"Plan Fulfillment"

The Communists have almost throttled open opposition in Eastern Europe. Last week their stooges took over the remnants of Mikolajcyk's Peasant Party in Poland and denounced "Anglo-Saxon imperialism." Last fortnight a military court sentenced Rumania's Maniu to life imprisonment. Yugoslavia's Mihailovich and Bulgaria's Petkoff had long since been shot. Hungary's Communists had swallowed the Smallholders Party, and last week Czech Communists began to break up their opposition with arrests.

Communists are busily shaping each of the six satellite countries to a set Marxist pattern as fast as the national character will allow. Each is getting what Americans call "the works" and Soviets more solemnly call vypolnenye plana, "plan fulfillment."

TIME Correspondent Sam Welles here reports on how Poland's Communists have tailored the process to their people:

Peter Zaremba is a Communist and the mayor of Szczecin, as Poles call once-German Stettin. At the dedication of his city's new hospital, we knelt next to each other in the front row of a large open-air congregation at a Catholic Mass.

"Most Poles are Catholics," he told me afterwards. "It is the Polish custom to start a dedication with a Mass. It has been so for centuries. It would be silly to upset so old a tradition."

Polish Communists have not upset such traditions. They voted to keep the words "So help me God" in the oath of office for government posts. When they nationalized Poland's large estates, they exempted all church property. But they say privately: "The last fight will be with the church."

Tammany Plus. The small, smart, efficient high command of Poland's Communists, which one observer told me was "Tammany Hall with Tommy guns," plans to fight its battles one at a time, though occasionally these overlap. The projected seven-point program of absorption: 1) the wartime London government -in -exile; 2) the underground; 3) the schools; 4) the middle class; 5) the Socialists (now Communism's ally in the government bloc); 6) the peasants; 7) the church.

Wherever you go in Poland you find Communists in the key posts, working longer and harder hours than almost anybody else to make up in energy what they lack in numbers. In the large slice of Germany which the Potsdam Conference turned over to Polish administration, they have the mayors of the two biggest cities: Zaremba at Szczecin and Bronislaw Kupczynski at Wroclaw (once Breslau).

These two, who were boyhood chums in Poznan, personify Communist use of both brain & brawn. Balding, professorial Zaremba speaks six languages and worked as a clerk with the Nazi occupation forces as a spy for the resistance. Stocky, genial Kupczynski, who, when he stops smiling, looks like a Bowery tough, won Poland's highest medal for valor as a fighter in the resistance.

"Not Very Happy." Such leaders watch over their followers as thoroughly as Tammany Hall ever did. The 7.5 million workers and intellectuals among Poland's 24 million population whom the party wants to cultivate get not a Christmas basket and a summer clambake, but better food and housing than the low Polish average--and the better jobs. Nearly a third of the Polish budget goes into state subsidies for this new elite.

A Polish painter whom I met in a blitzed Warsaw suburb told me that each of the arts--painting, music, theater, writing, etc.--was run by a government trade union committee. "Writers must be very careful to follow the correct lines," he said, "but we other creative artists have not been so much disturbed."

"Then you can paint anything you like?" I asked.

"Well, not exactly," he said, "for our union committee of course has ideas. For instance, it told us lately that there was too much neglect of still lifes, and that we should concentrate our chief effort on them for a time."

"What do landscape and portrait painters think of that?"

"They are not very happy," he said.

"Russia Gets, We Give." The Tommy-gun half of the definition is equally evident. Every railway platform I saw in Poland was patrolled by a man with a Tommy gun. Poles, who jostled familiarly with the many soldiers on all such platforms, edged gingerly away from the patrols. On one 200-mile stretch of highway in central Poland, I encountered nine armed control points where other men with Tommy guns inspected traffic.

The first two of Communism's seven battles in Poland are almost won. Typical terror tactics have eliminated all independent-minded members of the London government who, like Mikolajczyk, tried to steer a political course uncontrolled by the Communists. The underground has been almost ended by the fairly full amnesty offered last spring. The government promised not to prosecute those who surrendered with their arms, and 59,576 did so. The regime was willing to make--and keep--such a promise because it knows that while it could probably stay in power by force, it could do so more easily with at least some popular support. The amnesty was a very popular move.

