Back from the Brink

By Thomas A. Sancton

Warsaw buys time as peace breaks out on the labor front

In a red brick building at the University of Lodz, eleven student strike leaders and four government negotiators faced each other over two green cloth-covered tables. On one wall hung a six-foot white paper cross; on the others posters bearing slogans of protest and defiance. At 4 p.m. Sociology Student Krzysztof Pakulski began to read a complicated agreement that had been hammered out and haggled over during two weeks of often hot-tempered negotiations, and which now signaled the end of a spreading student strike. When the accord was signed an hour later, triumphant cheers erupted from the 800 students assembled in the university auditorium.

Pakulski snatched the 45-page document from Higher Education Minister Janusz Gorski, jumped up on the table and waved it over his head like a captured battle flag. The strikers then picked up their sleeping bags, guitars and posters and peacefully left the building they had occupied for 28 days. "We have won," declared Pakulski. "But it is also a success for the government."

So it seemed. Within hours of the Lodz settlement, sympathy strikes ended at the University of Warsaw and 19 other campuses. In the southeastern city of Rzeszow, meanwhile, a seven-week farmers' sit-in ended after government negotiators signed agreements with peasant leaders there and in nearby Ustrzyki Dolne. Just seven days after the new Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski had issued his dramatic appeal for "90 days of calm," peace, it seemed, had broken out on all labor fronts.

Telegrams of support flowed into the new Premier's office not only from party officials, but also from workers, students and local chapters of Solidarity, the in dependent union federation. The whole country seemed to realize that a campaign of cooperation was Poland's last, best hope of consolidating its bold experiment in socialist "renewal" and avoiding the ultimate disaster of a Soviet invasion. Summing up the increasingly conciliatory national mood, Solidarity Spokesman Karol Modzelewski told the daily Zycie Warszawy that the new government "created a genuine chance for rolling back a dangerous course of events."

But at what price? In the Lodz agreement, the government granted a set of surprisingly far-reaching concessions to the students. Among them: the barring of police from campuses, a 30% student representation in each school's administrative senate, the abolition of mandatory Russian language study and a reduction in the number of required Marxist-Leninist courses. Most important, the students were granted an independent union--thereby establishing yet another potential power center outside the Communist Party.

The students appeared to make only two major concessions in return: 1) a pledge that their union charter would declare allegiance to the Polish constitution, which enshrines the party's leading role, and 2) a requirement that only those strikes approved by a majority of the student body would be considered legitimate. Referring to the whole student settlement package, one Western diplomat shook his head and said, "I just don't see how the Soviets can accept that."

Nor was the agreement with the farmers likely to win favor from the Kremlin's leaders. Though the Rzeszow peasants had apparently been persuaded by Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa to suspend their demands for an independent union, they had also wrested two significant promises from the government. First, Warsaw agreed to increase the proportion of state funds invested in private agriculture, which produces 80% of the country's domestically grown food. Second, independent farmers would be allowed to purchase unused state land, which would increase the amount of privately owned farm land. Both provisions, obviously, flew in the face of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of collective agriculture.

Warsaw's leaders must now convince their Soviet-bloc allies that they have not bought labor peace at the expense of the party's power monopoly. That was the apparent aim of Party Boss Stanislaw Kania's surprise visits to Prague and East Berlin last week. Party Bosses Gustav Husak of Czechoslovakia and Erich Honecker of East Germany have been, along with the Soviets, the most bitter and vocal critics of Poland's liberalization. Western analysts saw Kama's back-to-back meetings with them as an attempt to reassure his skeptical comrades and gain enough time to bring the Polish crisis solidly under control. Significantly, press coverage of Poland was muted throughout the East bloc last week. TASS even reported that the Jaruzelski government seemed to be restoring order.

Kania's breathing space may be shortlived. As one Western diplomat noted, the easing of external pressure on Warsaw could well be due only "to a desire for peace and quiet within the East bloc during the upcoming Soviet Party Congress in Moscow." In presiding over that nine-day Communist extravaganza, which begins this week, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev will want to paint Moscow's empire in the most favorable light possible; thus the timing of Poland's apparent labor truce works to the Kremlin's advantage. But when Kania returns from Moscow, his ears will almost certainly be ringing with stern warnings to halt his country's creeping pluralism.

Another crucial question is how long the union leaders can maintain their patience--and their control over restive lo cals. With whetted appetites, workers will expect fresh victories in the continuing negotiations over a series of pending demands, including a new labor law and the granting of radio and television time to Solidarity. Moreover, promised economic reforms are sure to require more belt tightening, something the rank and file seems ill-disposed to accept. Thus a dangerous potential for new clashes remained. Ultimately, the Poles and their leaders could only hope they might transcend the hazards by cleaving to a bedrock sense of nationalism that has sustained the country through almost two centuries of foreign encroachments. As a Bonn Foreign Ministry expert put it last week, "Whatever their ideological bent, Poles agree fully on one thing: they don't want the Russians in."

--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Richard Hornik/West Berlin and B. William Mader/Bonn

With reporting by Richard Hornik, B. William Mader

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