The Rule of Chaos

Stettin is an overcrowded, underemployed port on the Baltic Sea whose lusty waterfront population takes its politics with violence and vodka. Last week a cou ple of cops who tried to arrest a slaphappy vodka drinker touched off a political riot that had Wladyslaw Gomulka's new government in a nervous dither.

A group of young men who tried to separate the cops from the drunk were quickly joined by habitues of the Pod Jeleniem and Pod Gryfem bars and the Centralna and Magnolia cafes. Soon the Aleja Wojska Polskiego was crowded with 2,000 grim, destruction-bent Stettiners. Out of the intense anti-Soviet feeling that floods Poland today came a focus for their violence: Stettin's Soviet consulate. Soon the mob had broken into that building, wrecked and looted its contents. Only when the Stettin Communist Party committee called in sober-minded shipyard workers, students and local militiamen were the rioters brought to order.

The Stettin outbreak was the most se rious of a series of anti-Soviet incidents that have rocked Poland in recent weeks.

At Bydgoszcz a radio-jamming station was burned down and the local police headquarters attacked to shouts of "Long live Gomulka." At Kutno, an important rail junction between Warsaw and Poznan, a Soviet supply train was attacked, and at Legnica, main Soviet base near the German frontier, a Soviet officer's house was burned down. Throughout Silesia workers' groups passed resolutions protesting against the latest measures of the Kadar regime in Hungary. Last week in Poznan, center of the June riots, 30,000 steelworkers capped three days of anti-Soviet demonstrations with a demand for the with drawal of Soviet troops from Hungary.

The danger facing Communist Party Secretary Gomulka is that the Soviet Union may step in and attempt to reoccupy Poland on the excuse that he no longer has control of his country. Said Gomulka's Trybuna Ludu last week: "Do the passive onlookers not realize that there are hostile forces vitally interested in the rule of chaos and in the paralysis of authority?"

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