New Invasion Jitters

By Thomas A. Sancton

A perilous strike is averted--but concern continues to grow Worrisome military movements in the Soviet Union's western districts. Reports of Soviet transport planes landing in southwestern Poland with helicopters and other heavy gear. An unexpected extension of the two-week-old Warsaw Pact maneuvers in and around Poland. Stepped-up attacks against Polish "counterrevolutionaries" in Izvestiya, Soviet government newspaper. A sudden flight to Prague by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev to meet with Warsaw Pact leaders. It seemed all too reminiscent of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, an operation that had followed on the heels of Warsaw Pact war games. Could that scenario be replayed now in Poland? No one could say. But the alarming signs sparked a new round of invasion jitters last week, just as the Poles should have been heaving a sigh of relief at having averted a potentially disastrous general strike.

Testifying on Capitol Hill last Thursday, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger announced that the Soviets had significantly increased their invasion capability, making the situation "far more serious" than before. Next day State Department Spokesman William Dyess warned that Soviet preparedness had reached the point where "they are capable of moving at any time." Vice President George Bush underscored U.S. concern by telling Polish Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, who was in Washington seeking economic aid (see box), that "we follow a policy of nonintervention in Poland's internal affairs, and we are anxious that others do the same."

It was not immediately clear just what had set off Washington's alarm, but as one State Department official put it, "the concern grows with each hour." With an estimated 200,000 Soviet troops reportedly massed near the Polish border, there were indications that some small-scale movement into Poland had already begun. Said a State Department spokesman: "Some specialized personnel have moved in. We are not talking about divisions but smaller things." A U.S. intelligence official, meanwhile, confirmed that the Soviets had just completed a sophisticated military communications network inside Poland big enough to handle a force of 30 divisions. Armed intervention was not necessarily imminent, in the official view, but the essential preparations had been made.

Washington's unsettling reports were met with some skepticism abroad. Most experts in Western Europe felt that Moscow's latest military movements were mainly meant to intimidate the wayward Poles. One Soviet official visiting the U.S., Georgi Arbatov, director of Moscow's Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, insisted last week that "nobody in the Soviet Union wants a dramatic development [an invasion] in Poland, because it would have tragic consequences for our own relations with that country." Yet he conveyed the clear implication that an invasion may be unavoidable: "After all,

Poland is really on the brink of chaos."

Indeed, the country had narrowly escaped calamity earlier last week. Like two express trains hurtling toward each other along a single track, Poland's government and independent labor movement had seemed headed for certain collision. Solidarity, the 10 million-member union federation, was threatening to launch a general strike that would halt every loom, lathe and furnace in the country. Warsaw's Communist leaders were ready to respond with a declared state of emergency and possibly an armed crackdown, a move that could provoke a violent civil conflict. But both sides in Poland's labor-government showdown hit the brakes at the last moment and averted a smashup by inches.

The breakthrough came at a seven-hour meeting between Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski and Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa on the eve of the threatened strike. There was little optimism when those talks got under way at noon in Warsaw's 17th century Koniecpolski Palace. Three previous meetings had failed to defuse the crisis that erupted last month when police in the northwestern city of Bydgoszcz brutally evicted 26 union members from a provincial assembly hall. Indeed, a massive warning strike to protest the beatings had halted the country for four hours on March 27. With Solidarity brandishing a list of five demands, and Warsaw's Communist bosses railing against creeping "anarchy," there seemed to be little room for compromise.

Rakowski pulled no punches. He opened the talks by telling Walesa bluntly that the government would declare a state of emergency and possibly call in the army if the general strike took place. As Solidarity Spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz later recounted, the government side threatened a "total confrontation including some bloodshed. This time it looked like it was not a bluff." With that grim threat waving over them, the Solidarity delegates dropped their unyielding stance and began working toward a compromise agreement. They were apparently also prompted by some behind-the-scenes mediation from Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the Primate of Poland. Midway through the talks came a promising sign: Solidarity extended from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. the deadline it had set for calling off the strike.

Less than one hour before that limit, Walesa emerged from the building to announce that an agreement had been reached and the strike was being canceled. Cheers erupted from the crowd of several thousand workers and housewives assembled before the wrought-iron gates. They chanted Walesa's nickname, "Leszek, Leszek." As Walesa's car inched through the crush of supporters, some overexuberant fans even managed to lift the rear wheels off the ground. A sticker on Walesa's windshield seemed to capture the spirit of the moment: IT'S EXCITING TO BE POLISH.

