PROMISE IN POLAND
PEW, THOMAS W. Jr.
PROMISE IN POLAND THOMAS W. PEW, JR. Yesterday and today: the same larger than life stylized posters still stare down on the workers in Polish factories exhorting them to be "with the Party." But...
...It is to these groups as well as to the new leadership that a report of Poland's Central Committee appealed when it acknowledged that after 1968 there had been "disappointment and lack of faith in the social and economic progress of the country and in the prospects of personal advancements...
...Czechoslovakia made the Soviet Union look bad enough...
...we need to prepare those instruments that will allow industry to operate more autonomously...
...It is a change that was deemed impossible by Polish watchers before it began...
...Beginning with changed faces: Since the meeting this winter of the Polish Party Congress (a meeting held one year ahead of schedule) several top Party people who were still with the Party last year are no longer with the Party this year...
...Every official seemed to want to get to the immediate gut issue as he saw it...
...Social motivation—strong emotional support are needed...
...Professor Burks believes that Gierek, like Kadar, will carefully avoid any Czechoslovakian kind of challenge to the Kremlin leaders...
...And this change of faces at the top signifies much more than just a cosmetic alteration...
...Two of the new men—Jablonski, the vice president of the Polish Academy, and Jagielski— hold doctorates, and two others hold master's degrees...
...In their place, Edward Gierek, the fifty-nine-year-old former emigre coal miner, who took power about a year ago in the wake of the bloody worker-consumer uprisings, has put younger men of his own choosing on the Politburo...
...After the December [riots] our new leadership understood the need for careful planning . . . the need was not for partial planning, but for long-range improvement...
...The joke was not without its point...
...Gierek himself put the finishing touches on the criticism when he said, "We are overcoming dogmatic petrification and subjectivism marked by lack of faith in the strength of the working class...
...And the report addressed every Pole when it admitted that "no marked improvement has been noted in commuter transportation in urban areas," and in areas where reform had been attempted it had been accomplished "feverishly," with the result that there was a conflict between central planning and economic instruments...
...The most important of these are the remnants of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), and members of the Catholic Church who did not go along with the Polish Stalinists in these organizations...
...Something like a mandate for Gierek's reforms was achieved in the parliamentary elections held in late March of this year...
...Moczar was a figure who appealed to hardliners and war veterans, and who distinguished himself by breaking the student demonstrations of 1968...
...From 1956 many people in our government accepted this in principle, but we have not done enough...
...The new faces were: Mieczyslaw Jagielski, head of the powerful economic planning commission...
...One wag among the journalists I was with quietly whispered that "they might try busing to get a more integrated society...
...In addition, a significant number of non-Communist Polish "experts" were reported in attendance at the meeting...
...Kadar has managed to get away with so many changes in Hungary because the Kremlin leaders trust him...
...This Gierek strategy is most clearly seen in the dismissal of the secret police chief Moczar, leader of the formerly powerful "partisan" faction in the Polish Communist Party (a group of wartime Communists who resisted the Nazi occupation...
...Perhaps they are not talking as openly as the people interviewed in similar positions in Yugoslavia, and perhaps their "market experiments" are not designed to go so far, and perhaps a Western journalist still feels an uncertainty about quoting the officials by name...
...The Polish Party Congress was different this year from the top down to the average member in attendance...
...And totally absent from any Polish Communist Party roster is the name of the former head man, Wladyslaw Gomulka...
...It is the right of every citizen that matters which concern him should be dealt with in a simple manner, without delays and bureaucracy...
...It is the most hopeful time in Poland in many years, and the people as well as officials reflect this new hope...
...State planning bodies do not do enough long-range planning, and they're too concerned with immediate problems...
...For instance, we have not done enough in making pricing more flexible...
...Gone from the Polish Politburo are the wartime Communists, among them the so-called collaborators who voluntarily led the Polish Party into Stalinism: former Foreign Minister Stefan Jedrychowski, former President Josef Cyrankiewicz, and the former Interior Minister and secret police chief, Mieczyslaw Moczar...
...the Party Secretariat, which is the working body, was increased from seven to eleven members, and the Central Committee from ninety-one to 115...
...Gierek's changes in top Party leadership and his wooing of non-Party people reveal that he intends to deal directly with a number of interest groups in Poland that have previously been on the outside...
...We are studying the experiences of Hungary and Yugoslavia as well as the German Democratic Republic...
...And as long as the Poles are cautious in their tampering with the position of the Party in society, the Russians are prepared to let them go a long way with social and economic reforms...
...In discussions I had with Polish officials who will supervise the implementation of Gierek's programs, the talk was full of the need for market economy experiments and social reform, words heard commonly today in Yugoslavia and Hungary, but never heard so openly before in Poland...
...The metamorphosis is aimed at improving the Polish quality of life by spreading consumer benefits, particularly housing...
...2. I intend to rule with new men in high Party positions, men who have backgrounds different from the old line professional Party types...
