play the part of supreme arbiter between the workers (and society as a whole) and the ruling authorities...

...The reward for outrageous idiocy should surely go to one newspaper, which—after 100,000 had already laid down their tools—reported that "recently there have been cases where workers, after mutual clarification, brought the director bouquets of flowers...

...the March 1968 student demonstrations in Warsaw were obviously not unrelated to the heady developments in Czechoslovakia...

...The demands of each strike must contain, in addition to economic matters, specific demands for an end to political repression as well...

...KOR has obviously been a thorn in the flesh of the authorities...

...and there now is evidence of the effects of the Polish strikes on the Baltic republics, the Ukraine, and beyond...

...If allowed to fester, they will have the most deleterious effect on the workers' ability to withstand the still powerful attempts by the regime to undermine the strength and effectiveness of what Kuron has called the emerging autonomous (or self-governing) groups in the society (see his article on p. 34...

...In some instances, unfortunately, the director had the trade union chairman in his pocket, for he could increase his pay when necessary...

...IT HAS BY NOW BECOME almost commonplace to say that Poland enjoys a sort of "political pluralism...

...The August 15 Robotnik carried a long editorial called "What to Demand," which again showed the editors' meticulous attention to social and political ramifications of labor unrest...

...led to the exhaustion of its material and human resources...

...I Jan Litynski, one of the editors of Robotnik, told me in a telephone interview on September 2, 1980 that the print run of his newspaper had then reached 40,000—a figure subsequently confirmed by other sources...

...e Michnik, "The New Evolutionism...

...12 "Work stoppages" was the general euphemism...

...The government simply refused to draw any meaningful conclusions from the June 1976 riots: not only did bureaucratic disasters and contradictory ad hoc measures proliferate (as is now officially admitted), but the system of extreme political and economic centralization was continued...

...6. Finally, there is the problem of the reaction of the Soviet Union and at least of some of its East European allies—a problem that preoccupies some Western observers to the exclusion of any other present and potential developments in Poland...

...Political Opposition IF I DWELL on the term "pluralism," it is partly because precisely that demand—for genuine pluralism—constitutes the common slogan of today's political opposition, and partly because precisely that half-hearted, grudgingly tolerated, and never fully realized "pluralization" of Polish life has provided the ground for a political opposition...

...the massacre of 15,000 Polish army officers at Katyn in 1940...

...The story of Piasecki boggles the mind...

...Yet this new "pluralism" represents a momentous achievement, and it is slowly becoming part of the country's collective consciousness...

...It dealt with wages ("pay should rise at least in step with the cost of living"), the struggle for "a 40-hour work week without reduction of wages," occupational safety, open and equal sharing of material privileges "to liquidate privileged groups, e.g., the militia and party apparatus," and the need to organize free trade unions...

...The Party's own leadership has been responsible from start to finish for the real and tragic defeats suffered by the Party.' And who would have expected words such as these in an interview with a high official of the now defunct Central Trade Union Council in Gdansk, published in the Belgrade daily Politika on October 15, 1980: 21 In many factories, especially the big ones, those who were appointed trade union leaders frequently also got higher pay and therefore they would draw closer to the administration and the director...

...12 It was due largely to these efforts that on August 14 the official media were finally forced to acknowledge massive labor unrest throughout the country...

...Who would have thought a year ago that high-ranking members of the ruling elite, some of them uncomfortably close to the now deposed Edward Gierek, would be arrested for bribery, embezzlement, illegal currency transactions, extravagant personal enrichment —and that workers who had been paid handsome sums for building sumptuous villas for their "leaders" would relate their experiences over public television...

...Fissures and differences between "militants" and "moderates" are now in evidence...

...All the rest is literature...

...It was not KOR that carried on official propaganda...

...Go back to some of Nagy's statements of 1953-54, or to the disclosures made by the Hungarian party in 1956, again substitute "Polish" for "Hungarian," and the similarities are no less striking...

...than to its own leaders, be forced to go back to work, much less to maintain the kind of discipline and productivity that are essential if the country is ever to emerge from its present state of ruin and bankruptcy...

...14 Nor is the fact that "antisocialist elements" —specifically KOR—are still singled out for attack (this after Walesa, the object of Kania's touching 27 courtship, has again publicly praised it...

