"All These Errors"

Moscow had raised Poland's bald-domed Wladislaw Gomulka from the Communist underground to a place of power. Last week, through Poland's Communist Party (called the Polish Workers' Party), Moscow slapped him down. The reason: Gomulka, like Yugoslavia's Tito, had become a dangerous "nationalist."

In Warsaw the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party roasted Gomulka, Vice Premier and the party's secretary general, over a Moscow-kindled ideological fire. In party jargon, Gomulka was charged with four cardinal sins: 1) he lacked "understanding of the . . . leading role of the Russian Communist Party in the international front combating [U.S.] imperialism"; 2) he suffered from nationalism; 3) he had an "unconquered and repeatedly renascent social democratic attitude"; 4) he had a "tendency to postpone the struggle against capitalist elements feeding upon exploitation of the poor and medium-sized peasantry."

Gomulka held out for three days against the Central Committee. Then, unlike Tito, who had defied Moscow and been quarantined by the Cominform for it, he confessed his sins. To a congress of 800 party workers in Warsaw Gomulka said: "Comrades, tell all the party members I committed a number of errors. However, I've realized all these errors under the influence of sharp criticism by my comrades . . . Our party is a party of struggle, and one cannot be victorious in a struggle if the leader is hesitant. Such hesitation appeared in my case."

For his sins Gomulka was deprived of his job as party secretary general. Into the secretaryship Moscow put Poland's President Boleslaw Bierut, another underground graduate who had pretended since his emergence in 1945 that he was aloof from party influences.

Poland's peasantry understood. While the "rich" ones (anyone owning more than 49 acres) quaked, some of the "poor" ones queued up for examinations preliminary to joining the Communists. In a Warsaw suburb three of them flunked. When asked "Who is Poland's greatest enemy?" (the prescribed answer: "American imperialism"), they said: "The Soviet Union."

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