Gomulka's Lonely Road

POLAND Gomulka's Lonely Road Two toasts offered at a Warsaw reception last week neatly characterized the widening split in world Communism. Said Red China's Premier Chou Enlai: "I propose a toast to the . . . solidarity of the Socialist countries headed by the U.S.S.R." Replied Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka: "I toast the Polish Party's . . . attitude of international proletarian solidarity . . . based on principles of equality and mutual respect."

The wily Chou was plugging the Socialist brotherhood of little brothers subservient to the Big Soviet Brother; Gomulka wanted a Socialist brotherhood in which all brothers would be equal. Ailing, bespectacled Gomulka was walking a lonely and dangerous road. He had taken a step unprecedented in Communist countries by calling elections this week that would not be truly free, but would at least allow a limited number of alternate choices as candidates from tame fronts, as well as the usual fixed slate of Communists.

The elections were rigged so that the Communists could not fail of a majority, but the danger was that the number of cryptodemocrats hiding beneath the Communist Party label threatened to produce non-Communist combinations in the new Parliament. A non-Communist Polish government now, to judge from Hungary's experience, would be an open invitation for Soviet armed intervention. To avoid this possibility, Gomulka last week ordered the electoral commission to remove from the approved list any candidates who "are weak of character and have shown lack of responsibility." He had another worry: What if thousands of voters boycotted the elections?

In everything he did, Gomulka was being pulled one way by his own people, another way by Moscow. Last week, faced with a chaotic farm problem, he retreated farther than any avowedly Socialist or Communist country ever has before from the doctrinaire Marxist position on land ownership. To encourage those collective farms still operating (some 7,500 of 10,-ooo have been abandoned since Gomulka took power) he will reduce by one-third the state requisitions from them, and pay twice as much for what the state does get. For other land, restrictions will be removed from ownership, leases, purchases and sales, and the "principle of the free transfer of property will be observed."

Matching these concessions by trying to reassert Communist control over the farmers, Wladyslaw Gomulka appointed Politburo Member Edward Ochab (once called "a Communist with teeth" by Stalin) to take over the Ministry of Agriculture. Tough and toothy Ochab would have much to chew on.

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