More Renewal

A crucial party congress begins

Once more the strike sirens were wailing across Poland. First, 35,000 dockers at Baltic seaports from Gdansk to Szczecin walked off their jobs for an hour. The men were demanding improved working conditions and benefits. Next day, most of the 6,000 employees of LOT, the national airline, quit working for four hours. Reason: they claimed the right to name the airline's new director. (At week's end the LOT employees accepted the government's appointee as "president" but insisted that their candidate actually run the airline.) Finally, transport workers in the northwestern city of Bydgoszcz staged a two-hour warning strike to force the ouster of a local transport chief. Accused of corruption, the official finally resigned.

The sudden rash of work stoppages, the first cases of labor unrest in Poland since March, could hardly have come at a worse time for Party Boss Stanislaw Kania. Not only is he trying to grapple with the country's worst postwar economic crisis, amid shortages of everything from basic foodstuffs to vodka and cigarettes, but he faces a key test at this week's crucial party congress. Renewed unrest could create a hard-line backlash at the session, one which will determine the party's leadership and policies at a crucial juncture for the nation. Nor was the labor flare-up likely to convince a skeptical Kremlin that Kania had the situation in Poland under control.

Strikes. Economic debacle. Invasion jitters. It might seem at a quick glance that nothing much had changed in Poland since those turbulent days last summer, when an obscure electrician named Lech Walesa clambered over the gates of Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to take control of a burgeoning national strike. In reality almost everything is different. The 1980 strikes shook the Communist world to its roots, engendering the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, Solidarity, and launching a far-reaching process of reform and re-examination called odnowa (renewal).

Following the ouster of Party Boss Edward Gierek in September, the Kania regime dismissed hundreds of officials for corruption or incompetence. Many local party units began demanding more internal democracy and "horizontal" relations among themselves, reversing the orthodox Leninist top-to-bottom party structure. Unable to stamp out such trends, Kania has endorsed a series of reforms that, if approved by this week's congress, would make the Polish Communist Party the most liberal in the Soviet bloc. The Sejm, Poland's parliament, is already the most representative and outspoken legislative body among the Warsaw Pact nations.

Poland's powerful Catholic Church has also played a key role in the national renewal. Archbishop Jozef Glemp, named last week to succeed the late Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski as Primate (see RELIGION), promised to continue the Cardinal's policies. But, though the church has won some important concessions, such as the right to broadcast Sunday Mass, some clerics fear that its influence as a unique voice of Polish nationalism may diminish with the rise of political pluralism.

Press censorship has relaxed to the point where Solidarity publishes its own newspaper, and even the official party paper, Trybuna Ludu, reflects a greater degree of objectivity. People in general enjoy more freedom of expression and movement than at any time since the Communist takeover in 1947.

Solidarity, meanwhile, must decide what it wants to become now that its existence is firmly established: a trade union or a de facto political party? Radicals in the membership are urging the latter, but Walesa has called for a return to pure unionism. Solidarity's first annual congress next month will seek to resolve these contradictory impulses.

The union's greatest problem is that most of its apparent gains, such as higher wages and shorter hours, are rendered worthless by the country's economic crisis. The queues are even longer -- and the shelves emptier -- than they were a year ago. Unless the workers scale back their demands, there seems to be little chance for national recovery. "If this continues, those who applauded us in August 1980 will be throwing stones at us," Walesa admonished at a Solidarity meeting in Gdansk last week. That would be a rude awakening indeed from the dream of odnowa.

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