Rebellious Compromiser

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Russia seems to be impregnable, but she is not at all. Poland is her weak spot.

--Bismarck (1887)

In a smoke-filled basement room in Warsaw's Polytechnic Institute last week, 30 determined young Poles probed deep for the weak spot in Russia's hitherto impregnable Communist empire. No plotters, and meaning to be peaceable, they were asking questions: How much farther can Poland go on the road to democratization without risking a Soviet crackdown? Can the Polish Communist Party slow down the momentum of Poland's drive for complete national independence? The answers could also spell out the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and a formidable reduction of Soviet power itself.

The Polytechnic students saw a specific test for their questions: Poland's general elections next January. A free and honest election in Poland today could result in a clean sweep for the now banned Catholic parties, so deep runs the revulsion from Communism. The January elections will not be free, but the Communists, under intense pressure, will offer approved alternate candidates on a one-party slate for the first time. The Polytechnic students (members of Catholic, Socialist and Communist youth organizations) seemed ready to accept this, provided they could nominate some of the "approved alternates." Similar groups among factory workers and peasants--most prominent in the fight for liberalizing the tyranny--are taking the same line. Though their chosen candidates might have to be Communists, they wanted to make sure that they were also patriotically Polish. For the moment, they were not asking more.

What made the students and workers wise in their time and situation was not alone the example of Hungary. They also had a belief in a man, once disgraced and imprisoned, almost forgotten a year ago, whose firm defiance of the Russians had shot him up through the crumbling Communist apparatus to a position of national hero. In Wladyslaw Gomulka many Poles feel that they found a leader before it was too late.

The Guarantee. It was a mutual discovery. In the new nine-man Politburo, Gomulka has few comrades he can trust, and not a few old Communist enemies. His position there depends on his continuing influence on the workers and intellectuals who hold him in such high regard. He is taking great pains to cultivate and preserve that regard by the only means he knows: hard work, courtesy, firmly expressed cautionary advice and, for a fanatic Communist, daring departures from the old Stalin economic and political dogmas.

During last month's critical decisions he averaged four hours of sleep each night, now he has perhaps six. The other 18 hours vanish in a succession of conferences, interviews, speechwriting, speechmaking (three a week on Radio Warsaw), and listening to dozens of workers' delegations from all over the country. A group of workers from Wroclaw asks about higher wages. A delegation from an association of collective farms seeks his ideas about farm policy. They all get a little of Gomulka's time. At 8 o'clock one night last week a batch of students, workers and farmers walked in, spent three hours getting answers to questions. Typical questions: When do the Russian troops leave? What guarantees do we have against Stalinist activities in Poland? His answer to the last: "You are the guarantee. Without you young people I would not stay one minute."

He does a lot of listening at these sessions, his sharp blue eyes set deep in a sallow face, with its high cheekbones and bulky forehead, expanded by baldness. It is the face of one who has held stubbornly to his beliefs and acted resolutely upon them. But visitors are often astonished to find him so aged and apparently frail. He seems shorter than his 5 ft. 7 in., older than his 51 years. These are the marks of his lifelong apprenticeship to Communism. Years of imprisonment in his youth left him with a lung ailment, a police bullet has permanently stiffened his right knee, and there are hints of unspecified internal organic disorders. The later years of disgrace and isolation have softened his voice, and he no longer speaks loudly as he once did. Reading in isolation has improved his grasp of ideas. It was always said of him that he was a man without humor. "There are no funny stories about Gomulka," says Peasant Leader Stanislaw Banczyk. He is essentially a lonely man. He and his wife Zofia, a member of an old Russian Bolshevik family (purged by Stalin), live quietly in a tiny apartment in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, have no social life. A 26-year-old son, an engineer, lives in the same house. Gomulka's sole recreation: walking his dog around the block.

As he listens, he periodically leans back in his chair, takes off his steel-rimmed glasses, polishing them with a handkerchief in deft circular strokes. It is an uncommonly sad face that is revealed, but the visitor notices the eyes, cool and piercing, the strong, shovel-like chin, and there is an impression of sincerity and power. At midnight Gomulka drops his pencil, closes the manila folder on an unfinished speech, a lone late-staying assistant throws a dark overcoat over Gomulka's thin shoulders, and he clumps out to his ZIS limousine, pausing a moment to look across the streets and roofs of Warsaw shining with frost. Not in his office, or in intellectual circles, but out there in the dark bitter cold is the problem he must lick before Poland or the world knows whether he is a real leader.