...The most remarkable comment on these needs came from a Polish official who responded to a question about the December demonstrations by saying: "Obviously we don't wish to have our work initiated by demonstrations...
...It spoke directly to the workers when it acknowledged that "a frequently bad atmosphere on the job, bad work organization, shortage of basic social facilities and sanitary installations" brought about rising social dissatisfaction...
...First, Edward Gierek, leader of the Polish Communist Party, and his reform regime came to power on the flood of a popular, worker revolt and not on the basis of some internal maneuvering among top Party leaders...
...He gathered the material for this article while he was on a Kettering Foundation fellowship in Eastern Europe last fall...
...5. I will see to it that the security police have a different role...
...First, Gierek made a blunt admission to past problems: Poland has come through a "bitter experience...
...In Poland, the trouble began with the workers and not with the leaders...
...Thus the demotions mean not just the dropping of offensive individuals, but the decline in influence, prestige, and power of the old Party apparat...
...The dropping of Cryankiewicz and the likely dropping of the Pax (the Roman Catholic group which went along with the Polish Stalinist leaders) reveal that Gierek intends to disregard the old Party members...
...Other changes included an expansion of the ruling bodies: the Politburo was increased by one to become an eleven-member body...
...prices are still frozen while wages have been rising, but these are static reforms and Gierek must yet prove that he can come through with more than new faces and encouraging words if he is "to move Poland off dead center...
...But the Party the posters admonish the worker to be with today is not the same Party the poster artist extolled as he drafted his work yesterday...
...On March 28 Parliament elected Jablonski as Poland's President, largely a ceremonial post...
...Thomas W. Pew, Jr., is editor and associate publisher of the Troy Daily News in Ohio...
...It is about the closest thing to a popular election —or at least the exercise of popular pressure—that has been seen anywhere in the Communist bloc and that has not been crushed...
...Stefan Olszowski, selected by Gierek for the Politburo, noted that now "more than half" of the Central Committee is made up of new members...
...For example, one told me: "We have found that our enterprises are not quick enough to introduce new techniques, new products...
...This plebiscite, which had been advanced a year to aid the reform program, produced a vote of confidence for the Gierek government as expected...
...But it also seems likely that the Polish people have had enough recent experience with invading armies to restrain themselves from irritating the Soviet leadership with too much Party reform...
...The numerous conversations I had with Polish economists and planners clearly showed that when they spoke of "a more flexible price system," or of seeking "the best possible balance" in economic systems, they were saying that their planners need a strong dose of supply and demand reality to meet the needs of the country and its people...
...Young people, families, lower income must be treated as important as some economic problems...
...Gierek, in openly appealing to non-Party members and to Roman Catholic "believers," is opening up the government to the large mass of intelligentsia...
...It is a change that makes Poland the most fascinating Communist bloc country to watch today...
...3. I will initiate experiments in management and supply and demand economics along the lines of the experiments tried in Hungary under Janos Kadar...
...In Poland last fall, the people I listened to at the Central Planning Committee, the Committee on Science and Technology, the Ministry of Agriculture, municipal officials, factory managers and foremen, and ordinary citizens talk in new terms...
...We need changes in production and for exchange to be expressed in prices...
...This emphasis on real problems contrasts sharply with the last Party Congress of November, 1968, when Gierek's ousted predecessor, Wladyslaw Gomulka, and other Party members spent their time in intrigues between rival factions and beating the bushes for Zionist intruders...
...He has been seeking a national mandate—a popular mandate —within and outside the ruling Communist Party...
...This did not eliminate them, but it demonstrated their relative unpopularity...
...We are sure our system will use more economic instruments in the future...
...And even though no one is expecting a repeat performance of the December, 1970, riots, Gierek must have the support of the people if his reforms are to succeed and if Poland is to turn around its back-sliding economy (housing construction actually decreased in 1970 and wages showed a lower-than-planned two per cent annual rise...
...General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Defense Minister...
...This would allow them the freedom from short-term problems—problems which repeat every year...
...and Franciszek Szlachcic, Interior Minister...
...Our goals were altered after the December disturbances, and we would like to get to know the needs from the enterprise level . . . from the lowest level...
...All of these changes, which include putting the younger, more pragmatic, Gierek men in places of influence, follow the broader pattern established last year when 10,500 persons were expelled from Party ranks after the December worker riots...
...Whether or not Gierek really has the support and trust of the Polish working class remains to be seen...
...Now we understand that we need prices to be much more flexible...
...Since December, 1970, when thousands of Polish workers were definitely not with the Party, when they were so exasperated with the social and economic doldrums that have become the trademark of modern Polish life under the Polish Communist Party that they took to the streets in the Baltic ports of Szczecin and Gdansk in violent protest over increased food and consumer prices, the Polish Communist Party has been going through a unique metamorphosis...
...The central planning body should be free to work on long-range problems while the enterprises should be making their own short-term plans...
...In addition, more than half of the 115-member central committee was changed at an election in which 1,815 delegates to the Sixth Party Congress participated...