...Having led armed raids, first against the Germans and then against the Soviet troops, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, only to be allowed out of jail a few months later, with a mandate to found a pro-Communist Catholic organization, with its own press, daily paper, and vast network of economic enterprises...

...The so recent pleas that the regime honor its pledges to the workers now sound absurd, weeks after the authorities swallowed their pride and allowed Solidarity to acquire legal status...

...10 In 1977, an official from the censorship office in Cracow defected to Sweden with 600 printed pages of directives and regulations—for instance, "No information should be passed out about the annual coffee consumption in our country," and lists of foreign periodicals and authors that must never be mentioned in the press...

...an economic policy that...

...By now every Polish high school student knows of the fierce debates within the inner councils of the elite and, what's more, couldn't care less...

...Pressure from Below ONE RESULT OF 1976, directly bearing on the current situation, has been a formulation of general goals and principles of action, embraced with remarkable unanimity by nearly all oppositional groups regardless of ideological coloration...

...In itself it is not synonymous with stability, with the attainment of a decent living standard, or with the solution of social ills that have concerned parts of the opposition at least as much as the problem of political democratization (e.g., how to deal more effectively with the persistence of thievery, alcoholism, xenophobia, narrow-minded exclusivism, and so forth...

...See my article "The Open Politi30 cal Struggle in Poland," New York Review of Books, February 8, 1979...

...Nor could the population, even more fiercely hostile to the U.S.S.R...

...3 Yet if it is true, to quote Kolakowski again, that the Polish party, like all the other ruling parties in Eastern Europe, has never relinquished its "unrelenting drive to nationalize everything, including culture and memory, feeling and thought, as well as...

...Michnik does not exclude dialogue with those elements in the United Workers' (that is, Communist) party that are guided by pragmatic considerations: A Party "pragmatist" has no reason to wish for democratic changes, to hope for political pluralism or for workers' self-government...

...A great deal depends on the West, too...

...A naked, brazen invasion, then, shorn of any even remotely plausible pretense of "popular support...

...Action in defense of arrested workers is essential, especially by their co-workers...

...The policy was ill conceived, utterly mismanaged, doomed to failure...

...Yet I am deeply conscious of the fact that our own concepts of "rationality" cannot easily be projected upon the Soviet leaders, that the Politburo's estimation of "cost-effectiveness" may yet prove appallingly "illogical" from our point of view—and that my analysis may thus prove to be dismally wrong...

...Another lesson had been learned from the bloody suppression of the workers' rising in December 1970: namely that, without an alliance between intellectuals and workers, no pressure against the regime's policies could succeed...

...3. It is difficult to judge how the party intends to deal with the new reality...

...Most economists agree that even if profound structural economic reforms are introduced, Poland's need to produce enough for export to repay its staggering foreign debt ($22 billion, and bound to soar in 28 the next few years) will entail a considerable lowering of the standard of living...

...For now independent trade unions have become a reality and the official unions have disappeared...

...Indeed, the very slogan that KOR and Robotnik had launched was, "Don't destroy— organize...

...Until the mid 'S0s there was only one lay Catholic organization: Pax, led by Boleslaw Piasecki, the rabidly anti-Semitic leader of the prewar fascist party Falanga, who had endeared himself to both the Moscow KGB and the Warsaw regime by promising to enlist the support of the Catholic masses for the "task of rebuilding Polish statehood...

...November 30, 1980 Stefan Bratkowski, Radio Warsaw, September 9, 1980...

...students' participation in running their own affairs...

...The conditions that precipitated the current crisis in Poland bear a marked resemblance to those that occasioned political crises in the past (1956, 1970, 1976...

...Who would have thought a year ago that a series of "work stoppages" in the summer of 1980 would result in the formulation of a "free and independent" trade union numbering about 9 million members, and that the party-controlled Central Council of Trade Unions would formally dissolve itself...

...23 The workers proved to be the single most powerful adversary of the party, in effect bringing down three governments in succession (in 1956, 1970, 1980...

...In the 1960s the Church began taking a progressive stand on economic and social issues, thus moving closer to the fundamental ideas of the Second Vatican Council...

...after Kania openly asked Walesa and his 10 or 12 million trade union followers to "help" the party by becoming its ally in the reconstruction and renovation of their "beloved homeland...

...Shortly,thereafter he invited Kuron to act as adviser to the Interfactory Consultative Committee, the body that was forming the new, independent trade union...

