Crisis & a Question

Poland's diehard Stalinists had been waiting the opportune moment to make a comeback. In the seven months of Wladyslaw Gomulka's leadership, no longer tied to Moscow or supported by police terror, the Polish Communist Party had lost much of its former authority and force. The time had come, said one opportunistic Communist leader, Boleslaw Piasecki, to end the "ideological chaos" and get closer to the Soviet Union.

For three months Gomulka, the man on a tightrope, had delayed calling the ninth plenum of the party's 80-man Central Committee while he attempted to discipline his highly vocal anti-Stalinist left supporters, who are demanding increasing democratization and secretly hope for a breakthrough to a Western European type of socialism. Last week, under increasing pressure from the Stalinist right, Gomulka suddenly called the Central Committee together.

In a five-hour speech he reaffirmed his intention of traveling his own "road to socialism." The distinguishing marks of the Gomulka road: worker participation in management but not ownership, the right to strike, more local self-government, limited private enterprise, peasant self-management (collective farms, he said, did not "stand the test of life"). Said Gomulka: "The way to socialism on which the Soviet Union advanced is not at all necessary or useful for other nations."

Two Fronts. Admitting that his "understanding with the Catholic Church" found no precedent in any other socialist state, or even "in such capitalist countries as the U.S. and France," Gomulka insisted that the kind of socialism he envisaged for Poland would in the long run "depend on the shaping of relations between the People's State and the church." Nevertheless the guiding power on Gomulka's road would be a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat. Inside the party he promised "full freedom of speech," but outside no party member (and presumably no private person) would have the right to express opinions which are out of harmony with party policy. This was a direct slap at his left supporters, whose "ideological confusion and revisionist tendencies," he said, "undermine unity and sow disbelief." Then Gomulka turned on the Stalinists: "Not only revisionism disarms the party--the same, though in a different way, results from dogmatism and conservatism."

To the Attack. While Moscow quietly studied the speech (in Red China, but not in Moscow, copious extracts were published), the Polish Stalinists went into the attack. Their leader was former Minister of Communal Economy Kazimierz Mijal, who insisted that there was no such thing as a Polish road to socialism and that to say so was to capitulate to capitalism. Said he : "Why does the party keep discussing the need to fight antisemitism, which does not exist in Poland, and ignore what we must do about the serious problem of anti-Sovietism, which really does exist?" Behind the locked doors of the committee room the Stalinists blasted the whole Gomulka line, singling out his closest supporters for vicious personal attacks with an intensity which made the startled and for the most part silent left call it "the black day." Then the Stalinists put their power to test; the general resolution of the plenum must be reworded, they said, to affirm the Soviet Union's "leading" position and to condemn the Hungarian "counter-revolution."

But they had gone too far. The mild-mannered, hollow-cheeked Gomulka, who had tried to steer a middle course between the extremists of both sides, was stung into an electrifying attack on the Stalinists. "Why, Comrade Mijal," asked Gomulka, "do you all the time insist on including references to the Soviet Union supremacy? We had the example of Rakosi and Gero always using such phrases, and it ended with Soviet tanks at the head of Budapest streets." Confusion fell among the Stalinists when 'one of their number, Franciszek Mazur, a recognized Kremlin agent who flits regularly between Moscow and Warsaw, suddenly switched his support to Gomulka, indicating that the Kremlin did not favor a frontal attack on Gomulka at this moment.

At week's end Gomulka was still very much boss of Poland. He had shown the same kind of stubborn resistance to attack that he had displayed last October, confirming the impression that he is a man who reacts best in a crisis. Once again the Stalinists had been routed, but the vital question they had raised had still to be answered: Can a Communist Party govern successfully without Kremlin support or an extensive police system, make concessions to private enterprise and the church and remain a Communist Party?

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