Triumph And New Shocks

By Thomas A. Scanton

The workers win and outgoes Gierek

Poland had scarcely begun to savor the remarkable triumph of the workers of Gdansk and the miners of Silesia in wresting a series of unprecedented reforms from the Communist government when there was unsettling news. There had been rumors all week long, perhaps inevitably in a Communist country, that the price for Polish Leader Edward Gierek might be stiff. One version had it that his entire Politburo had been called on the red carpet to Moscow. Nonetheless, in downtown Warsaw the country's parliament assembled on schedule to discuss and ratify the government's settlement with the striking workers. Then came the first shock: a bulletin that Gierek had been stricken with a "serious heart disturbance" and was being attended by five physicians, including the Minister of Health. But the proceedings continued, and in his televised address Premier Jozef Pinkowski eloquently recommended that the strike agreement be adopted so that the government could go on and "rebuild the confidence of the nation."

Half a mile away, a less advertised meeting of the Polish United Workers' Party's central committee had been suddenly convened. Cars of the Politburo and committee members converged on the Party House, their white sandstone-faced headquarters. There, something quite different was going on, and, in the ease of hindsight, perfectly predictable. Indeed, the script had been used before. At 1:30 a.m. Saturday came the official announcement that the ailing Gierek--whose malady might be more political than physical--had been replaced. The new boss of the Polish Communist party, the country's ruling authority, was Stanislaw Kania, 53, whose responsibilities for the past five years in the Politburo pointedly included, among other things, .security and defense. A tough, inside-party man, Kania had been largely overlooked in the betting on who might replace Gierek.

Gierek apparently learned about his fate last Wednesday when he met secretly near the U.S.S.R. border with Soviet Politburo Member Andrei Kirilenko. Western analysts assume that Gierek also learned then that he was losing his Politburo seat and Central Committee secretaryship. "His illness might have speeded things up a little more," said a West German specialist. "But now it seems the decision was made before."

Precisely what the change meant for the country, and for the victory the workers believed they had won, remained to be seen. There were those, understandably, who did not take much comfort in Kama's background. But there were also those who recalled that at the height of the strikes Kania had been quoted as telling the Gdansk party organization that it was a time "for a political solution--not for force." The only thing that could be reasonably certain, given the risky experiments the country and the workers had embarked upon, was that Kania was surely a man to Moscow's liking.

The week had begun with life in the Baltic port of Gdansk getting back to normal. Before dawn, city trams and buses began their rounds through the chilly, rainswept streets. Workers filed through factory gates. Dockers started to unload the dozens of ships stacked up in the harbor. As seagulls wheeled and cried overhead, the multicolored cranes at Lenin Shipyard arced through the air hauling heavy metal parts. Indeed, it almost seemed as if nothing much had changed since 16,000 shipyard workers had walked off the job and occupied the sprawling complex for 18 days.

In reality, all of Poland had been shaken. The Lenin Shipyard strike had transformed a series of scattered protests over rising meat prices into a workers' crusade for sweeping economic and political reforms. From its nerve center in Gdansk, the movement quickly swept the Baltic coast, spread southward, and finally reached deep into the coal-mining heartland of Silesia. Before the strikes had ended, some 500,000 workers at over 500 enterprises had joined the peaceful but crippling revolt. The work stoppages had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, pushing the country to the brink of disaster and testing the limits of Soviet patience.

For three tense weeks, the world had watched a surreal spectacle: a Communist government at first denouncing, then publicly negotiating with, its own rebellious workers. No less remarkable was the display of discipline, organization and shrewd negotiating skills provided by the Gdansk-based Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) that became the bargaining agent for over 400 Baltic enterprises. Most astounding of all were the agreements that finally ended the major strikes. In addition to pay raises and increased social benefits, Gierek's regime had granted --on paper at least--a spate of political concessions unprecedented anywhere in a Communist country: independent, worker-run trade unions, a legal right to strike and a relaxation of censorship. In return, the strikers agreed to recognize the supremacy of the Communist Party and to keep their independent trade unions out of the "political" realm.

