"Fighting for an Idea"

POLAND

Toward a farmers' union--and new headaches for Warsaw

After eight months of determined struggle, marked by protest demonstrations, sit-ins and even threats of mass crop strikes, Poland's private farmers last week finally won the promise of legal recognition for Rural Solidarity, the 800,000-member independent agricultural union. The unprecedented agreement, signed by government negotiators and peasant leaders at an emotional ceremony in the northwestern city of Bydgoszcz, called for the union's registration by May 10.

A parliamentary commission had recommended legalizing the farm union ealier in the week, but last-minute quibbles delayed the agreement for three more days, and tensions began to rise. On the eve of the signing, 100 farmers took over a municipal building in nearby Inowroclaw, not unlike the 100 or so other protesters who had already been occupying the Bydgoszcz headquarters of the government-controlled United Peasants' Party for a month. The breakthrough finally came when peasant leaders agreed to refrain from staging new protests and to recognize the leading role of the Communist Party in their forthcoming charter. Nonetheless, the accord had all the makings of a severe new headache for Warsaw: Poland's Communist leaders were faced with another de facto power center outside their control, alongside the church and the 10 million-strong trade-union federation, Solidarity.

As if that were not enough, the party leaders also had to contend with a potentially more dangerous erosion of power within their own ranks. Last week some 500 delegates from local Communist Party cells throughout Poland converged on a university lecture hall in the northern city of Torun, birthplace of the astronomer Copernicus, for an extraordinary conference on party reform. Speaker after speaker at the eight-hour meeting criticized Warsaw's Communist leadership for tailing to carry out its promised "renewal." Calling for greater democratization within the party, one delegate declared. "We are fighting for an idea. The top people in the party fight only for their jobs."

All the speeches conveyed a common theme: the channels of party control should flow up from the rank and file instead of down from the leadership. It was a heretical challenge to the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism." The delegates put their ideas into concrete form in a near unanimous resolution calling for among other things, leadership changes and the direct election of delegates to July's party congress.

Moscow could hardly take such heresies lightly. Even before the Torun gathering, Pravda had stepped up its attacks on those within the Polish party who held "views foreign to a Marxist-Leninist party." In the view of many Western analysts, the liberal evolution of the Polish party could pose a far more serious threat to the Soviets than the independent labor movement. Indeed, the situation seemed increasingly to resemble that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when a party-led reform movement finally brought on a Soviet-led invasion. In the case of Poland, the immediate invasion threat appeared to be receding last week; State Department officials confirmed that most Warsaw Pact units had returned to their barracks after three weeks of intimidating maneuvers in and around Poland. But Moscow was maintaining strong political pressure on Warsaw's leaders to resist further reform.

Those efforts do not seem to have been very successful so far. For the past month, TIME has learned, the Soviets have been urging Warsaw to impose martial law. But the Poles have refused, arguing that such a move would almost certainly provoke a general strike. That, they fear, would in turn force the Soviets to invade. At the same time, Soviet efforts to shore up the hard-lining members of the Polish Politburo Stefan Olszowski and Tadeusz Grabski, also appear to be faltering. According to one well-informed Polish official, the two might soon be purged from the party leadership--if the Soviets allow events to take their course.

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