Quarters for Lovers. In Warsaw's wintry grey days the sun is seldom seen. The facades of houses are pocked with shell marks, and the ruins of war are wherever the visitor looks. The people of Warsaw do not look. Hurrying by in their fleece-lined topcoats and heavy boots, the women often wearing slacks and boots, they are too busy struggling to live. There are long queues for buses and trolley cars. There are endless day-long queues at the meat and bread stores for the basic food available: round loaves of dark bread and long Polish sausages. The cafes of Warsaw are crowded.

For that mysterious elite which inhabits all Communist cities there is the Rarytas Restaurant with soft lights and music, where dinner with wine costs 400 zlotys ($100 at the present exchange rate, a week's wage for a better-paid Pole). At the Kaskada, a smoke-filled vodka joint, there is Dixieland music, and at 2 a.m. the proprietor, according to a Warsaw magazine, "discreetly removes the drunks and lays them out in neat rows on the sidewalk." Gasoline is rationed, taxis hard to find, and there is a coal shortage.

Poland's housing problem may be Europe's worst. For every room there are 1.8 people. The only hope for newlyweds is a proposed "build-it-yourself" development project, called romantically "Quarters for Lovers Without an Apartment." Complaining that government ministers get all the good houses, the newspaper Zycie Warszawy recently described 16,000 families quartered in unheated barracks at Jozefow, gave special mention to the case of Jozef Grajka, who lives with his family of five in an outside toilet.

Anarchy. Poland is a police state which in the past few months has lost most of its police, and the result is an increase in both freedom and anarchy. People no longer whisper in Poland, or try to convey a world of meaning with their eyes, and there are fewer darted over-the-shoulder glances before opening a conversation. But the country's production has never been lower (except in wartime), and the harvest never looked worse. Farmers accustomed to work under the eye of the U.B. (security police) are leaving much of the potato and sugar-beet crop in ground this winter. Thousands of collective farms, no longer under police supervision, have been abandoned, their equipment and animals stolen as farmers hasten to rebuild their own farms. In a country which normally imports up to 1,500,000 tons of grain a year, and where the worker spends 90% of his wages on food, a food crisis threatens. The situation is worst in the western lands, formerly German, where the Polish farmers brought from the east have never felt at home, and the collectives, built around the old Junker estates, have never prospered despite credits and tax exemptions.

In the factories, as party control has slipped, so has production. Unpopular bosses have been roughly ridden out of town in wheelbarrows, and there have been some near lynchings. The mood of the country has not been improved by the 36,000 prisoners released from U.B. prisons and the 16,000 Poles repatriated from Soviet slave-labor camps, each with a bitter story of Soviet brutality. To these must be added the serious preachments of the score of Polish correspondents who were in Budapest during the Soviet siege and, unable to publish their stories in their own newspapers for fear of offending the Soviet leaders, are now touring the country telling workers, peasants and students what happened in Hungary. Russian street names are torn down, and banners appear: "Stop Soviet Domination." At Bydgoszcz last week an anti-Soviet demonstration ended with an attack on the police station, and for a few hours, until troops were brought in, the rioters controlled the city.

It is Poland's present acceptance of Gomulka that prevents another Poznan riot from flaring up into a general revolt like that in Hungary. But if such a revolt should take place, Poland's intellectuals, students and soldiers would play a key part just as their counterparts did in Budapest. But what would Gomulka's role be? Would he play Nagy or Kadar? The answer to the question lies somewhere in Gomulka's curious balance between Communism and patriotism.

Burn & Crush. The twelve years of Soviet depredations which have impoverished Poland to the point of desperation are part of a deliberately conceived Russian policy not very different from that of the Czars. Through 400 years the great powers surrounding Poland, seeking to exploit its estates and mines, have sought to crush Polish independence. From Russia's Ivan the Terrible, who invaded under the pretext of "gathering in of the Russian lands," to Sweden's Charles XII, whose declared Polish policy was "burn, destroy, rob and arrest," the invaders, as though fearing Poland's unquenchable spirit, have sought a "final solution."

In the 18th century Poland was partitioned on three occasions, the third partition being successfully resisted for a time under the leadership of the Polish patriot Kosciuzko, only to fall to Russia, Austria and Prussia again. The Congress of Vienna gave Poland nominal independence, but after a period of "watchful waiting" the Russians were back again with a program of wholesale executions and Russification. Napoleon had used Poland ("my second Polish war") as an excuse to attack Russia, but it was Otto von Bismarck, master of Realpolitik, who saw Poland's festering hatred of Russia as a means of keeping the great eastern power in bounds. "If one helped the Poles a little, they could rise in revolt and win their freedom," he whispered to Italy's Premier Crispi.