Though the government's extraordinary concessions got nearly all the strikers back to work, ominous questions loomed even before Gierek's ousting. First of all, there was the text of the agreement itself; it contained ambiguous, even contradictory, language that could obviously lead to widely differing interpretations in the future. For example, the section providing for relaxation of censorship nevertheless asserts the government's right to "protect state and economic secrets." But more important was the question of whether the government would, or could, deliver on the spirit of the agreement. Even with the best of intentions, how could the regime, already economically strapped, deliver on its bread-and-butter promises? Would Warsaw really permit independent labor organizations to rival the party-controlled unions prescribed by Leninist dogma? If so, would Moscow tolerate such a challenge to the Communist Party's monopoly of power? Kania was reassuring in a speech before the Central Committee Friday night. Said he: "We shall take care that all these agreements are implemented."

But reaction from Moscow and the rest of the East bloc was hardly encouraging. While Poland announced a hard-currency Soviet loan to help ease its economic crisis, Moscow delivered a steady stream of vitriol against "antisocialist elements," which it blamed for the strikes in the first place, and against the West in general, which it blamed for subsequent interference. Concerted blasts from East German and Czechoslovak party organs --obviously concerned with the potential for labor trouble in their own countries --denounced "those whose hearts supposedly beat for Polish workers [but] in reality are anti-Polish wolves in sheep's clothing." One obvious target of such recriminations: a gesture of solidarity from the U.S. labor movement. In spite of grave reservations on the part of the Carter Administration, which was careful to urge restraint in the Polish crisis, the AFL-CIO announced the establishment of a special fund to help the Polish strikers set up their new free labor unions.

Nothing better illustrated the improbability of the situation than the nationally televised signing ceremony that took place in Gdansk last week. As millions of Poles looked on from their living rooms, the Interfactory Strike Committee and government delegations filed into a reception room at Lenin Shipyard and took their seats at the same wooden table where the agreements had been hammered out over the previous week. On one side sat the Warsaw government's chief negotiator, Mieczyslaw Jagielski, 56, the conservatively dressed, gray-templed First Deputy Premier of Poland. Facing him was Strike Leader Lech Walesa, the 37-year-old electrician with a drooping mustache and a shock of brown hair, who had become the workingmen's hero.

Walesa began by reading a brief statement. "I can say with satisfaction that we have solved our dispute without the use of force, through talks and persuasion," he said. "We have shown that Poles, when they want to, can always reach an understanding. So this is success for both sides." Walesa conceded that the workers had not got everything they wanted, but added, "We have gained everything that could be gained in the present situation. And we shall gain the rest, too, because we have the most important thing--our independent, self-governing trade unions." Then came the solemn declaration: "I pronounce the strike ended."

The strike leader rose, followed by his comrades and the government delegates, and in a raspy baritone began to sing the Polish national anthem, Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela (Poland Has Not Yet Perished). The workers and government officials picked it up, as did the hundreds of strike representatives who had been listening to the proceedings over a loudspeaker. Then came the signing of the formal strike settlement, a blue-bound document containing agreements on all but one of the strikers' 21 major demands. (Rejected: across-the-board lowering of the retirement age.) The Deputy Premier quickly flipped through the pages and signed with an ordinary ballpoint. Walesa, however, took out a red and white sausage of a pen as long as his forearm. It was a souvenir of Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland last year--and thus a sort of pop reminder of the church's devout following among the country's overwhelmingly Catholic workers.

When the shipyard workers returned to their jobs the next day, garlands of wilting flowers still decorated the gate. But now there was also a new red slogan: WORKERS OF ALL ENTERPRISES--UNITE!

In one of the hull-making sheds across the yard, workers were doing just that. All morning long, blue-clad men and women trooped up the rickety stairs to a grimy foreman's office to sign up for membership in the new unions.

In a brown apartment building across town, meanwhile, Lech Walesa arrived with a bunch of gladioli and a large crucifix to open up the temporary union headquarters. He stretched out his hands, looked skyward and proclaimed: "I am in an empty room, but one full of hope." Walesa said that he and the other members of the Gdansk strike committee would serve as interim officers until elections can be held; but he confessed that no one yet knows how the new unions will operate. The settlement stipulated that any worker could choose to remain in the old party-controlled unions and even envisioned "the possibility of cooperation between the [new and old] unions."

