Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Report from Gomulka's Poland By William Henry Chamberlin Warsaw Poland is now far enough away from the exhilarating days of October 1956 to make it possible to see more...
...Now all this has been radically changed...
...the election held after the October change offered the voters only one list of candidates...
...A Polish-American engineer, condemned to eight years in prison for "economic sabotage," has been rehabilitated and given a responsible post in a big new factory...
...The milder wind blowing in Poland now is also reflected in easier conditions for foreign visitors...
...Discontent on this issue, which finds expression in sporadic strikes, is the most serious threat to the stability of the Gomulka regime...
...Obviously a foreign visitor could not check up, but the sense of psychological relief is unmistakable...
...The dictatorship of the so-called United Workers party remains...
...About 10 per cent of the peasants were forced into collective farms...
...In most Polish schools, it has been restored...
...Such cases could be multiplied indefinitely...
...Proposals of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations to promote the exchange of scholars between Poland and the United States are welcomed...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS Report from Gomulka's Poland By William Henry Chamberlin Warsaw Poland is now far enough away from the exhilarating days of October 1956 to make it possible to see more clearly what has changed and what has remained unchanged in its Communist-dominated regime...
...The best guarantee that this relaxation is likely to remain is that the sinister UB, or secret police, has disappeared as an institution since October...
...Government spokesmen claim that there have been no political arrests since October and that all political prisoners, except some involved in armed uprisings, have been released...
...And Poland is still closely bound to the Soviet Union...
...Collective farming has been made voluntary, with the result that some 80 per cent of the collective farmers went back to their small individual farms...
...As a result, the price of land has risen, the value of a horse has doubled, and the prospects are for a good crop...
...Most serious of all, there has been little if any improvement in an appallingly low standard of living...
...American, British and French newspapers are now sold in Warsaw, although they arrive late and in such small quantities that they quickly disappear from the stands...
...The press is subject to censorship...
...For years, both were distrusted pariahs...
...To be sure, well-to-do peasants, or "kulaks," were not "liquidated" with the thorough brutality that was practiced in the Soviet Union...
...Persecution of the Church has also ceased...
...Most striking of all, this Communist government, whose leaders are atheists, has restored compulsory teaching of religion in the schools, provided that the majority of parents desire this...
...Arrested bishops and priests have been set free, and there is more freedom for Catholic publications...
...Pointing to the different political positions of Poland and Yugoslavia, a Polish publicist, a veteran member of the ruling party and hearty supporter of the new course, said: "There is more personal and intellectual freedom here...
...Two other important changes are in agrarian policy and in the Government attitude toward the Catholic Church, to which the majority of the Polish people are still attached...
...Before October, he would no more have thought of doing such a thing than of jumping off the top of the "Palace of Culture," the huge new building in Stalinist style which dominates the Warsaw skyline...
...Equally characteristic was the case of a woman who had lived abroad for some years and whose husband had fought with the Polish forces in the West...
...But Yugoslavia, because it doesn't directly border on Russia, enjoys more independence in foreign policy...
...While there have been real changes in Poland (one may also mention the disappearance of numerous Soviet military advisers), some things have not changed...
...A man came up to me in a public place and proceeded to denounce the Government, Communism and living conditions in general, ending with a most unfavorable comparison between Poland now and Poland before the war and expressing a fervent desire to emigrate...
...Now both have jobs...
...Industry and most trade remain under inefficient state operation, although somewhat more leeway has been given to private artisans and small traders...
...But they were persecuted by discriminatory taxation and in other ways, so that many of them threw up their farms and sought jobs in the cities...
...What the average citizen in Warsaw feels most strongly is the lifting of the terror: the possibility to speak his mind freely, to go to bed without fear that he will be awakened by the secret police, to get a job even if he has a "bourgeois" past, to mix with foreigners...
...In what is usually referred to here as "the Stalinist era," Polish Government policy in agriculture, as in other fields, was a pretty close imitation of the Soviet...
...Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the Primate, was released from the monastery to which he was confined for some years...
...Occasionally the new relative liberalism slips, as when the authorities expelled an American correspondent for "exaggerated" reporting of a strike by the Lodz streetcar workers...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 35