...But of equal significance with the change of faces at the top announced at the Party Congress are Gierek's pronouncements and the frankness of a report of the Central Committee...
...He assured the assemblage of Communists that the Sixth Congress was gathered with a "justified sense of the support and trust of the Polish working class...
...The February, 1971, rollback of food and consumer price increases—increases that had touched off the riots—is still in effect...
...Workers were represented in larger numbers among the 1,815 delegates than at any previous congress," Dan Morgan of The Washington Post reported from Warsaw, and "some forty-three per cent of the delegates were workers compared with the same percentage of white collar delegates, drawn heavily from Party bureaucracy...
...As though by way of acknowledging this awareness publicly, the Poles at the Party Congress gave visiting Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev a standing ovation, and to indicate that they are still very much a part of the community sixty-nine other foreign delegations attended the meeting as well as the heads of all the Soviet bloc states, including Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu...
...The Warsaw Pact troops mainly went in there to change the leadership...
...Perhaps the answer came from a former aristocrat who described Edward Gierek to one Western reporter as "our Willy Brandt...
...Although they do not trust Gierek to the same extent, he is a far cry from Czechoslovakia's deposed Alexander Dubcek, and, furthermore, the Kremlin leaders dread the possibility of moving into Poland and being confronted by a workers' resistance...
...As he put it: "We are strong enough now to produce consumer goods...
...Three, we must have a national plan to integrate society...
...They have waited a long time...
...His resignation was one of the demands made last year by rioting workers, who put partial blame on Moczar for police strikebreaking actions...
...and by aiding the lot of the worker by reducing working hours and eventually giving every Pole at least one Saturday a month off...
...But there was some disaffection expressed in the only way permitted—by voters scratching the names of some candidates off the ballot...
...and then he announced, "Our supreme goal is the systematic improvement of living standards...
...Two, we must increase the role of social problems...
...This would allow the central planning body to do more long-range planning...
...Although the average age of the members is just over fifty, they symbolize the technocratic stamp of Gierek's plans for Poland...
...This number is considered high for Central Committees even under new leaders...
...But what chance of success does Gierek have in Poland, a country whose people have grown so apathetic about its Communist leadership in recent years that they often appear to have given up all hope of ever re-entering the mainstream of European society...
...Henryk Jablonski, Minister of Education...
...But for Poland the changes in plans and the changes in Party attitudes are revolutionary...
...The building of more one-family houses, early retirement, and a greater emphasis on fixed wages are also among the plans to alleviate the doldrums and prevent a recurrence of the bloody Baltic coast riots of 1970...
...And unless the plans are thwarted by another unforeseen internal upheaval—not considered likely—or by Soviet intervention (the Poles are fully cognizant of this threat and the Kremlin would be reluctant), "being with the Party" over the next decade in Poland is going to mean being with a Party that has, in the words of its leader Edward Gierek, as "our supreme goal, the systematic improvement of living standards...
...What is happening in Poland today is unique in Eastern Europe in two respects...
...The Kremlin has become public relations-conscious enough to know that it would not look the same to put down a genuinely popular uprising with the same techniques used in the bloc in the past...
...Many Poles deleted the names of some prominent Party and government officials who were at the top of the list of candidates...
...In another Communist country or in Poland in another time (i.e., if the country had not just barely escaped a civil war that scared the Russians as much as it scared the Poles), one could write this off as just so much Communist politicking, but enough has already changed in Poland to see that Gierek means what he says and to predicate what some of the •changes will be...
...4. I will reform the Central Committee to bring it more in line with public demands and social needs...
...A Pole in a position to affect planning described the need for a new kind of planning by outlining the three most important factors in the new "1971 social economic policy" as he visualized it: "One, Poland must accelerate the growth of real wages and consumption, making the people feel more effects of industrialization...
...This is not to say that the problems are the same in the East and the West, but that officials and businessmen on both sides are bumping into each other all over the world as they try to find the answers, and perhaps this in itself will turn out to be a large part of the answer...
...Material problems are not the only problems...
...From 1956 there has been an understanding that we should go on with reform, with an incentive economy where economic instruments should replace directives and orders from above...
...We need correction—our specialists are working on a more flexible price system...
...Talking socio-economic problems today to a Polish official is talking in a language that is not at all unfamiliar to an American—it is the language of the problems of the early 1970s, and it has a way of sounding more and more alike in both Communist and capitalist countries as each system attempts to deal with problems of nationalism, rising consumer expectations, and market mechanisms...
...Second, both the Polish Communist Party and the ever watchful neighbor to the East allowed it to happen...
...by raising the level of industrial productivity...
...According to Professor R. V. Burks, who generously provided me with some authoritative analysis (Burks is professor of history at Detroit's Wayne State University and former policy director of Radio Free Europe, Munich, as well as author of the book, Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe), Polish Party head Edward Gierek is saying through the new appointments: 1. I am dumping the socialist collaborators—the Poles who voluntarily brought Stalinist leadership to Poland...
...Education and a healthy social infrastructure are important...
Vol. 36 • May 1972 • No. 5