Later that evening, authorities fulfilled another promise made by Jagielski: the release of some 30 dissidents who had been jailed during the crisis. At a press conference shortly after his liberation, Jacek Kuron, spokesman for the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), called the Gdansk agreement "a victory for the workers, but also for the government, which showed a sense of realism."

In fact, the government's back-to-work campaign was not yet complete. No sooner had workers on the Baltic coast and most other regions returned to their jobs than the scattered coal miners' strikes in Silesia mushroomed into a new potential crisis. Among Poland's best paid and most coddled workers, the miners had remained aloof from the riots of 1970 and 1976. Their burgeoning unrest last week was all the more alarming to Warsaw since coal and lignite provide 85% of Poland's energy and 15% of its hard-currency export earnings. The upheaval was also a personal blow to ex-Miner Gierek, whose birthplace and original power base was in Silesia.

News of the Gdansk agreement failed to stem the tide of the mining protest, and tensions were further heightened when a runaway coal car killed eight men in the Halemba Mine near Katowice. By midweek, 200,000 workers from some 22 mines and 50 factories had allied themselves with a central strike committee at the Manifest Lipcowy Mine in the southern town of Jastrzebie. To the 21 Gdansk demands, the miners added several of their own, including improved safety measures and an end to the four-shift "brigade" system begun last year to enable the mines to operate 24 hours a day. Though workers in each shift got two days off after six working days, they had only about one free Sunday a month--an arrangement they bitterly resented for both religious and family reasons.

After initial talks bogged down, the government dispatched a top-level delegation, headed by Deputy Premier Aleksander Kopec, to Jastrzebie. Negotiations continued through the night in a stuffy conference room whose walls were draped with black cloth as a sign of mourning for the eight dead Halemba miners. It was clear at that point that the government was desperate to end the crisis. Conceded a party member in Warsaw: "Whatever is demanded by the miners, the government will accept." An accord reached at midweek promised the miners 52 free Saturdays a year, an end to the four-brigade system, and higher salaries. Almost all of the miners returned to work the next day, bringing Poland's worst postwar labor crisis to an uneasy close.

The strike experience was liberating in its own right. Once the crisis began, the Polish press enjoyed considerable freedom in reporting events objectively. Poles accustomed to censorship reveled in a series of novelties: striking workers quoted in newspapers; a sermon by Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the Polish Primate, broadcast over national television; the full texts of the labor-government agreements; even editorial criticisms of government economic policies. People waited in lines a hundred yards long to buy party newspapers that suddenly contained enough real news to make them worth reading.

But many observers doubt that such relative freedom can last. Warned a prominent Warsaw journalist: "The censorship apparatus is still in place. The agreement that was signed is only the beginning. Now it will be submitted to the most serious trial, the trial of life." He said he hoped that the press and the public would move cautiously in testing the limits of free expression. "We all have in mind the Czechoslovak experience," he said. "We know that whoever wants too much may lose everything."

Most Western experts are equally doubtful that the key political concessions will be fully honored by the Warsaw government. Some of the promises may be carried out; but a complete enactment of the accords would mean dismantling or at least weakening much of the Communist system. Despite the workers' pledge to recognize the party's supremacy and refrain from political activity, it would be difficult for the independent unions to avoid a clash with the central authority of the state. It could amount to a de facto multiparty system, which Communism cannot ideologically countenance.

One Carter Administration official went so far as to hail the Polish strike settlement as "potentially the most important event in Eastern Europe since the Stalin-Tito break." It is particularly significant, he suggested, because it questions the very core of the Communist structure in Poland--which to the Soviet Union, geopolitically, is the most important country in Europe. Now, the official said, the popular support for reform is such that "the Soviets are going to have considerable difficulty in defining what is tolerable."