The agreement was hardly the sort of bargaining victory to which Solidarity had become accustomed. Indeed, the union conceded more than the government on three of its five demands. Warsaw's leaders did promise to investigate and punish those responsible for the Bydgoszcz beatings. (Deputy Provincial Governor Roman Bak, whom Solidarity held particularly responsible, resigned the day after the agreement was reached.) The demand for legalization of the independent farmers' union, known as Rural Solidarity, was partly satisfied by a pledge to tolerate the organization's activities pending recommendations on its permanent status by a joint labor-government commission.

But the union made little headway on its remaining issues. The question of amnesty for political dissidents was referred to a special parliamentary commission, and there was no decision at all on the demands for guaranteed full pay during strikes and greater access by Solidarity to the state radio and television. Walesa pronounced himself "70%" satisfied with the agreement but admitted that "it will not satisfy everyone."

Nor did it. When Solidarity's national commission assembled in Gdansk to ratify the pact the next day, Walesa came under bitter attack. Jan Rulewski and Mariusz Labentowicz, two Bydgoszcz union leaders hospitalized after the po lice attack, sent a letter accusing Walesa of "bungling" the negotiations. "You lost everything," the letter charged scornfully. "We can compromise on the supply of onions, but not when blood has been spilled." Fumed a union leader from Lublin: "It was our only chance so far to achieve almost everything. But now it's gone."

But if some local union leaders chafed at Walesa's moderation, there were strong expressions of support from the rank and file. All the Gdansk factories submitted a joint resolution backing the compromise agreement. Walesa seized on the moder ate mood to accuse the militant leaders of losing touch with the grass roots and forgetting "that they too had been workers once." He ultimately managed to hold the line against the radicals: the commission decided to accept the agreement and strike cancellation by a vote of 25 to 4, with six abstentions.

Next day, simmering dissensions boiled over into what amounted to a leadership purge. Anna Walentynowicz, a fiery radical who opposed the agreement, was ousted from the national commission by her own Gdansk local. It was an ironic passing, since it had been her sacking from the Lenin Shipyard last August that had helped spark the strikes that gave birth to Solidarity. At the same time, militant Solidarity Spokesman Karol Modzelewski, a leading dissident, resigned in protest over the agreement. Thus, Walesa and his fellow moderates appeared to emerge from last week's crisis in firm control of the national leadership.

Party Boss Stanislaw Kama was in no position to gloat over Solidarity's internal conflicts. He had to contend with an equally fractious tug of war between the moderates and the hard-liners within Warsaw's Communist hierarchy. Only a day before the strike-averting accord was reached, these two factions slugged it out at a stormy 18-hour Central Committee meeting. The hardliners, led by Politburo Members Stefan Olszowski and Tadeusz Grabski, reportedly pushed for an immediate crackdown against the labor movement. The more pragmatic Politburo leaders, including Kania and Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski, argued for accommodation. They had apparently sought to prepare their ground in advance by organizing a national letter-writing campaign in favor of negotiating with Solidarity.

When the hard-liners unleashed their predictable tirades against the union, they encountered a surprise: most of the speakers reported that the party's rank-and-file membership--39% of whom also belong to Solidarity--were overwhelmingly in favor of the reforms demanded by the union. Said the party first secretary from Szczecin: "We must know that Solidarity is in the first place the working class itself."

Rebuffed by such broad-based opposition, Olszowski and Grabski offered to step down. But the 140-member Central Committee, apparently unwilling to offend Moscow, rejected the proffered resignations and gave the entire Politburo a vote of confidence. The final communique, however, was a clear victory for the moderates. It called for continued negotiations with Solidarity, and thus opened the way for the latest settlement. It also recommended closer ties with party organizations at the factory level, an obvious gesture to the rank and file. Finally, it scheduled a Party Congress for this July, when delegates will be chosen democratically by secret ballot for the first time in Poland's 34-year Communist history.

In the end, an encouraging symmetry emerged from the chaotic jumble of the week's events. In both the party and the union, the groups favoring accommodation over confrontation appeared to have won. Kania and Walesa both prevailed against their hard-line adversaries by invoking the wishes of their grass-roots followers. There was no guarantee--but much reason to hope--that thus each of the two leaders could survive the next challenge. --By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Richard Hornik/West Berlin

With reporting by Richard Hornik

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.