Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Gomulka's Vote Of Confidence Many factors must have entered into the vote of confidence which Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka obtained at...
...However, Chou's imprimatur presumably offered some guarantee against intervention by Moscow...
...What Gomulka has accomplished during the few months of his administration gives some reason for cautious optimism...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Gomulka's Vote Of Confidence Many factors must have entered into the vote of confidence which Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka obtained at the polls...
...It is conceivable that the "many roads to socialism" theory can be stretched to a point where Poland, intellectually and economically, might be something like the Soviet Union was under the NEP...
...there are Soviet divisions in Poland and much larger forces immediately across the border in the Soviet Zone of Germany...
...He is under pressure from Moscow to conform more and more to the re-emerging pattern of Stalinism in the Kremlin, and under pressure from the Polish people (including rank-and-file Communists) to move farther away from the bear-hug of the Soviet Union with an eventual independent neutral status as the ideal...
...there is less restraint on the publication of religious publications...
...Terror and demoralization were spread...
...Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, who has also done some expert tightrope balancing since 1948, was in a much more favorable position than Gomulka...
...Polish newspapers are relatively the freest in the Soviet sphere of influence...
...He benefited from endorsement by such dissimilar individuals as the Polish Primate, Cardinal Wyezynski, and the visiting Chinese Communist Premier, Chou En-lai...
...The Polish armed forces are no longer commanded by a Soviet marshal...
...There is no reason for the United States to go overboard for his regime...
...Cardinal Wyszynski and other high dignitaries were released from internment...
...But he may have learned wisdom and sympathy from his own experience of Stalin's terror...
...He gave a scathing analysis of failure all along the line economically, of inefficiency of collective farms, decline in individual coal output, deplorable living conditions...
...But mass abstention or wholesale deletion of the names of Communist candidates would nevertheless have hurt his prestige...
...The price that had to be paid for Chou En-lai's endorsement was perhaps more bitter, because it included specific endorsement of the Quisling regime of Janos Kadar in Hungary— a regime that has reduced the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to its final absurdity by introducing the death penalty for strikers...
...After all the Poles suffered during and after the war, it is understandable that they should see a certain virtue in discretion...
...Many people were submitted to bestial tortures...
...But there would seem to be no valid objection to increased American-Polish cultural contacts, with 110 political strings attached, or to the modest measures of economic aid which the United States is beginning to adopt...
...It is a current Warsaw wisecrack that the Hungarians have been acting like Poles, the Poles like Czechs, and the Czechs like swine...
...it is reported that lines form in front of Moscow newsstands to buy these papers...
...In the first place, this was not a free election in the Western sense of the term...
...Gomulka set an example of plain speaking when he took power, admitting that in Poland under the Stalinist regime "tragic events occurred when innocent people were sent to their death...
...Gomulka could not have lost, whatever the voters did...
...That neither of these occurred is partly due to some expert tightrope-walking by Gomulka...
...Certainly it is not for the West—which gave the brave Hungarians not a man, not a gun, not even a gesture (such as barring Kadar's delegates from the UN) —to criticize this attitude...
...There were no Soviet troops in Yugoslavia...
...If Moscow were clearly preparing to destroy the limited independence Poland now enjoys, the Polish Army would fight as bravely, and with more and better arms, than the Hungarians —but the military odds between the two would be grimly uneven...
...This would be a long way from the Western conception of democracy, but it would be a considerable improvement over Stalinist totalitarianism...
...Side by side with religious concessions have gone concessions to the peasants...
...religious instruction in the schools is permitted...
...Under these circumstances, progress toward a status comparable with Yugoslavia's, which may well be Gomulka's goal, is likely to be slow and checkered...
...Yet Gomulka's position remains precarious...
...Gomulka's election success most probably reflects not so much enthusiasm for his more moderate brand of Communism as a resigned feeling that nothing better can be hoped for at the present time...
...As many Poles in exile remember, Gomulka was a ruthless persecutor of non-Communists in the first phase of the new regime in Poland...
...There has been a considerable extension of religious freedom in Poland since the peaceful take-over by Gomulka and his followers in October...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 5
