Wowing Them in Warsaw

A working-class hero tours the big town in triumph

Dressed in his familiar baggy gray suit, Lech Walesa proudly led his delegation into Room 203 of the Warsaw district provincial court. As hundreds of sympathizers jostled one another outside, the Baltic labor leader slid an eight-page document across the long table. It was the charter of Solidarnosc (Solidarity), the new Gdansk-based umbrella organization representing 36 independent unions from all over Poland. Judge Zdzislaw Koscielniok declared he would examine the charter for two weeks and then rule on its legitimacy. As Walesa departed from the drab sandstone building, cheering workers hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him through the streets. "I'm counting on you," he shouted over the din, "and I believe you will help me."

The court appearance was the high point of a triumphant tour of Warsaw by the Gdansk electrician who became a national folk hero as the leader of the legendary Lenin Shipyard strike. Walesa began the morning with a 9 o'clock Mass at the Church of the Holy Cross, where three days earlier, regular radio broadcasts of the Roman Catholic Mass had resumed following a 41-year blackout. Later in the day, Walesa's delegation met with a group of Politburo members, including Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, the official who had negotiated the Gdansk agreement on behalf of the government. With characteristic bluntness, Walesa complained that the authorities, contrary to their promises, were denying the independent labor movement adequate opportunity to publicize its existence. Jagielski indicated that he would try to arrange freer access to the press and radio. In return, he asked that the unions mobilize the workers in support of economic recovery. One sign of the apparent cooperation between authorities and unions so far: Walesa and six other former strike leaders were named to a special 25-member committee charged with drafting a new labor code.

Nor could Walesa complain about his own exposure. He held a press conference at the Warsaw office of Interpress, the government news agency. He drew laughter and applause as he deftly fielded questions from some 200 Polish and foreign journalists. In response to one combative Soviet reporter, Walesa snapped, "We are cleaning our own house. We are not endangering anyone. The whole world understands. So you understand this: we are making small changes and perhaps others should follow our example."

Poland's Communist Party was undergoing its own housecleaning. In a continuing purge, Radio and Television Chief Jozef Barecki was sacked just four weeks after replacing his disgraced predecessor, Maciej Szczepanski, still under investigation for embezzlement. Barecki's apparent sin: years of loyal service to discredited ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek. Further changes were expected. Warsaw's new leader, Stanislaw Kania, continued to shape his own administration. Said Interpress Director Miroslaw Wojciechowski: "The situation is new. It demands new faces, new attitudes. It is a question of democracy within the party."

The limits on such "democracy," however, were clear from the intensifying official campaign against "antisocialist elements." The leader of one dissident fringe group was arrested last week after calling for an end to Communist rule in a West German TV interview. Jacek Kuron, head of the far more influential KOR dissident group, was also denounced in a government news program that broadcast edited excerpts of a Swedish interview in which he appeared to favor the violent overthrow of the Communist regime. In Kuron's defense, Walesa warned that slandering KOR members could be a violation of the Gdansk agreement. It was a veiled but unmistakable threat of new strikes if Warsaw should persist in its crackdown on dissidents.

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