Embattled Farmers

Fortnight ago the long-suppressed resentment of Poland's 20,000,000 virtually disenfranchised, illiterate, poverty-stricken peasants against tyrannical army rule rumbled into action. The Peasant Party-- forced underground by the reactionary army coterie around the late Marshal Joseph Pilsudski--emerged into the open, called a 10-day peasant strike which last week was in full swing.

Starting as a passive revolt to keep farm products from the market, dogged farmers in the southern agricultural areas shut themselves in their straw-thatched izby, refused to buy or sell, to work any land but their own. Last week, gaunt, rag-clad peasants, enraged at individuals who profited by delivering foodstuffs, took to barring the roads, overturning market trucks, destroying farm produce. Reports seeping through the iron press censorship told of sporadic clashes with police, with 56 casualties the result. Before long the strike took an anti-Semitic turn. Roving peasant bands attacked Jewish markets, set upon Jewish peddlers handling farm products.

Socialist Party workers egged the peasants on by promising support for their cause. At Cracow, factory and transport workers staged a 24-hour general strike as a sympathetic gesture. "Solidarity strikes" were called in the Trzebinia and Chrzanow industrial districts.

Professed purpose of the peasant action was to protest the "dictatorial and bureaucratic system," to inaugurate a genuine democracy. Its immediate purpose was to force Marshal Smigly-Rydz to bring back to Poland Wincenty Witos, founder and head of the Peasant Party. Witos, who fled to Czechoslovakia to escape sentence inflicted by Pilsudski's courts for opposition in the 1930 election, is the peasants' living martyr.

Since 1926 the iron fist of Pilsudskrs regime has pressed heavily on Poland. With his last breath the blustering old Dictator two years ago placed his benediction on bush-browed Edward Smigly-Rydz, Inspector General of the Army, gave him to the nation as his successor. Lacking the personal magnetism of the Old Marshal, the landscape-painting Marshal makes a poor Dictator. Using Pilsudski's coffin as his chief stock-in-trade, soft-spoken Smigly-Rydz has appealed in vain for all factions to heed the Old Marshal's wish for a unified Poland.

Early in March, Smigly-Rydz had his political tool, bald-headed Colonel Adam Koc (pronounced kotz) merge the Pilsudski Legionnaires with a few scattered middleclass, youth, workers' groups into a nucleus with the sonorous title "Camp of National Unity." Koc, realizing that "national unity" was an empty formula without support of two large groups--the National Democrats (made up of conservative nationalists) and the peasants-- suggested to his political boss that concessions be made to induce one or both groups to join the united front. Price for peasant support was the return of Witos.

Rightist army leaders, the "Colonels' clique" of Pilsudski's regime, led by Colonels Valerian Slawek, Alexander Prystor, regard the "national unity" movement as too liberal. Two months ago, reactionaries, fearing Witos at the head of a strong Peasant Party, hired Count Wojceich Bieganek to assassinate Koc. The Count crouched outside the French windows of Koc's suburban Warsaw villa, but the bomb went off prematurely, blew him to bits.

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