Eighteen years after Bismarck's death, the Germans got the chance to "help Poland a little." In World War I they gave Poland its independence under Pilsudski, on condition that it fight Russia. Germany was defeated, but the Allies at Versailles recognized the Republic of Poland. The Bolsheviks also recognized Poland, but a couple of years later Stalin bared Soviet imperialist policy in a speech to the Polish comrades in which he insisted that they must understand "the Russian problem," and consider Russia's dominance "primordial to the entire revolutionary movement . . . because Soviet power is the basis and backbone of the world revolution."

Poland enjoyed 18 all-too-brief years of peaceful independence, but Hitler and Stalin finally did it in. Poland had a non-aggression pact with Russia dating from 1929, and after Hitler's rise it contracted alliances with the West and signed a ten-year nonaggression pact with Germany. But in 1939 Molotov and Hitler got together, signed a secret protocol arranging to attack Poland simultaneously from both sides and to partition it out of existence. After a 26-day fight, Poland was no more. Said Molotov: "Nothing is left of that monstrous bastard, the Versailles Treaty."

Wladyslaw Gomulka, the son of a hardworking Socialist oil worker from Krosno, was 38 when the Russians and Germans invaded Poland. (Before he was born, his father had emigrated to the U.S., but returned when he discovered that the streets were not paved with gold.) Wladyslaw Gomulka in twelve years in the party had done all the things that Communists do, infiltrated trade unions, spread propaganda under the name of Comrade Duniak. He had been sentenced to four years "for arousing mobs to a dangerous state" and for conspiracy against the state, and shared a cell with six other Communists. Differing with them on minor ideological grounds, he refrained from speaking to them for 18 months.

He was luckily in jail in 1937 when Stalin, mistrusting the Polish Communists, ordered the Polish leadership to come to Moscow. None of them ever got back alive. Gomulka was likewise in jail when the Nazis and Communists invaded Poland. His jailers fled, and he was free. He went to Warsaw, rescued his wife and child, and headed for Lvov, the outpost of the Soviet army.

The legal government of Poland had its own plans for continuing Poland's fight, and ably executed them. During World War II, some 250,000 Poles and Polish soldiers, escaping through neighboring states, put on Allied uniforms and fought with the French, British and U.S. armies with great distinction and one of the highest casualty records of the war. In addition, the exiled government, resident in Britain, set up an underground Home Army which numbered 300,000 men and women, organized on a military basis, with courts to try collaborators.

Gomulka took no part in this. But when the Germans attacked Russia, he petitioned Moscow to be allowed to form a Communist underground in Poland. Moscow did not answer, but after Stalingrad, Stalin put his own plan for a Polish Communist underground into operation. The Communist Party was to be reconstituted as the Polish Workers Party. New leaders, Poles who had been living in Moscow, were dropped by parachute. But like all Stalin's undergrounds, this one had peculiar duties: it was more interested in liquidating the political opposition, i.e., the Home Army underground, than the Germans. At least one of its leading members collaborated with the Gestapo on this basis, tipping it off. But this did not prevent the Nazis from killing the Communists, and after several of the Moscow importations had disappeared, the leadership of the underground fell to Gomulka. There is no evidence that he pursued the Stalinist policy of doublecrossing others in the underground, and for this reason he is grudgingly respected by some Poles who loathe his politics. Those who knew him at this time say that he fought the Nazis with courage and resolution.

Stalin's policy of liquidating the effective Home Army, which reached its brazen peak in 1944 when Marshal Rokossovsky's army stood idly in the outskirts of Warsaw while the Nazis systematically bombed, shelled and dynamited the city, killing 250,000 people, was the logical outcome of the "Russian problem.'' What Stalin did not obtain by force, he won politically at the conference tables at Yalta and Potsdam. The Western Allies agreed that Poland should fall within the Soviet sphere.

Because of Western insistence on "free, unfettered elections" and party government, Stalin arranged that the provisional government (Deputy Premier: Gomulka) should include the Polish Peasant Party and the Social Democrats as well as the Communists, but he had his men ceaselessly working to surround, isolate, blackmail, and even to murder, the democratic politicians. "Poland's secret government,'' wrote Polish Peasant Party Leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, "is headed by a man few Poles have ever seen--the Russian general Malinov. His name has never appeared in a Polish newspaper. He has never made a public appearance in Poland. He towers above all other officials--public or secret." Malinov's real name: Ivan Serov, Stalin's specialist in liquidation, who had already deported 1,500,000 Poles to Siberia. Serov, now Russia's secret police boss, last week was working in Hungary.

