Big Brother Is Watching

Gromyko flies to Warsaw on the eve of a crucial congress

There were no photographers on hand when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko stepped onto the tarmac at Warsaw's Okecie Airport last week. The official Polish press agency reported only that "high party officials" had been there to greet the distinguished visitor. The low-key arrival of one of the Kremlin's most powerful leaders, a man widely regarded as a pragmatist rather than a hard-lining ideologue, was seen as a reassuring sign by many Poles. Said one Warsaw journalist: "It means that the Soviets are prepared to accept what we are doing as long as it does not disturb the political and military balance of Eastern Europe."

That optimism may be premature. Gromyko's very presence in Warsaw was a sign of Soviet concern at a moment of political change and uncertainty unparalleled in Poland's postwar history. Buffeted by a year of sporadic labor unrest and economic turmoil, faced with the constant threat of Soviet intervention, the Polish Communists last week completed the election of delegates to an extraordinary party congress. Its purpose: to elect party leaders and act on a series of proposed structural reforms that are expected to make the Polish Communist Party by far the most liberal in the Soviet bloc. Even prominent nonparty members like Lech Walesa, leader of the independent Solidarity union federation, were hoping that the congress would succeed and thus help stabilize the country.

Repeated Soviet warnings had failed to deter Polish leaders from calling the congress and choosing delegates in the freest elections the country has seen since the Communists consolidated their power in 1947. Under the new rules, nominations could come up from the rank and file as well as down from the leadership, and the final voting was done by secret ballot.

The results amounted to a sweeping purge of the party's middle-level leadership. The eleven-man Politburo emerged from the voting largely intact, losing two full members and two alternates. Far heavier losses were sustained by the Central Committee, which is still dominated by holdovers from the regime of deposed Party Boss Edward Gierek: less than a third of its 146 members were chosen. Some three-fourths of the 1,964 delegates will be attending their first party congress.

One of the first items on their agenda will be the election of party leaders. Party Boss Stanislaw Kania seems likely to keep his job. His personal prestige surged following an unsuccessful hard-line challenge to his leadership last month after the Kremlin sent him an ominous letter criticizing his failure to deal effectively with "counterrevolutionary forces." But the Central Committee appears destined for a major overhaul.

Whatever degree of internal democratization the party decides on, there remains the broader question of how it will cope with Poland's formidable problems. There are signs that Kania and his moderate supporters, including Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski, will retain control of the party and continue their policy of cautious reform. Jaruzelski clearly seemed to be in charge last week when he ousted or reassigned 18 Cabinet officials in an effort to improve the government's handling of a worsening economic crisis and food shortage. Indeed, on the eve of the conference, Warsaw wits were joking wryly that a Polish sandwich was a meat ration ticket between two bread tickets.

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