...Three, the elan and unity of the labor movement will be slowly eroded by internal squabbling, cynicism, and disillusionment...

...100, 1976...

...But the same pragmatists have reason to think that a compromise with the forces struggling for political pluralism can be more effective than brutal repression...

...Who would have believed that the Sejm (parliament), a sham body—which only four years ago voted (with one abstention), via a special constitutional amendment, to sanctify the subordination of the country's political system to the Communist party and of the country as a whole to the Soviet Union—would become the scene of fiery speeches denouncing the Sejm as nothing more than a "kind of decorative facade or a rubber stamp to seal the decisions made elsewhere...

...During the strikes this past summer, KOR set up an information bureau that supplied both the country and foreign correspondents with a daily stream of carefully documented information, particularly valuable during the first week of July, when the official media either kept silent or presented palpably distorted information...

...In the last analysis, Soviet actions are determined not by "ideological" but by practical considerations...

...which] retains the right to act on its own initiative.9 Trade Unions: Pluralism in Action TWO YEARS AGO, when I was in Poland and listened to Jacek Kuron's enthusiastic outline of his vision of a network of autonomous "social groups" that would gradually force the government to yield to their demands, I thought it rather too good to come true...

...13 Reuter, September 1, 1980...

...the need to destroy all forms of communal life than those it sets up itself,"4 it is equally true that this urge has never been successfully consummated...

...It is, in fact, this dogged resistance to any meaningful co-participation in the process of politics that constitutes one of the basic causes of the current crisis...

...In assessing the current situation, many analysts rightly stress the emergence of various oppositional currents in the wake of the Polish workers' uprising of June 1976...

...This is clearly something the party is acutely aware of: one of Kania's first acts was to hold a meeting with Wyszynski, which (according to the official communique published on October 22), resulted in a "common view that constructive cooperation between the Church and the state serves well the interests of the nation, and that is why it will continue in the name of Poland's well-being and security...

...The events of 1968 also had dismayed liberals of the Znak persuasion, and by 1976 many of them were thoroughly disillusioned with their policy of endless compromise with the regime...

...Before the war, he advocated the forcible expulsion of all Jews from Poland, and his Falanga specialized in throwing bombs at Jewish stores and May Day demonstrators...

...you will survive and hold out...

...For the past 300 years it has survived as a nation without genuine statehood (except for the wretched two decades between the World Wars...

...Yet it is hardly fortuitous that among the most active members of KOR, as well as of the more nationalistically inclined Movement for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCIO) that emerged in March 1977, there are many people with considerable experience in past political struggles...

...There is no basis for either trumpeting about antisocialist forces or frightening our allies...

...Since so much has (and will have) been written on this doleful subject, let me add merely a few comments here...

...There are a number of reasons why Poland has not developed into a full-blown totalitarian state, and all of them relate to its history, traditions, and political culture...

...Instead, let me add a few comments on current trends and on their implications for the future, as they appear from the vantage point of late November 1980: 1. The changes of the past five months are irreversible...

...an end to preventive censorship and to the steady diet of absurd and mendacious propaganda...

...Its only beneficiaries were the various bureaucracies, and its victims were the workers, the peasants—indeed, the population at large...

...A society, held together by an omnipotent party disposing of all the instruments of political and social control, again has found its voice and forced the rulers to listen...

...I recall talking to one of the editors of Robotnik (The Worker), a four-page off-set newspaper edited by members of KOR, with contributions from workers throughout the country...

...The last, I think, is the least likely...

...Who would have believed that Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, whose works have not only been banned but excoriated in the Polish press, would be interviewed via telephone, in Berkeley, by Radio Warsaw—and that his works would be mounted in a solemn exhibition in Lublin...

...Thus far Solidarity has apparently followed —both in theory and in practiceKuron's advice to resist "co-optation" and to act as a continuing source of pressure on the authorities...

...Lay Catholic groups have been allowed to run their clubs and publications...

...Since 1956, most of the country's tillable land has been owned by private farmers...

...But independent trade unions...

...Between 1956 and 1976 political opposition was fragmented, unorganized, and parochial...

...9 Jacek Kuron, "Reflections on a Program of Action," Polish Review (London), vol...

...IT SEEMS pointless, therefore, to trace the most recent developments in extenso...

