The Blind

Some of his fellow Communists, said Poland's President Boleslaw Bierut, had been "politically blind." What they had not seen was the Red handwriting on the wall: Stalin had slated Poland for all-out economic and military colonization. A purge of the blind was inevitable.

Last week Wladyslaw Gomulka, once the country's No. 1 Communist but for some time past under suspicion of being a Titoist, was expelled from the Communist Party Central Committee. Vice Minister of Justice Zenon Kliszko and Minister of Construction Spychalski were also kicked out. All were denounced as "masked enemies, provocateurs, saboteurs and traitors"--a few of the epithets currently applied to Titoists by true-blue Stalinists. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, new Soviet proconsul for Poland (TIME, Nov. 21), was elected to the purified Central Committee.

Next day, Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz, turncoat Socialist who last year engineered his party's merger with the Communists, hastily put in his two zlotys' worth. He announced that Vice Minister of Agriculture Stanislaw Kowalewski had been fired as a "hypocrite."

Meanwhile, a rash of "sabotage" trials had broken out in Poland. The head of the state farms in Qlsztyn was sentenced to be hanged for "deliberately failing to carry out the state plan." In Lodz, five state bank directors were sent to prison for "mismanagement of state finances." So much administrative talent had been axed that President Bierut found it necessary to instruct party officials to avoid "all hasty and imprudent dismissals . . ."

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