On a lower level, Deputy Premier Gomulka was working as hard as any other Communist to undermine democracy. "You can't kill all of us, Gomulka. You can't exterminate a whole people or crush its determination to be independent," Mikolajczyk told him on one occasion. Gomulka leaped from his chair, his hand on the gun he carried in his pocket, but Mikolajczyk calmly asked for a cigarette. Said Gomulka: "We'll get the people. And we'll get you." Two years later, Mikolajczyk was forced to flee into exile, and the only "democrats" left in the Polish government were Communist stooges.

Grab & Give. Stalin had attempted his "final" solution to the Polish-Russian question at the Potsdam peace table. He had already annexed a huge tract of Polish territory in the east (see map), and as compensation he now sliced most of Pomerania from Germany and "gave" it to Poland. Pretending that the Poles had gained materially from this deal, he demanded that Polish coal exports be sold to Russia at a nominal price per ton (about one-seventh the market price). He also arranged that Germany should pay Poland reparations, but these he collected himself. He then forced the Poles to accept a permanent Soviet army of occupation, for whose upkeep Poland paid. He also maintained access through Poland to Soviet divisions (now 22) garrisoned in East Germany.

Thus to the deep Polish hatred of the Nazi conqueror, Stalin added a boundary quarrel to make certain that Germany and Poland should have cause to resent one another eternally and thus preclude any secret alliances. Gomulka was put in charge of the new western territory taken from the Germans. He did Soviet bidding, though he was distressed by Russia's dismantling and removal of factories. "I fought against the Germans," he once told a group of peasants. "I will not allow Poland to become the 17th Soviet Republic."

In 1948 a word was coined for this kind of view: Titoism. Tito has once met Gomulka, who made "a very favorable impression. He is a worker, rather modest and reticent." Gomulka was less impressed by the vain Tito, privately referred to him as "a fat swine." When Stalin expelled Tito from the Russian family, Polish Communist leaders concurred in denouncing Tito, all except Gomulka, who said: "I don't know who is right or who is wrong, but we must end it all without publicity. We must find a compromise." He refused to attend a Cominform conference in Rumania where the satellite leaders were to gang up on Tito. That was enough for Stalin. At a signal Gomulka's comrades turned on him. General Marian Spychalski was Gomulka's chief denouncer. Gomulka was accused of being "permeated with the Pilsudski spirit." Economic Minister Mine accused him of betraying his underground comrades to the Gestapo. Said Polit-burocrat Jakub Berman: "Let Comrade Gomulka repudiate his mystical notions and let him march together with the party." But the stubborn Gomulka had another idea. Said he: "I have come to the conclusion that my political career is over. It is my fault . . . Free me from my responsibilities and allow me to work in a small party position." But Stalin demanded a groveling confession, and when Gomulka resisted, he was dismissed and Moscow-trained Boleslaw Bierut took over the party secretaryship.

Resting at the resort of Krynica some time later, Gomulka was disturbed while in bed one morning by a U.B. man. Gomulka reached under his pillow for his pistol, but the U.B. man was there first. Said he: "I have orders from the Central Committee to bring you to Warsaw." Replied Gomulka calmly: "If somebody from the Central Committee wants to see me, let him come here." But he went quietly with the guard to Miedzieszyn, a Warsaw suburb, where he and his wife were held under arrest in separate cottages without seeing each other for four years. Most people thought him dead.

Unlike Czechoslovakia's Slansky, Hungary's Rajk and Bulgaria's Kostov, who went to the gallows after dutifully confessing their party errors, there was no great public show trial of the Polish "Titoist" Gomulka. One of the reasons for this was that the stubborn Gomulka could not be broken, stubbornly refused to make an abject confession. Fearing that some of his ad-lib remarks in court might involve others in their wartime duplicity, his Politburo comrades found reasons to delay Stalin's orders for a trial. They delayed the arrangements so long that Stalin died before the trial could take place.

Send for Gomulka. With the old Dictator's death came that "wavering" in Soviet power which he had always feared. When destalinization got out of hand, the long-disciplined Polish intellectuals broke loose. The unrest spread to the workers and peasants. All Stalin's successors could think of was to order Jakub Berman and other hated leaders to disappear. Party Secretary Bierut died fortuitously in Moscow, Deputy Premier Mine took ill. In July came the riots at Poznan. Someone in Moscow remembered Gomulka, the one man who, because of his war record, his persecution, but most of all his patriotism, could perhaps win public sympathy and stem the rising tide of revolt. Ailing Gomulka was taken from his cottage and sent to Sochi on the Black Sea for recuperation. But when the Politburo invited him to become party secretary he said: "I do not wish to enter your Politburo. The Politburo I enter will have to be changed entirely."

