Spreading Purges

Despite a warming spring sun and blue skies, Warsaw last week was a gloomy and uneasy city. The press had a strident, scolding tone. Normally talkative Poles suddenly felt it more prudent to avoid the few Westerners who have lately managed to get entry visas, and the government became stricter about letting Poles leave the country. Everywhere there seemed to be larger numbers than usual of plainclothes policemen and other shadowy characters. The country's severest purge since the bloodless revolution of 1956, which had started off a few weeks earlier by concentrating on the Jews in government and universities, suddenly spread to engulf people in other walks of Polish life.

No one, it seemed, was immune from ominous personal criticism or sudden dismissal. The government fired Jozef Kutin, a deputy foreign trade minister, and Wilhelm Billig, head of Poland's nuclear-energy office and a former chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Without explanation, it relieved three top-ranking generals, including the head of the vast Warsaw Military District, of their troop commands and consigned them to out-of-the-way desk jobs. It dropped an Olympics official in the department of state sports and dismissed the rector and deputy rector, both Jews, of the Lodz State College of Theater and Film, which has produced such directors as Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water) and Jerry Skolimowski (Le Depart). While the purges gained momentum in Warsaw, there were reports from provincial cities of sweeping dismissals also in progress there.

Age Gap. The extent of the campaigns, and their continuing anti-Semitic cast, raised doubts as to whether Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka still exercises complete control of the party. Not only has Gomulka's plea for an end to the anti-Zionist campaign three weeks ago been ignored by the government, but mutterings of dissatisfaction with the stagnant Gomulka regime have begun to appear in the Polish press.

Last week, the fortnightly Prawo i Zycie issued an ominous warning: "Wladyslaw Gomulka and the party leadership are facing the urgent need of giving the nation a reply about the prospects of future development" in dealing with "incompetent, discredited people carrying on intrigues at their places of work." Trybuna Ludu criticized the Gomulka regime for being too much influenced by "revisionist" economists, denounced the type of market economy now being introduced in other Socialist countries. And Polityka, a magazine with a large readership among young party members, bemoaned the considerable age gap between leading party officials, many of whom are in their sixties, and the rest of the country--40% of whose people have not yet reached their 19th birthday.

More than Willing. The two men standing in the wings who have most to gain by a weakening of Gomulka's position are Police Boss Mieczyslaw Moczar and Silesian Party Boss Edward Gierek (TIME, March 29). As head of an organization of onetime underground fighters known as the Partisans, Moczar, 54, intensely dislikes the Jews in government because many of them returned to Poland with Russian troops and held posts during Stalin's time. He is anxious to see them dismissed, even more anxious to see them replaced with his own men. Gierek, who was the first national figure to condemn the "Zionists," is fond of the youth argument since, at 55, he is the youngest member of the twelve-man ruling Politburo--to which Moczar does not belong. If the Polish Parliament, which convenes this week, should decide to make a change in the top-echelon leadership, including that of ailing President Edward Ochab, both men would be more than willing to offer their services.

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