Not Yet

At a congress in Wroclaw (once Breslau), Poland's Socialist Party heard a fateful summons last week. Poland's Communist Party Secretary General and Vice Premier, Wladyslaw Gomulka, told them: "Conditions make it imperative that a common front must lead to one party." What Gomulka meant was that the time had come for the Socialists to let themselves be swallowed by the smaller Communist Party.

Every Communist and most Socialists knew that it was the logical sequence to the Communists' successful subjugation of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk's majority Peasant Party. Though the Socialists had applauded as the Communist-dominated state police decimated the Peasant Party and sent Mikolajczyk scurrying into exile, they screamed in protest at Gomulka's blunt warning that the Socialists came next.

Jozef Cyrankiewicz, Socialist leader and Poland's Premier, rejected Gomulka's invitation. He said: "Our party is and will be needed and is of benefit to the Polish nation." Delegates broke into prolonged cheering, winding up with a spirited singing of The Red Banner, which is the Polish Socialist hymn. And when Boleslaw Drobner, Cracow's short, walrus-mustached Socialist leader who always wears a black worker's jerkin, added, "We don't need outsiders to tell us how to run our affairs," the demonstration was trebled in noise and duration. With a decisive no, the Socialists rejected Gomulka's suggestion.

In the same speech Drobner also said: "We are willing to go forward arm in arm, but we don't intend to have them lead us by the hand." And a brother Socialist commented: "Only Drobner would have dared, and managed to get away with it." The sum of the two statements was simply that Poland's "united front" government would stay united, and the Polish Socialists' no really meant not yet.

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