The Turning Point in Poland

...Despite police harassment, the intellectual opposition has been operating during the last four years with comparative freedom and has been publishing volumes of uncensored publications...

...They are no longer impressed by attempts to settle every new crisis with the ritualistic replacement of "hard liners" by more "pragmatic" Party functionaries, supposedly sympathetic to the "reforms" being sought...

...STRIKING AT THE SYSTEM The Turning Point in Poland By Jan Nowak Washington When the first strikes triggered by the government's sharp increase of meat prices broke out at several Warsaw factories early last July, it looked like Poland might again be the scene of the unprecedented-for a Soviet bloc nation...

...Polish experience has demonstrated, however, that monopoly of power can be a flexible notion...

...As a result, new trouble developed in the southern city of Lublin...

...Instead, the authorities began negotiating with spontaneously elected strike committees...

...But the present regime can only obtain such sacrifices if it is prepared to share power and responsibility with the factory workers, the farmers, the intellectuals, and the Church...

...The jamming of Radio Liberty was never stopped...

...And the official trade unions, tools of the regime, were ignored...

...Polish history is abundant with examples of self-sacrifice by the people...

...A pattern emerged distinctly different from that of the previous economically motivated upheavals in 1956,1970 and 1976: This time there was no violence on either side, or even any arrests...

...The scenario, though, did not play...

...Indeed, under the circumstances there was better reason to show patience...

...Some prominent members of the Committee for Social Self-Defense, including dissident leader Jacek Kuron, also were arrested...

...Gierek, who had himself been brought to his post a decade earlier by rioting in Gdansk and Gdynia, responded that acceptable limits had been overstepped...

...For good reason: With military spending eating up 15 per cent of the national income, the standard of living of the Soviet worker is well below that of his Polish counterpart...

...in the USSR it is 125 pounds...

...Neither was the Party able to rally support by "accepting responsibility" for past errors...

...In 1980, not only were the rebellious workers insisting that their demands be formalized, but their call for free trade unions directly challenged the Communist system...

...Most important politically, such an outcome would mean de facto recognition of the right to strike, and of informal workers' committees as a kind of substitute for free trade unions...

...I do not mean to suggest a fear in the Kremlin that discontented Soviet workers, too, are about to resort to widespread, simultaneous strikes...

...This would seem to explain why, for the first time since the early days of detente, Moscow is again jamming the Voice of America, the BBC and Deutsche Welle, the West German foreign language broadcasting service...

...The turning point came August 14...

...There was no reason to send in troops to Warsaw to replace Gierek, who has remained a loyal viceroy of Moscow...

...Full awareness of the struggles in Poland could therefore serve as a catalyst for further resistance...

...Jan Nowak, a new contributor to the NL, is a specialist on Polish affairs...

...The spectacle of Soviet tanks crushing striking Polish workers, the Kremlin recognized, would be extremely expensive in political terms...

...The difference was not lost on the Soviet leaders, and beyond a ripple effect in the other Eastern bloc countries they have shown themselves to be concerned about the impact at home...

...Thus, Gierek's most pressing difficulty at the moment is a lack of credibility...

...Moscow could no longer trust them...

...Hence the ouster of Prime Minister Edward Babiuch and three other Politburo members on August 24 had no influence on the latest confrontation...

...More immediately, the country is fast heading toward economic disaster...

...No sooner was that settled-following the establishment of a commission on workers' rights at an emergency Politburo meeting-than the garbagemen, bus drivers and taxi drivers in Warsaw walked out...

...Peasants have successfully resisted collectivization, so that 75 per cent of the land still remains in the hands of small holders...

...Since the workers' demands were limited to wage increases and related benefits, plus assurances in writing that strike leaders would not be persecuted, it appeared an agreement would be reached, ending the unrest...

...The impact of such blood baths on the Third World, Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc and the governments and people of Western Europe would be much worse than the invasion of Afghanistan...

...The Soviet authorities are apparently quite prepared to allow their people to hear foreign broadcasts on virtually every embarrassing subject-Afghanistan, Soviet troops in Africa, the Olympic boycott...

...The root of the trouble in Poland is the widespread consciousness that the system imposed by the Soviet Union simply does not work...

...Moscow and its regime in Warsaw have been grudgingly tolerant, for instance, of the independence and vitality of the Church...

...Servicing the foreign debt will take 70 per cent of the country's hard currency earnings-A situation bound to be worsened by rising oil prices and the need to import more grain to maintain domestic meat production...

...Among the first demands made now were official recognition of free trade unions and of the right to strike, as well as the elimination of censorship and access to the mass media by all religious denominations...

...Even the radical agreement signed by Lech Walesa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski will not bring stability to Poland until it is established that the vested interests of the Party bureaucrats and the resistance of the Party dogmatists can be overcome...

...Add to this the reduced hay, potato and sugar beet production caused by recent floods, and the heavy losses resulting from the late summer strikes (estimated at $20 million daily), and you have the seeds of a fresh winter crisis accompanied by an acute food shortage...

...There was, moreover, a significant difference between the situation in Poland and what had occurred earlier in Eastern Europe...

...But they are already demonstrating their frustration through deliberately slow and sloppy work, absenteeism and growing alcoholism as an escape from reality...

...In refusing to negotiate and warning of the peril facing Poland if the Communist monopoly of power were challenged, he raised the specter of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968...

...And precisely how ready it is-or how far Moscow will allow it to go-remains a big question mark...

...The expensive and very determined jamming operation began as soon as the Polish workers escalated their demands and the crisis deepened...

...Nor is it a secret that the decline in agricultural production was brought on by economic discrimination against private farms, in accordance with Party dogma, preventing their modernization...

...The workers have been fooled too often by promises never kept...

...To begin with, Moscow will surely keep an uneasy eye trained on the implementation of the agreement reached between the Gierek government and the strikers...

...Everyone knows that over the last decade faulty central planning wasted foreign credits totaling $19.5 billion...

...Wage increases now have to be paid out in inflationary currency...

...That day the workers in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk went on strike, took over the premises and installed 37-year-old Lech Walesa as their leader...

...Both Imre Nagy in Budapest in 1956 and Aleksandr Dub-cek in Prague in 1968 had allowed themselves to be carried away by the revolutionary tide and sided with the people...

...Although the unprecedented has been achieved in Poland after all, the problems have certainly not been resolved...

...On the other hand, in the past Moscow tolerated Polish deviations from its own rigid pattern of Communism with the tacit condition that no concession be made a part of the legal structure...

...In sum, the Polish people feel the fruit of their labor is being lost through mismanagement, organizational inefficiency and political rigidity...

...A cool, charismatic man, he had been dismissed for his participation in the 1970 and '76 uprisings, and during the past year-while pursuing odd jobs to support his wife and six children-had been active in a group called the Baltic Free Trade Union...

...But, as the scant and misleading reports in the Soviet press also indicate, they do not want it widely known that the industrial working class in a fraternal "workers' state" has won such rights as independent trade unions and access to the state controlled media...

...Communist Party boss Edward Gierek refused to give in on the wage hikes, ostensibly because they would be inflationary...

...Workers have twice brought about a change of Party leadership and won considerable concessions, making themselves a political factor to be reckoned with...

...In Poland, for instance, the annual per capita consumption of meat is 160 pounds...