They offered him various heads on a platter, but held out on Marshal Rokossovsky because they were afraid of Russian reaction. Gomulka was unmoved. "You fear the Russians?" he said. ''It is only necessary to know how to handle them. I remember when in 1944 Comrade Bulganin, at that time Soviet military commander in Poland, arrived in Lublin and sent word that I should call on him immediately. I told the general, 'If the general is in such a hurry, let him come to me.' Imagine, he arrived some minutes later with a smile on his lips."

But Gomulka had his chance to get tough with the Russians a few weeks later when Moscow took umbrage at his cavalier firing of Marshal Rokossovsky. A delegation of the Soviet Party Presidium came flying into Warsaw and Khrushchev stepped out, arms flailing, shouting insults at the Poles. Gomulka was calm. When Khrushchev asked, "Who is that?" Gomulka replied, "It is I, Gomulka, the man you sent to jail." The Russians' coup de theatre flopped because one of Gomulka's supporters had taken the precaution of arming the workers of the Zeran works, and another, the new secret police boss, had put a discreet cordon of tanks around the parliament house and changed the guard at Radio Warsaw. After listening patiently to Khrushchev's harangue, Gomulka said quietly: "Now it is my turn. I don't want to speak here, but in a radio studio. Tonight I am going to tell the people the truth--what you're demanding and what we're refusing." Khrushchev climbed down, agreed to talk over pressing economic questions later in Moscow.

The Moscow trip went off with bands and bunting, and fortnight ago Gomulka returned with a number of small concessions, but no sense of victory. Thousands of Poles, happy and even a little surprised to see him back, jammed the Warsaw station to welcome him, chant and toss bouquets. But to the chanting throng Gomulka would only say: "We went to Moscow and talked to the Soviet leaders as equals, a very important thing for us. We put an end to the great differences between Soviet words and Soviet deeds. Polish-Soviet friendship can now proceed without serious obstacles in its way."

The Russians had agreed to forget Poland's past debts, which were largely imaginary. On the credit side was a Russian loan of $175 million spread over the next two years and a promise of 1,400,000 tons of grain "to help our present difficuties."

Poles were disappointed that Gomulka had agreed to recognize the "workers" regime in Hungary, though Gomulka had refused to endorse Kadar by name. Instead of getting the Red army out of Poland, he had entered into a new military agreement by which six Soviet divisions would remain in Poland, although their upkeep would in future be paid for by Moscow. His reason: "Safeguarding our security and protecting the sanctity of the Oder-Neisse line." The poison sowed by Stalin was still being harvested by Russia.

In his effort to reorganize party and government. Gomulka is pursuing some highly unorthodox methods, by Stalinist standards. He has proved himself far more liberal than Tito. He is sending a delegation to study farm cooperatives in the Scandinavian countries, another to look into the U.S. building industry. He realizes that farm collectivization has failed, but does not know what to substitute. He promised the Roman Catholic Church that he would permit religious education in the schools in return for the recently freed Cardinal Wyszinski's appeal to his followers to keep the peace.

None of these developments appeared to change Gomulka's standing with the Russians. But when he approached the U.S. for tentative economic aid, Moscow cracked down hard. Nor was Moscow standing for multi-party government, along the lines accepted by Premier Nagy in Hungary's five days of freedom. Said Gomulka bluntly last week: "There will be no freedom for bourgeois [Western-type] political parties in this country." For the anarchy which is the real threat to his power he had a warning: "We shall combat ruthlessly provocateurs, scum, and all those who disturb public order, threaten, or commit lynching."

Although Gomulka had won the esteem, and even the affection of his people, for standing up to Russia, he was also doing a fine job of keeping Poland inside the Soviet orbit. At this moment of history his peculiar balance between Communism and patriotism makes him the ideal leader to both sides.

He sits in a desperate middle: if Poles are content for now to seek to alleviate rather than to overthrow Communism, it is because, watching Hungary's revolt with anguished sympathy, they see that other nations will not come to their aid, and they know that Russia is far more determined to hold a neighboring Poland than a distant Hungary.

But the Poles also want change. If they become disillusioned with Gomulka's performance, or if the Russians think he is being pulled too far, the whole precarious experiment could come crashing down. But things cannot remain immovable. The current of freedom is running deep and wide through Poland.

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