Fever in the Middle

For a year Wladyslaw Gomulka, the bald boss of Polish Communism, has wobbled down the middle of the road, driving slowly away from Moscow but unwilling and unable to turn toward the West, titillating the Polish people with the heady wine of limited freedom without withdrawing the hangover of Communist controls. At times Gomulka must have wondered if the so-called "Polish road to Socialism," for which he had defied Nikita Khrushchev himself, was a- road at all. His policies of half-independence and half-freedom left everybody only half-satisfied and failed miserably to solve the nation's economic crisis.

Last week, addressing the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers (Communist) Party in Warsaw, Gomulka spoke in the tones of a man sorely beset. The Polish party, he admitted, "has partly dissolved itself into a nonparty mass," is riddled with disorientation and confusion." Said he, "It is high time to put an end to this." The first step: purge of half the party's 1,300,000 members, which would leave Poland's core of Communists the smallest proportionately in Eastern Europe.

To demonstrate what he planned, Gomulka expelled from the party ten members of the board of editors of Po Prostu, the free-speaking newspaper that had demanded more freedom, balanced these by ousting a Stalinist provincial party secretary and four of his lieutenants in Koszalin. Declared Gomulka: "The party does not intend to close the wide-open doors of democratic freedom. But it must watch these doors more closely than in the past."

Clearly, when Gomulka said freedom, he meant only freedom to support Gomulka's own brand of Communism.

Back from a ten-week tour of Eastern Europe, the New York Times's former Moscow Correspondent Harrison Salisbury reported last week that a comparable intellectual fever of unease was raging in nearly every one of Russia's European satellites. Reported Salisbury: "This does not mean that the literate spokesmen of these countries reject socialism or a socialist society. For most of them this is still the ideal. But they want a socialism founded on democracy, morality, principles and concern for man."

Pointing to such men as Djilas in Yugoslavia and Kolakowski in Poland (TIME, Oct. 14), Salisbury quoted a Warsaw observer: "What the West must remember about this process is that all of this started inside the Communist Party. The sharpest critics are Communists or men closely associated with Communism. The process of evolution or revolution is occurring within the Communist movement because that is where the best minds of these countries have been assembled by force of circumstance." Concludes Salisbury: "The Communist myth in Eastern Europe, never strongly established, seems broken beyond repair. This becomes apparent when even the writers of Czechoslovakia, as calm and conventional as any of their countrymen, quietly explain why Poland and Hungary revolted. The startling fact, most encouraging to the West, is that when men in Eastern Europe begin to challenge communist assumptions they apply democratic principles, often couched with eloquence reminiscent of the great debates of the rights of man carried on in the late 18th century."

Youth behind the Iron Curtain are convinced that "Western culture has a vigor and dramatic force that make Moscow's seem sterile." After 13 years of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet army, reported Salisbury, "today, in most of these lands, it is Rousseau, Jefferson and even Wilson whose appeal is most persuasive."

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