Between Two Worlds

_ THE FROZEN REVOLUTION (269 pp.)--Frank Glbney--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.75).

The Star-Spangled Banner celebrates the fact that, after a night of battle, the country's flag was still there. The Polish national anthem celebrates the fact that, after centuries of battle, the country is still there. This cautious, realistic anthem --"Poland is not yet lost"--could serve as the theme of this book. The Frozen Revolution undertakes to explain how it happened that Poland is still there and that its cause--vital to the West--is not yet lost.

It is one of the 20th century's major political miracles that Poland today is "a one-time satellite whirling half out of its orbit," in daily danger of suppression but also in daily defiance of Moscow. The origin of the miracle is familiar. Ever since Hungary rebelled and Poland came close to open rebellion in 1956, Moscow has known that it could restore total domination over Poland only at the price of bloodshed. At the same time, the Poles have known that, if they sought total freedom, Moscow would not hesitate to pay the price. This potentially lethal balance is the basis of Poland's small measure of independence from the Kremlin.

Two-Headed City. No newsman has described the delicate and complex situation with more insight than Reporter Gibney, a LIFE staff writer. With authority, humor, and political sophistication, Gibney describes how paradox has become a law of life in a country where a dedicated Communist (Premier Gomulka) collaborates with a dedicated Catholic (Cardinal Wyszynski) to check both hothead Marxists and anti-Marxists. The result, reports Gibney, can sometimes be as bewildering as that wondrous two-headed animal of Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle stories, the "Push-me Pull-you."

Two-headed Warsaw, says Gibney, is full of "tattered signboards with their promise of a bargain-basement brotherhood of man," and at the same time it is more Catholic than any European capital except Rome ("and more sincerely so than Rome, one suspects"). Old World charm still contends with the Reds' brave new world: "Nowhere else do so many Communists kiss so many ladies' hands." Poland today "is a place where Marxist theoreticians argue with Americans in night clubs, [where] TV commercials can be permitted on the same channels that pledge the 'workers' society' to a world free from private enterprise." The contradictions stem from the fact that the 1956 revolution had to be halted halfway, frozen in mid-blow; Poland's economy is lethargic and disorderly, its younger generation is embittered after seeing its 1956 hopes for liberty diluted in daily compromise with Moscow.

Humane Socialism. Gibney believes that Gomulka, as the country's boss, has a fair chance to keep up his hair-raising tightrope act under the international big top. But he has no illusions about him. In the past, Gomulka "connived, cheated, threatened and bludgeoned" as much as any other Communist leader. When he returned to power in 1956, after years of imprisonment at the hands of the Stalinists, a more humane side emerged. He undertook to introduce democracy in the Communist Party and to build "humane socialism" (which Gibney describes as a "wedding of modern Communist practice with an idea of the rule of law, half rediscovered"). But more and more his promises have given way to renewed repression, not only because Moscow and its Polish followers want it that way, but because Gomulka has discovered that a little liberty is a dangerous thing: "Gresham's Law is not true of political coinage -- for the customs of a free society, wherever the Poles introduced them, began forthwith to drive Communist methods out . . . Where democratization inside the party was permitted, the organizations speedily fell apart."

Therein, feels Gibney, lies Poland's immense value to the West; the country is "a pilot-study in Communist decay." As the stone of Red repression was temporarily rolled away and the life underneath suddenly laid bare, it became clearer than ever that the Communist state, even when men try to liberalize it, cannot do without coercion and police power. Author Gibney finds another way of saying this, in the words of a witty Polish intellectual. In a small Jewish congregation, so goes the story, a young Communist was puzzling about one of Stalin's famous slogans and asked: "Tell me, Comrade Rabbi, can you build 'socialism in one country'?" The rabbi thought deeply. "Yes," he replied finally. "You can build socialism in one country, but you have to live in another."

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