Long-Play Needle

Polish journalists believing that limited freedom is better than none, have carefully avoided open battle with the ruling Communist Party. They have been sorely provoked nonetheless. Soon after the government's suppression of the free-swinging youth magazine Po Prostu (TIME, Oct. 14) last fall, party censors salted liberal wounds by smothering at birth a new intellectual magazine named Europa.

Last week the tension between writer and commissar stretched even tighter. The party decided to turn the independent-minded daily Sztandar Mlodych (Standard of Youth) into a house organ for the Communists' discredited Union of Socialist Youth Association. Then Stalinist Author Leon Kruczkowski, chairman of the party's Cultural Commission, bluntly warned the press that censorship will become an even stronger "weapon of cultural policy."

The only publication in Poland that seems immune to party lockjaw is a twelve-page satirical weekly with the apt name of Szpilki (Needles). Garishly printed on cheap paper, cocky, 24-year-old Szpilki (pronounced "shpeelky") sticks its needles into Communist hides from Moscow to Warsaw. In a cartoon deriding the cultural isolation of Leon Kruczkowski and other hacks on the party's Trybuna Literacka (Literary Tribune), Szpilki this month depicted three self-pitying wallflowers on a vast, empty dance floor. Caption: "The Trybuna Literacka Lonely Hearts Ball."

One reason for Szpilki's durability is that many of its best-known staffers, including Cartoon Editor (and Co-Founder) Eryk Lipinski, 49, have long been Communists or fellow travelers and know intuitively how deep they can sink their shafts. In a country that has long suffered satirists more willingly than reporters, Polish newsmen believe that Szpilki is so popular (circ. 165,000) that it is virtually assassination-proof.

The weekly is also a harsh critic of the West, but to Poles, in their dogged, rear-guard struggle for democracy, Szpilki's sharpest needles are reserved for Communist duplicity and doublethink. In a cartoon that wryly helped to explain its own survival, Szpilki showed a technician standing with a visitor in front of a Rube Goldbergian version of an electronic brain. "You think this criticism machine is big?" said the technician. "You should see the anti-criticism machine."

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