The Retreat from Hope

A frail, greying man stood up under the subdued lights of Poland's Sejm last week and said: "People are tired and impatient because they are not sure of the future, and have not been told, even in general terms, what the future is to be." The speaker was Stanislaw Stomma, leader of Poland's twelve-man Catholic parliamentary group, and his words illuminated the strange image of today's Poland: the double image of a worried, unhappy country, yet the only Communist-ruled country where a man can stand up in Parliament and say such things.

Stomma appealed to Wladyslaw Gomulka's ruling Communists "to resurrect the energies of the nation" by trusting it with a "margin of freedom." To restore the "aim of life and joy in living" that might allay the "bitterness, nihilism, hooliganism and drunkenness" in the land, said Stomma, "confidence must be mutual--of people in authorities, but even more so of the authorities in the people. Only in this way can Polish society be united."

The Purge That Failed. In the last six months uneasy Poles have watched Gomulka, their hero of the October 1956 rising, edge back from his "separate road to Socialism" toward closer ties with Moscow. Gomulka has cracked down so hard on the press that he himself was recently heard to complain: "It is nothing but boring trash now." At Moscow last fall he publicly accepted Soviet leadership over all Communist nations. Last fortnight he met Khrushchev secretly at the border--to ask new, large-scale Soviet economic aid, said unofficial Warsaw sources. His party purge, which was supposed to shake out the old Stalinists and strengthen his leadership, has bogged down into a sort of cataloguing census. The blighting bureaucrats Gomulka hoped to get rid of have clung like leeches to their party membership while the workers who were supposed to be the base of the new party have streamed out. Disenchanted intellectuals by the dozen have torn up their party cards. Of the 14,000 students at the Warsaw Polytechnic, a rallying point of the October rising, only twelve remain in the Communist youth organization.

Some specific freedoms won in October still hold. The lot of the peasants improved as the regime cut back compulsory deliveries and the number of collective farms dwindled to a token 1,724 (10,000 in Stalin's time). "The new fences," observed Warsaw's Swiat, "testify to the return of the peasants' sense of ownership." Relations with the Catholic Church are far better than in other Soviet-bloc countries, though the Vatican reports that "government interference with religious appointments tends to become more rigorous than last year."

No Exhilaration. Unable to govern effectively through the party and unwilling to govern any other way, Gomulka has failed to inspire the self-sacrificing energy expected in October's exhilarated hour. In Polish factories, absenteeism has doubled. Productivity at Warsaw's Zeran Automobile Works is down to one twenty-seventh of the prevailing rate at U.S. Ford plants. To survive, most workers have to take second jobs, many of them in the innumerable hole-in-the-wall private enterprises that have sprung up, and their employment at these second jobs often depends on how much they can steal from their state factory to provide raw materials for the business.

Because last year's world-price movements clipped Poland's export earnings, especially from coal, by a crippling $250 million, the regime must have massive new help from abroad or cut living standards further by restricting imports. Nobody thinks that the $100 million extra they are now seeking in Washington will suffice, and so, the Poles say, Gomulka has turned to Moscow.

The Crumbling Middle. February's local-government elections, the first nationwide test since the parliamentary contests that followed the October rising, may give some evidence of the growing conviction that Gomulka is no longer standing up manfully, doing his best for Poland. "Why should I bother to vote?" said a Warsaw office worker last week. "Last time I voted because I believed Gomulka was going to help us. Since then the price of bread has gone up, butter has gone up, meat has gone up, everything costs more. What difference will these elections make? None."

Between his own failures and the inexorable pressures of East and West, Gomulka still fought to preserve the appearances of his desperate middle course between Communism and the patriotism of his tired and impatient countrymen.

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