On the Fairway?

The headlines went wild. Actually, the Polish issue last week was not "near solution." Neither was it in a state of "crisis." Said a British diplomat in Washington: "We are now where we should have been two months ago. We are out of the bunker and back on the fairway. There is still an iron shot and at least one putt before we sink the ball."

The ball will be holed when & if Russia. Britain, the U.S. and a respectable variety of Poles agree on a new Warsaw government. Invited to Moscow to begin new discussions this week were: ex-Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, a key figure in any settlement, and two other London exiles (but no member of the unreconstructible exiled Government); Warsaw President Boleslaw Bierut and three members of his Government; five non-Government Poles from Poland. With the Russians, these men would try to find agreement among themselves, then submit the result to the Big Three's troubleshooters (Molotov, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman, British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr). If all went well, the whole thing would be cleaned up before the next Big Three meeting (see above).

Honestly Jailed? A barrier to agreement was Moscow's arrest and treatment of the famous 16 Poles who came out of their underground holes at Russian invitation last March and were promptly seized by the Red Army. On Harry Hopkins' recent Moscow visit, he had done much to ease the Polish controversy, but apparently he had not obtained any guarantees for the arrested Poles. At most, he seemed to have persuaded the Kremlin to bring them to early trial.

On this issue within an issue, the U.S. and Britain had beat a partial retreat. Originally they said they would not resume negotiations with Moscow until the Poles were released or their arrest satisfactorily explained; now they had compromised. But on this point, the London delegates were not inclined to accept a compromise. Said Socialist ex-Minister of Labor Jan Stanczyk: "This puts us in a terrible position. How can we honestly negotiate in Moscow while our comrades are in jail somewhere near by?"

Cymbals & Silence. When Bierut and his Warsaw colleagues (Osubka-Morawski, Kowalski and Gomulka) arrived at Moscow's airport, they were greeted by Foreign Commissar Molotov, Vice Commissar Vyshinsky, Politburo brass hats and a vast blare of tubas, trumpets, cymbals and drums.

When Mikolajczyk and Stanczyk arrived in a British Lancaster, they were greeted by Ambassadors Harriman and Clark Kerr, and a lone representative of the Foreign Commissariat. Said Harriman in a murmured aside to Clark Kerr: "Then you'll follow?" Arm-in-arm with Mikolajczyk and Stanczyk, Harriman entered his long black car. Clark Kerr followed.

As It Was in the Beginning. Another kind of Polish issue began to brew last week. One of the worst of the London Poles' many mistakes was their claim to Teschen, which Poland took from Czechoslovakia in 1938, when the Czechs were in Hitler's grasp. The Lublin Poles originally took the opposite line, expressed a willingness to see Teschen go back to Czechoslovakia. But last week the Polish Communist press started an anti-Czech campaign for Teschen.

Poland's 1938 Teschen grab hurt Poland's later case before the world. Lublin and London seemed to be enrolled in an unpopularity contest.

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