Poland's Communists do put Polish interests high, though they put Russian interests first. A sardonic Socialist told me: "Our trade treaty with Moscow provides that Russia gets our coal, and in return we give them our textiles."

The trade is not that lopsided. While 80% of Poland's foreign trade in 1946 was with Russia (prewar average: 1%), the percentage has fallen to 40% in 1947. Polish Communists have upped their trade with the West because it, and not Russia, can provide the machinery Poland desperately needs for her recovery.

Ice Cream for Ivan. Poland was among the first nations to accept the Marshall Plan "in principle" last June, and the Communists, like other Poles, were disappointed when the Kremlin told them to reverse themselves and decline the invitation to the Paris conference. Ships flying the flags of 14 nations were in Gdynia the day I landed. But even Poland's ports are not entirely her own. The former German Swinemunde, now Swinoujscie, has thousands of Red fleet sailors. One of the few Polish sailors I saw there said sourly: "This is a Soviet base." Swinoujscie's ice-cream shop had the Russian word for "ice cream," morozhenoye, before the Polish word, lody.

When I asked Mayor Zaremba about Szczecin harbor, he said: "The Russians have any section of the port they want. Sometimes they move from one section to another."

Inverse Ratio. Poland's Communists are now fighting their third and fourth battles, for control of the schools and the middle class. "We can never win the old people," one Communist frankly told me, "so we must educate the youth our way." They handpick the teachers, and even have a "social commission" to control all exams and make sure that every pupil is "correct" in his social thinking before he can pass, no matter how high his scholastic grades.

One move to control the middle class is a new Communist-dominated commission to fix taxes for townspeople. A citizen's rate of tax is in inverse ratio to his rate of cooperation.*

Another law forces all small businessmen (big business has been nationalized) to get permission for every product they make from the Communist Minister of Industry, Poland's biggest producer and their own chief competitor. Most Poles believe that within three years all Polish shops will be state-owned.

Ministries That Matter. The Communists have not formally opened their fifth battle, against their own present allies, the Socialists. But both parties know it will come. One Socialist M.P. told me: "We provide nearly all the government's support; the Communists have all the power." The Socialists do have six cabinet ministers, including Premier Joseph Cyrankiewicz. But the Communists manage the ministries that matter. They control the army, the secret police, education, military courts (where the significant trials are held), foreign trade, and Poland's entire economic life.

The battle against the church may not come for years, until the Communists have consolidated everything else. Poland's Communist President Bierut has stated that the question of whether the present religious freedom will be continued "depends on the attitude of the clergy; on whether they will accept the state of things existing in Poland."

The struggle with the peasants (70% of the population) will almost certainly come before that, not only because the Communists have to depend on them for food, and hate the feeling of dependence, but also because it is the one class in Poland that has a physical basis for resistance. Shopkeepers can be squeezed, intellectuals intimidated, businessmen nationalized, and factory workers fired--but farmers can hold out longer because they grow their own crops and thus are relatively self-sufficient.

"Connected Vessels." Meanwhile, the regime is building its strength for that eventual struggle by weakening everything else in Poland. A scientist put it to me: "All Polish life is being lowered to the Russian level by the law of connected vessels."/- A prime factor in the Red drive for more & more power is the secret police, which last week had its 1947 budget of $170 million upped to $230 million for 1948.

I saw a symbol of the new Poland when I went to call on a quite ordinary Pole in Warsaw. His address turned out to be a large building with several entries. Since I had no apartment number for him, I asked a man for directions.

"She is the one who knows," he said, and waved at a woman in black sitting on the far side of the courtyard, where she commanded a view of every entry. A girl halfway across the court said the same thing. I asked if she were the concierge and the girl answered: "That is what the secret police call her." When I got to the beady-eyed woman herself, she gave me the number.

On my way out an hour later, she waved me over and said: "You were up there quite a while. Is there anyone else along the block whose address you want?"

The last time I had met that sort of block supervisor was in Soviet Russia. The time before that was in Nazi Germany.

* Last week the A.P. reported from Warsaw that when uncooperative Shopkeeper Antoni Olesinski complained that his taxes were too high, he was assessed another $1,000. He undressed and threw his clothes on the tax collector's counter. That brought him a $10 fine for disorderly conduct.

/- When a pipe connects liquids standing at different heights in two vessels, the liquids level out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.