A Conditional Reprieve

By Thomas A. Sancton

Moscow grants more time--and the Premier draws the line

"How many times must we stand on the brink of the precipice? What assurances do we have that one day we shall not fall into the abyss?" Even as he posed that grave question before Warsaw's parliament last week, Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski once again implored his fellow Poles to end the labor turmoil that has crippled the country for eight months and brought it perilously close to a Soviet invasion. This time the four-star general put teeth into his appeal by demanding a legislated, two-month ban against all strikes. Otherwise, Jaruzelski warned, he would be obliged to resign.

Addressing an admonition to Solidarity, the 10 million-member union federation, Jaruzelski declared that the government would no longer be "pushed to the wall." The country's catastrophic economic condition, he said, required new belt-tightening measures, including rationing of cereals and a freeze on salaries. Economic difficulties, he said, also made it impossible to fulfill all the agreements extracted from the government through repeated industrial confrontations. He concluded with a stern warning that "a sharp collision might mean death now." The 460-member parliament quickly approved the strike ban with no opposition and only four abstentions.

Meeting in Gdansk under Lech Walesa's leadership, Solidarity's national commission said it had no intention of calling any strikes in the next two months, but warned, "No resolution of the parliament will prevent a strike if the security of our union is threatened or a glaring violation of the law occurs."

Earlier in the week, events had seemed to be moving inexorably toward a possible Warsaw Pact intervention. The official East German news agency announced that fresh troops, tanks and armored cars had been sent to join the three-week-old Warsaw Pact maneuvers in and around Poland. Pravda, meanwhile, charged that "the opponents of socialism" were pushing Poland "toward a counterrevolutionary path." Then came the news that Leonid Brezhnev would personally attend the 16th Czechoslovak Party Congress in Prague--an extraordinary announcement, since the ailing 74-year-old Soviet President had not ventured abroad for such a meeting since 1975. The news inspired alarming rumors that an emergency Warsaw Pact summit meeting was being called in Prague to decide on armed intervention in Poland.

Invasion fears were hardly allayed by the truculence of Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak's 79-page keynote speech. With Brezhnev looking on in approval, Husak declared that "anti-socialist forces --supported and instigated by the enemies of socialism from abroad--are attempting to bring about a counterrevolutionary reversal in this fraternal socialist country [Poland]." Invoking the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine that was used to justify the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Husak warned ominously that "the protection of the socialist system is . . . the joint concern of the states of the socialist community."

But as it turned out, Brezhnev was the only foreign party chief present at the party congress in Prague. And when the Soviet leader shuffled to the podium the day after Husak's diatribe, he adopted a far more moderate tone. He alluded only obliquely to the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. "But one would have to assume," he added, "that the Polish Communists, with the support of all true Polish patriots," would be able "to give a fitting rebuff to the designs of the enemies of the socialist system." The statement seemed to offer Warsaw's leaders one more chance to restore order on their own. Shortly after the speech came another hopeful sign: TASS announced the end of the Warsaw Pact maneuvers.

Brezhnev's conciliatory gestures were met with some skepticism by Western analysts. Pointing to the Soviets' continuing military presence in and around Poland, a French foreign ministry official said, "The soldiers aren't there with their rifles and tanks to hunt grouse, after all." Indeed, a State Department spokesman reported at midweek that there had been "no significant change in the overall level of [military] activity" despite the official end of the maneuvers.

In Bonn, the NATO Defense Ministers concluded a meeting of their Nuclear Planning Group with a joint expression of "great concern" over "increasingly menacing troop movements and other threatening events around Poland." The statement also warned that "the Soviets would gravely undermine the basis for effective arms control negotiations if they were to intervene in the internal affairs of Poland."

That stern admonition--and the linkage between intervention and disarmament talks--had been engineered largely by U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was making his first trip abroad since taking office. Weinberger had begun to sound invasion alarms the previous week after receiving intelligence reports of heightened Soviet military activity in and near Poland. During a stop-over in Britain last week, Weinberger told reporters at Cottesmore Royal Air Force Base that Poland was already a victim of "invasion by osmosis," a process he described as the "gradual filtering in of additions to the two [Soviet] divisions that have been in Poland for a long time."

In Bonn, Weinberger produced graphic evidence to back up his claims. Shortly after the NATO meeting began, a colonel from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency presented a series of recent satellite photographs. Among other things, the pictures showed equipment being unloaded from Soviet transport planes at the two Soviet divisional headquarters in Western Poland; various troop concentrations during the maneuvers; tent bivouacs in the western Soviet military districts, indicating that infantry and armor units had left their barracks and taken up positions closer to the Polish border.

It was an effective opening gambit by Weinberger, who was seeking a NATO statement tying future arms control talks to Soviet behavior. That idea met with considerable resistance at first, partly because the meeting's agenda had called only for a discussion of nuclear missile deployment in Europe; the Polish question might have been considered a separate political matter. But Weinberger followed up his intelligence presentation with a day and a half of lobbying, effectively mixing "stubbornness and charm," as one European delegate put it. In the end, the Secretary got almost all he wanted: a strong oral statement on Poland and a unanimous decision to stick with the 1983 timetable for deploying U.S.-made Pershing II and cruise missiles.in Europe.

