Life of the Party

In the lands behind the Iron Curtain, membership in the Communist Party is meant to be a signal honor, a reward for extraordinary services on a tractor, special zeal on a lathe, or talent and diligence at street-corner rallies. But in Warsaw last week, the rulers of Communist Poland were grimly facing up to the fact that to all but a handful of their subjects party membership had come to be nothing but a chore. On a recent journey through the Polish countryside, a Western traveler found that in village after village party headquarters had vanished, closed up for lack of members. Explained one peasant: "You can't be a party member and expect your neighbors to trust you."

Fortnight ago, in desperation, Polish Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka introduced a new tactic to beef up the party in rural areas. Since offers of good jobs, high salaries, and softer living had not succeeded in winning new rural members, Gomulka decreed that Communist workers who commute from villages to town factories would have their memberships transferred to the village party list to give a "psychological boost" to scattered country members and make others "less hesitant" to join.

Trouble with this maneuver was that even in the industrial towns party members have become increasingly apathetic. Of the 20,000 Polish Communists whose party records include an official reprimand, only 5,000 have bothered to obtain the vindication that the party has offered them. In the largest factory in Lodz, no new candidate for party membership has been recruited for two years. And in the town of Ziebice, only 30 of 300 party members showed up at a meeting to choose a new party secretary--and none would take the job.

Harking back nostalgically to the good old days when party activists worked seven days a week and scarcely found time to eat or sleep, the provincial paper Gazeta Robotnicza blamed the Ziebice fiasco on the fact that Ziebice's Communists were unwilling to accept responsibility. "We might as well say why," mused the paper unhappily. "A number of our activists have come to like the petty-bourgeois way of life. They want nothing else but to be left in peace."

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