...At the Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee, held early in October, the new First Secretary fully admitted that the party was facing "the most difficult crisis in the history of the People's Poland," a crisis whose roots lay in "faulty economic and social policies as well as in improper methods of government...

...But only in Poland have such upheavals occured with regularity, and only in Poland has the ruling party found itself challenged by a rebellion at once national—that is, embracing in effect all groups of society—and disciplined...

...In addition to economic demands, this editorial urged the workers to press for the formation of free trade unions, freedom of speech and association, and an immediate change in the government's agricultural policy...

...after a leading Catholic member of the Sejm (that is, not a party member and not even a "non-party Bolshevik") has been appointed Poland's deputy prime minister, and after the party press actually has opened its pages to officials of the new independent trade unions...

...Political opposition groups were spreading, becoming more self-confident...

...Articles have dealt with such subjects as the reasons for recurrent food shortages, police repression, the structure of trade unions in Western democratic countries, the history of the Polish labor movement, Polish-Soviet relations, agricultural problems and peasants' attempts to organize themselves, recent experiences of Polish workers in establishing ad hoc forms of collective bargaining with management, and the nature of Polish labor laws...

...Not merely had its version of Marxism-Leninism long ceased to be a source of ideological mobilization, but even attempts to use it as a fig leaf for expediency were laughable, greeted by the average Pole with contempt and derision...

...Still, right now it is difficult to see what Moscow could gain from trying to subjugate a country of 35 million people...

...In this sense the party's constant appeals to the workers to go back to their jobs and reestablish industrial discipline and productivity are not mere ruses...

...the refusal of the Soviet armies, then at the Vistula river, to come to the aid of Warsaw's June 1944 uprising against its German occupiers—all these have hardly disappeared from the Poles' collective memory...

...Why "Political Pluralism...

...5 After Gomulka's accession to power in 1956, the liberal lay Catholics were allowed to establish a loose coalition called Znak (Sign...

...the foreign debt stood at about $16 billion...

...Clearly, other countries in Eastern Europe are bound to be affected by the rise of independent trade unions (and tomorrow by other independent bodies as well): the Poznan riots of June 28, 1956 took place a day after the stormy meeting of the Petofi Circle in Budapest that ushered in the Hungarian revolution...

...The publication of these directives by KOR in Poland— and then in the West—was a major embarrassment to the regime...

...During the war Piasecki headed an organization that dreamed of establishing an "imperial Slavic state," with Poland at its head, on the ruins of both bolshevism and nazism...

...The term, I think, is appropriate, yet once it is accepted as a workable description, what happens to the theories of "totalitarianism...

...Lest these details seem arcane, let me merely mention at this point that it is precisely one of the offshoots of the original Znak—the Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia— which has, next to KOR, played an important role in the formation of the "Solidarity" unions...

...Polish nationalism has been kept alive by aspirations for independence, repeated insurrections, intense religious faith, and a no less intense hostility to Russia—the most powerful and ruthless of the three historic enemies 22 of Poland...

...the daily press has proved reasonably equal to this task...

...than about endemic features of the country's political and economic system...

...and its satellites, and a vastly accelerated arms race that Moscow can ill afford...

...Two, the power of the militants will grow—very likely as a result of stubborn and disruptive tactics pursued by the regime—and their demands will escalate beyond objectively reasonable limits...

...Hardly...

...2 Action Program adopted at Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia on April 5, 1968...

...22, no...

...2 Insert the word "Polish" and the story is virtually identical...

...5 See Alexander Korab, "Piasecki and the Polish Communists," Problems of Communism (Washington, D.C...

...an end to discrimination against religious believers...

...But their actions were episodic, lacking in ideological continuity, and above all were never coordinated with other groups...

...But all of them regard the Church as a model for "moral justice and honesty," as "the foundation upon which the crisis could be solved"—this despite the fact, he added, that the Church has of course "its own, specific tasks, and the workers have their own...

...See Index on Censorship (London), JulyAugust 1978...

...The Nazi-Soviet pact...

...In the 1970s, Western bankers inundated Poland with massive credits, used by the government for investments in heavy-industry projects...

...It should be given credit for it...

...Don't 25 forget to include a few issues of Robotnik...

...their families and relatives subjected to mistrust and humiliation...

...A social movement is a joint form of action in which every participant realizes his aims by acting in a small, independent group...

