Opting Boldly for "Renewal"

By Thomas A. Sancton

Kania too comes down on the side of reform

There had never been a May Day parade quite like it in the Soviet bloc. No outsize portraits of Marx and Lenin. No reviewing stand for party bigwigs. No interminable speeches. Marching in a procession of 100,000 workers down Warsaw's Krolewska Street last week, under a sea of red flags, was a group of men who used to gaze down on such manifestations from an elevated platform: the entire eleven-member Polish Politburo, hatless in spite of the light drizzle, occasionally smiling at the gaggle of photographers around them. Said one startled Polish journalist: "This is the greatest sign of renewal they could have given."

It was no empty gesture. Two days before, at a marathon session of the Central Committee, the party leadership had shown that it is out of step with its East bloc allies in far more fundamental ways. Party Boss Stanislaw Kania sought throughout the 19-hour session to satisfy the demands of his party's grass-roots reformers without openly challenging the Kremlin. In his own 90-minute speech, for example, he was careful to stress Poland's unshakable loyalty to the Soviet bloc. Ultimately, however, he seemed to come down clearly, and boldly, on the side of further democratization. Promising to "continue the line of socialist renewal," he told the 132 Central Committee members that "the party is empty and shallow without democracy." Kania went on to praise Solidarity, the independent trade union federation, as "a workers' organization, comprising millions of people of good will, in which many hundreds of thousands of party members operate." Coming from the leader of a party that had long claimed to be the workers' sole representative, Kania's utterances were remarkable.

No less remarkable were the specific reforms proposed by Kania and subsequently adopted by the plenum. Among them: a limit of two terms for all party officials, the banning of multiple officeholding by party members and the direct election by local party groups of delegates to the July 14-19 party congress.

Finally, the Central Committee also endorsed a minor shake-up in the ruling Politburo. Out went the ineffectual former Premier, Jozef Pinkowski. In came two workers, Gerard Gabrys, a miner, and Zygmunt Wronski, a molder at the Ursus tractor factory. Their inclusion in the party's supreme body, said Kania, was "the first step toward extending the representation of workers from the provinces into the Politburo."

For all Kania's lip service to the Soviet bloc, the Central Committee's actions seemed to fly in the face of Moscow's injunctions. Only six days before the plenum began, hard-lining Soviet Ideologue Mikhail Suslov had flown to Warsaw to deliver what was presumed to be a stiff warning to hold the line against further democratization. Shortly after that, a sizzling article published by TASS, the official Soviet news agency, charged unnamed Polish party reformists with "revisionism"--one of the gravest epithets in the Communist lexicon and one that was invoked against the reform-minded Czechoslovak leadership in 1968 just before Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague.

The Soviet diatribe had apparently been sparked by a strong trend in the Polish party toward "horizontal" contacts among local party cells, a heretical reversal of the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism," by which power flows down from the Central Committee. That movement, born at a meeting of party dissidents in Torun on April 15, is now active in 40 of Poland's 49 provinces. In his speech before the Central Committee, Kania conspicuously refrained from attacking the Torun movement. While he warned that the party's "historically tested Leninist construction" must not be undermined, Kania described the Torun initiative as "generally positive."

The new measures did not satisfy the representatives of the Torun group who had gone to Warsaw to monitor the Central Committee plenum. Said one of their spokesmen: "We're not concerned with approaching democracy. We're concerned with democracy now." But that expression of impatience was itself an indication of how far Poland had come along the road to democracy. Where else, under Moscow's dominion, could one imagine the spectacle of government representatives sitting down with members of an independent trade union and treating them as equal bargaining partners? What other Communist government would endorse a legislative bill, as Warsaw did last week, offering legal recognition not only to that independent trade union but also to a private farmers' union? And what other East bloc party would undertake so thorough a housecleaning? More than 1,000 Polish government and party officials are now under investigation on various charges of corruption, incompetence and economic mismanagement.

Even as it sought to punish those who had helped bring on Poland's economic woes, the government pressed its campaign abroad to gain the financial elbow room required for recovery. Some relief came last week when representatives of 15 Western governments meeting in Paris agreed to postpone until 1986 $2.6 billion in debt repayments due this year.

But real economic recovery will require stringent belt-tightening measures, something Poland's long-suffering population may be reluctant to accept. The government last week added cereals and flour to its list of strictly rationed commodities, which already include meat and sugar. Meanwhile, the queues of hapless shoppers grow ever longer as bread, milk and cooking oil get scarcer. Only Polish humor, it sometimes seemed, was still in abundance. A cartoon in Solidarity's weekly newspaper showed two Poles discussing politics. "I hear Solidarity is pouring oil on the waters," says one. The other answers: "Hmmm, I wonder where they got it? " --By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Richard Hornik/Vienna and Gertraud Leasing/Warsaw

With reporting by Richard Hornik, Gertraud Leasing

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