Another reason for Moscow's concern was the potential for contagion --that before long the successful strike for rights in Poland might prompt similar unrest elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Certainly the breeding ground was there. TIME has learned that two violent strikes broke out in Rumania in mid-July following Party Boss Nicolae Ceausescu's decision to reduce wages by 15%. One of the upheavals took place at the model 25,000-worker "23rd of August" heavy machinery complex, near Bucharest, where strikers burned down a foundry during a four-day riot. Two workers were killed.

For practical as well as ideological reasons, therefore, Moscow is likely to put tremendous pressure on Kania to scale down the concessions. The ultimate price of Soviet forbearance, speculates a senior Western diplomat, will be "that the party be reaffirmed as the supreme arbitrator of the state at every level of society."

As Poland's main trading partner, and the source of 80% of its oil supply, Moscow could make it economically impossible for Warsaw to carry out the promised reforms. Even before the strikes, Poland's economy was groaning under a $20 billion foreign debt, severe shortages and declining growth--a set of conditions that were largely responsible for the unrest in the first place. The stoppages themselves cost the country an estimated $500 million in foreign trade. Now the wage increases and new meat imports that the workers' agreement promises would severely strain the economy without large infusions of foreign aid. In these terms, the estimated $100 million loan Moscow had extended so far was modest, and it was not clear how much more help the Soviets might be willing to provide.

More substantial aid seemed to be available in the West. President Carter sent letters to the leaders of Britain, West Germany and France seeking their ideas on ways of shoring up their ailing Polish debtor. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's suggestion: a $2 billion U.S. credit to Poland as a follow-up to a $672 million loan granted last month by a West German banking consortium.

Foreshadowing the imminent party showdown, was the sudden eruption of a bizarre, high-level scandal. The "Polish Watergate," as irreverent newsmen promptly called it, involved Maciej Szczepanski, 52, a close Gierek associate who had been ousted as head of Polish Radio and Television during last month's party shakeup. Now it was publicly revealed that Szczepanski was under offi cial investigation for embezzlement, personal enrichment and moral depravity.

The high-living official was said to have amassed a vast fortune by siphoning off government radio and television funds.

Among his alleged acquisitions: a 40-acre sheep farm, a five-room villa with a glass-bottomed swimming pool and four black prostitutes in attendance, a luxuriously appointed yacht, a "palace" with 19 servants and over 900 pornographic video tapes. Gierek was said to have covered up the allegations when they first came to light last spring. Their sudden dis closure last week appeared to be part of a campaign to discredit him in prep aration for his removal.

Kama's selection as First Secretary of the Central Committee was accompanied by other significant changes in the party leadership. Two new men were appointed to the Politburo: Central Committee Member Andrzej Zabinski and Deputy Premier Kazimierz Barcikowski, one of the government negotiators in the Baltic strike. Three other officials were made Secretaries of the Central Committee. Among them was Tadeusz Grabski, who had been ousted last year after a scathing attack on the government's economic performance but then reinstated to Central Committee membership in last month's party shakeup, known as the Sunday Massacre. The elevation of men like Barcikowski and Grabski, who are considered economic reform ers, seemed to undercut Kama's reputation as a hardliner, or else are meant to provide a possible balance for a more collective new leadership.

Gierek thus met the same fate as his predecessor, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been ousted (after being tak en ill by a "circulatory ailment") in 1970 following his bloody suppression of food price riots in the Baltic ports.

An ex-miner who was then a provincial party chief in Silesia, Gierek had come to power as a popular reformer who grandly promised to improve the workers' lot with a rapid industrial modernization financed by heavy borrowing.

But a combination of mishaps and bungled central planning finally plunged the country into a hopeless economic quag mire that enraged the workers. As he had done in the violent 1976 upheaval, commendably enough, Gierek had worked for a peaceful solution of the recent strikes.

But by then he had lost the confidence of the public, his own party and the Krem lin. In the end, even the miners of his be loved Silesia had abandoned him. Said one of the strikers at a mine in Jastrzebie last week: "We believed in his good in tentions, but we did not believe he could make changes."

Reported by Barry Kalb/Warsaw

With reporting by Barry Kalb

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.