...He also has recently been reappointed chairman of the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, the Polish veterans' organization (a position from which he had been ousted by Gierek...

...in Documents on Today's CSSR (Prague: Svoboda Publishing House, July 1968...

...It is also indisputable that any explicitly anti-Soviet rebellion, or the collapse of the party's authority both in substance and appearance, or (however unlikely the scenario) a Polish repudiation of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, or any open advocacy of a multiparty system would make the compulsion to invade well-nigh irresistible...

...Even this sparse recital should make clear why Poland could never succumb to complete Sovietization, and why, almost from the beginning, a form of pluralism has existed in that country...

...Consider the following indictment: Suppression of the democratic rights and freedoms of the people, violation of laws, licentiousness and misuse of power which gravely and unjustly afflicted many citizens...

...Continuous wage increases and strikes are no answer...

...Now, nearly four weeks later, it strikes me that the opening section has acquired an air of antiquity...

...3, 1977...

...One can only conclude that Brezhnev and the aging men around him would have to be desperate to consider paying so staggering a price for the dubious advantage of bringing a renegade to heel...

...As for the Church, it kept its distance—from the political activities of the liberals and ex- (or neo-) Marxists, the lay Catholics, and from the workers...

...In his essay "The New Evolution," Michnik spells out some of the opposition's major demands: genuine representation for workers...

...There also are all the other consequences of such an invasion—such as perhaps an irrevocable break with various Communist parties throughout the world and with Moscow's clients in the Third World, and the collapse of any attempts to reach an understanding with Western powers (followed by a strengthening of Western alliances, the end of economic supports for the U.S.S.R...

...It also demanded concessions from the state—greater access to public media, the right to legal status, greater possibilities to offer catechism lessons to schoolchildren, and so forth—in return for its support for the government's efforts at achieving social stability...

...7 The Church's policy vis -a-vis the regime is highly complex...

...It is not surprising that the Communist party commanded so little popular support before the war, and even less when it seized power under the protection of Soviet bayonets...

...shortages of food and customer goods were mounting...

...According to the Polish news agency PAP (November 4, 1980), he then "recalled that Poland was the country that had suffered enormous human losses during the Second World War," among them "three million Polish citizens of Jewish extraction who for centuries have been living among us in the Polish lands, co-creating our history, making a great contribution to our culture and science...

...Moscow therefore would be compelled to prop up Poland economically, to the tune of billions of dollars—a task for which it is hardly equipped, with its own dismal prospects of precipitous economic decline, shortages of manpower, and rapid depletion of energy resources...

...In any case," Dubcek assured Brezhnev, "dear Comrade, we shall certainly not fire upon soldiers of the Soviet Army...

...Low standard and shortage of services of all sorts, which reduced the standard of living and aroused justified discontent...

...What's more, almost all of the opposition activities of that era were based on the assumption that the political system could be reformed "from above," as a result of—in the words of the young historian Adam Michnik, one of KOR's founders—"realistic policies implemented by intelligent leaders...

...3 As quoted in Flashpoint Poland, by George Blazynski (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1979), p. 376...

...In Poland, not only would there be resistance by the soldiers, but probably most of the officers of the Polish army, as well as the country as a whole, would put up a determined struggle...

...Still, Poland has already produced so many "fried snowballs" that it would not be astonishing if it were to produce the biggest of them all...

...No serious consideration was given to structural economic reforms and no effort made to draw nonparty groups or individuals into the party's confidence...

...The rise of General Moczar and his henchmen to new positions of prominence is hardly good news...

...Whatever the future may bring—continuous chaos, economic collapse, Soviet intervention (about this more below), or a gradual but perceptible resolution of the crisis—Poland will never return to the status quo ante...

...to do so would be to sign one's own death warrant...

...Behavior that seemed heroic in the aftermath of the Gdansk Agreement looks fairly ordinary today—and may well evoke little more than a knowing smile come January 1981...

...Perhaps, by the time these lines appear, it will have done so: given the steady and indeed catastrophic erosion of its authority, the party's interests lie in swiftly setting guidelines for the changes ahead...

...But after the June 1976 workers' uprising, the Church came out openly in behalf of the persecuted workers, began to cooperate tacitly with the Opposition, and started to voice demands for economic and social justice, for freedom of expression and abolition of censorship—in general, for human rights...