After intense consultations, the NATO countries have reached a consensus about how they could jointly respond to a Soviet invasion. Military action seems out of the question, but a succession of countermoves could go into effect immediately: withdrawal of ambassadors from Moscow; a drastic restriction of trade, high-technology sales and credits to the Soviets and other East bloc countries; a cutoff of economic aid to Poland; and an indefinite postponement of arms talks.

For the Soviets the consequences could be disastrous. First of all, there would be the strong possibility of armed resistance from the Polish population and even from units of the conscript-based armed forces. "The Poles will not stand aside as the Czechs did in 1968," predicts a Bonn Kremlinologist. Though open resistance would eventually be subdued by Moscow's overwhelming might, the myth of Warsaw Pact unity would be forever destroyed, and underground rebellion might smolder on for years. Even short of that, the Soviets would have to assume responsibility for Poland's $27 billion foreign debt and its faltering economy, all in the face of almost certain industrial sabotage, mass strikes and boycotts. Finally, intervention would mean the end of detente, which has been central to Brezhnev's whole foreign policy.

In spite of all these compelling arguments for not going in, the Kremlin might ultimately decide that it has no choice. Indeed, according to a Western intelligence report, Brezhnev himself had to break a deadlock in the Politburo to block a Soviet decision to invade Poland last December. Last week's decision to give the Polish leadership another reprieve was also thought to have been adopted only after a fierce debate in the Kremlin. Reliable reports reaching Whitehall, TIME has learned, indicate that the case in favor of intervention was made by hard-line Party Ideologue Mikhail Suslov, supported by Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov. Brezhnev himself led the argument against invasion, backed by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. The doves emerged victorious, but only just.

From the Kremlin's point of view, there is still a strong case for intervention. A primary consideration is military. If Poland ever seemed likely to secede from the Warsaw Pact, cutting off Moscow's vital rail links and supply lines to East Germany, Soviet tanks could be expected to roll in immediately. Ideological factors could prove equally persuasive. Even before the outbreak of labor unrest last summer, Poland showed some dangerous deviations from Communist orthodoxy: a strong Catholic Church, private ownership of 75% of the country's farm land, a flourishing dissident movement. Then, the birth of an independent labor movement last August established a rival power center among the very working masses that the party claimed to represent. Says William Hyland of Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies: "It is the final demonstration that the [Communist] system does not work. The people it's designed to benefit most have finally said they can't stand it any longer." Should that example spread to other East bloc satellites, it could mean the end of the Soviet empire.

Most analysts feel that the Soviets could accept a certain amount of pluralism in Poland as long as a strong party retained a firm grip on the reins. But therein lies another political hazard--for the Polish party itself seems bent on reversing Leninist orthodoxy. In a watershed decision two weeks ago, Party Boss Stanislaw Kania bowed to rank-and-file demands and announced that delegates to July's party congress would be elected by secret ballot from an unlimited list of candidates. Until now, most delegates were chosen by the party leadership according to the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism"--meaning that power flows from the top down. The rule change, which would probably benefit reformist candidates in any event, might ultimately prove the last straw for Moscow.

The party's reforms were already affecting the country's political customs. Looking incongruously like Western politicians on the hustings, officials fanned out across the country last week to meet with factory-level party units and solicit their support. Applause was not always forthcoming. At the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Kania fielded sharp questions and criticisms from about 3,000 local party members. Demanded one worker: "Now we ask you, Comrade Kania, if you will help us carry out the renewal of the party and the nation. If not, we shall do it by ourselves." That bold assertion drew a standing ovation. Another local party member derided the "merry-go-round" system whereby the same old faces dominated the Politburo. Kania responded by promising personnel changes in the Central Committee and Politburo. Similar rank-and-file pressures for reform appeared to be responsible for new "legal proceedings" that were initiated last week against former Premier Piotr Jaroszewicz. The charge: economic mismanagement.

Short of intervention, Moscow's hopes of stemming a tide of democratization seemed to rest with Polish hard-liners like Politburo Members Stefan Olszowski and Tadeusz Grabski. If they could seize the upper hand within the party, then the Soviets would probably have no immediate need to go in. Brezhnev himself reportedly requested that Olszowski be sent to represent the Polish party in Prague last week, and the two men held long consultations there. Some Western analysts speculated that a new party shake-up might soon substitute Olszowski for Kania, whose name went conspicuously unmentioned at the Prague congress.

Moscow's apparent strategy, says Georgetown's Hyland, appeared to be aimed at maintaining pressure on the Polish party until the hard-liners could gain control. But obviously the Soviets were as worried and mystified as everybody else. As one jittery Soviet official told a West German diplomat in Moscow, "We must be careful. Nobody knows where this crazy Polish drama is taking us all--not just the Soviet Union, but all of us, East and West alike." --By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Roland Flamini/Prague and Richard Hornik/Bonn

With reporting by Roland Flamini, Richard Hornik

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