Sealing Off Solidarity

...To many observers, Poland's needs are so great that nothing less than a new Marshall Plan could be meaningful...

...We take credit for everything that goes right, although of late, that hasn't been too much...

...And neighbors of this kind are what Solidarity and its intellectual advisers from the Roman Catholic Church fear the most...

...One way of anticipating Soviet objections would be to propose a joint American and European Community undertaking...

...is a question increasingly asked in Eastern Europe...

...We are now able to ask Donald R. Shanor , a past contributor, is director of the Columbia School of Journalism's International Division...

...People tell of real cases of starvation in some places, and of hospitals regularly turning away patients since there is no hope of treating them with both medicine and food supplies exhausted...

...For this to happen, however, the Polish example must be made far more attractive than it is now...

...Somehow, the political aims of Solidarity are forgotten, which is exactly what the Party leaders want...

...The view is widespread in the bloc that local supply problems are caused by helping Poland...

...There were stories in the Soviet press this summer of serious meat shortages in the Ukraine, which borders Poland, and Ukrainians were sure their neighbor was at fault...

...That is the Kremlin's formula for building the empire it wants on its Western flank in Europe: one consisting of countries more concerned with the price of a Lada or Skoda car than the costs of a bureaucracy insulated from almost every expression of the popular will...

...is a recurrent question, and there are many stories about Poles in Western cars crammed with consumer goods crisscrossing neighboring countries, making sales of blue jeans to buy up local food supplies...

...The work week was slowly being shortened under the economic reforms in place since 1968, they say, and this year was the final phase...

...he and his circle then argued that economic and political reform would spread in tandem through Eastern Europe...

...But the important point is that such small concessions do not add up to anything resembling the repercussions an upheaval like Poland's might be expected to have in the bloc-because Poland is indeed in a bad way...

...POLAND'S NEIGHBORS Sealing Off Solidarity BY DONALD R. SHANOR Warsaw In addition to the two very much publicized contests over Poland?between Solidarity and the regime, and the regime and the Soviet Union?a third one is being waged that will determine whether the new freedom here, if it survives, will spread to the rest of Eastern Europe...

...But it has been easy to persuade these populations that they are nevertheless far better off than the Poles...

...The Poles do not now propose uprisings...

...Shortages, hours of standing in line for food, overcrowded transportation, and shoddy workmanship are as endemic in most of Eastern Europe in the '80s as they were in the '50s...

...The government freely predicts the worst winter since World War II...

...The Soviet Union and the leaderships of Eastern Europe have long recognized it, as a glance at the daily press in any of the capitals of the area shows, and they have attempted to quarantine the source of potential trouble...

...Where are the Americans...

...Although these problems have been around for a long time, complaints had been limited so strictly that very little was done about solving them...

...To try to launch something similar now would require a degree of political delicacy not much in evidence recently in Washington...

...The political liberalization was stopped by Soviet tanks and the economic improvements were used as a substitute for freedom...

...Solidarity gets blamed for everything that goes wrong," a Warsaw official conceded...

...Hungarians were granted a 40-hour week after the gains in working conditions made by Solidarity, but officials insist the Polish situation had nothing to do with it...

...Each agricultural area in East Germany has a quota of meat it must ship to Poland this year, above and beyond existing trade agreements...

...Why don't they get back to work...

...During conversations with ordinary people in Eastern Europe outside Poland, it is disturbing to hear the propaganda cliches repeated approvingly...

...In any case, observers inside and outside Poland are beginning to reach the conclusion that something drastic must be done to shore up the economy, not necessarily for the sake of Solidarity's international image but for the welfare of the Polish people in the coming hard winter months...

...The United States has only modestly stepped up its food aid...

...Thus far, the tactic has been largely successful because the Communist authorities are able to use, with powerful effect, the great contradictions between the promise of Polish liberalization and the actual conditions in the country...

...We are willing to wait a little longer for political liberalization," a Hungarian economist told me, "if it is a question of risking our economic gains of the past few years...

...True, not entirely...

...Poles and Hungarians are fond of reminiscing these days about the heady autumn of 25 years ago when revolt broke out in both nations simultaneously and the Soviet Union found itself in great difficulty, although its Army eventually managed to prevail...

...Does that mean Poles must get back to work, as their East European neighbors say...

...Officials, of course, will not hear of a connection to Poland...

...The rest of Eastern Europe knows about this from the Communist media, whose simple message is that Solidarity equals economic chaos, and from Western reports as well...

...From our district, it's 7,000 tons," a Brandenburg intellectual said...

...They need support if their movement is to be anything other than a national one, isolated and exposed to all the wrath and retribution of Moscow...

...more questions and get more answers," he said...

...Solidarity recognized the importance of this front when, at its Gdansk congress last September, it expressed "support" for workers in neighboring Communist nations willing "to enter the difficult road of struggle for free and independent trade unions...

...Whatever the reason, the reformed economy is Hungary's best argument against the need for aggressive trade union activity, and one most Hungarians, who are relatively prosperous by Eastern standards, seem to accept...

...Of course, every question must still be prefaced by a commitment to socialism, and all criticism must be constructive...

...A schoolteacher from East Berlin, a staunch member of the Socialist Unity Party and defender of the Konsum-Kommunismus policies that have given his country one of the highest living standards in the bloc, spoke about growing frankness in the meetings of his trade union since the Polish August...

...It did not...

...Solidarity answers that many more hours are lost to strikes in the West than have been lost in Poland since August 1980...

...Yet if properly advanced, the Kremlin might find it hard to oppose a plan for feeding people and getting factories going again...

...Meat production is down by a third this year alone, and the distribution system has almost completely collapsed...

...Topics include the spot shortages of food and consumer goods that continue to plague East Germany, the difficulty of getting housing, and the shortage of day care facilities...

...While Western Europe has been shipping food to Poland, European Community officials have turned down appeals for a giant barter deal involving the Market' s agricultural surplus stockpiles and Polish coal...

...Thirteen years ago, when Czechoslovak liberalization had the bloc astir, his reaction had been markedly different...

...It also knows from its own experience...

...At the very least the Soviet Union would then be forced to show its hand: It would have to make clear whether it wants an economically stable Poland and an end to the drain on its own resources and those of its East European dependencies, or whether it is prepared to let the chaos continue at great cost to the Polish people as a means of discrediting Solidarity and keeping its doctrines quarantined...

...And that's 7,000 tons less for us...

...They would merely like to see some of Solidarity's notions of grass roots participation in the political process take hold outside Poland-not only because they think these ideas would be good for East Germany or Hungary, but because they don't want to be left standing alone...

...Romanians believe it was more than trying to cope with an increasingly inadequate food supply that prompted their government's sudden decision to give wider scope to the private plots of farmers working for collective or state farms...

...The Soviet Bloc was forced by the Russians to turn down the original Marshall Plan in the '40s...

...And the blame, in Poland or in the bloc, is placed squarely on Solidarity, not on those who ran the economy all the years before the August 1980 birth of the trade union movement...