Recalling in Sorrow and Hope

By John Kohan

Two years ago, Solidarity was born, and changed a nation

Free trade unions. An end to the Polish government's meddling in daily life. A greater voice in public affairs. Until two years ago last week, these lofty goals were only the dreams of a handful of militant workers and intellectuals. Then, quite unexpectedly, during two momentous weeks in August 1980, everything in Poland changed.

Workers at the Lenin shipyard, in the Baltic seaport of Gdansk, laid down their tools on Aug. 14 and refused to leave. As news of the strike spread, an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa climbed over the shipyard's iron-bar fence and into history. Under his leadership, the workers demanded higher wages, an earlier retirement age, better food supplies and, in a daring political challenge to the regime, the right to organize independent trade unions.

The movement quickly inflamed the Polish spirit. Thousands of ordinary citizens began to mass outside the shipyard's main gates, decorating them with flowers, ribbons, papal portraits and red-and-white banners. And before the year was out, Solidarity had finally become a reality, a free trade union, 10 million members strong and powerful enough to transform the political life of Poland.

Since the imposition of martial law almost nine months ago, Solidarity has once more become the stuff of dreams, its organizational structure crushed and its leader, Walesa, under house arrest. While calling on Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev at his summer retreat on the Black Sea last week, Poland's leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, labeled the tattered remnant of the suspended trade union a "counterrevolutionary underground, whose activities are inspired and supported from the outside, mainly from the United States."

In case that message might be lost in any upsurge of nostalgia on the second anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, security police turned Gdansk into an armed camp and quickly dispersed a crowd of 200 young demonstrators. In Warsaw, several hundred Poles braved water cannons to add flowers, greenery and pictures of Walesa and Pope John Paul II to the now famous cross laid out in Victory Square to honor the late Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. But late last week authorities sealed off the square with a sturdy 6-ft.-high gray wooden fence. Still, as one veteran Western diplomat in Warsaw said of these latest acts of derring-do: "This is what Poles do best. But what does it gain them?"

Despite such displays of support for the suspended trade union, Poland's military leaders have made it clear that any new national accord will have to be on their terms or not at all.

There have been signs that some fac tions in Solidarity have reluctantly begun to take to heart the government's tough talk. A bulletin issued this month by the leadership of an underground Solidarity chapter at the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk called for calm and restraint so that the government would have time to honor its commitment to continue reform. Economic hardships have clearly blunted the enthusiasm of many supporters for a confrontation with the regime.

But even if it can rule indefinitely by sheer force of arms, the Jaruzelski government must also win the cooperation of the nation to halt Poland's continuing economic decline. According to government statistics, industrial production in the first seven months of this year was 7.3% lower than in the same period last year. To compound the problem, early indications that agricultural production would improve this year have been thrown off by a long dry spell. The potato and sugar-beet harvest may be 25% smaller than in 1981. This can only put further strains on weary Polish consumers, who already find it difficult to make ends meet. Though wages have risen 40% this year, prices have doubled.

The martial-law regime has tried to pin the blame for Poland's weak economic performance on U.S. trade sanctions, which were imposed after the military crackdown last December. The sanctions have indeed hurt Poland indirectly by holding up agreement on rescheduling payment of Poland's $27 billion foreign debt. The sanctions have also choked off the flow of Western capital that will be needed if the economy is to revive over the next four years. But, as one Polish intellectual observed: "I never hear anyone on the bus grumbling about Reagan's sanctions. I do hear people complaining that the same idiots are ruining the economy."

The grumblers cannot be referring to the Communist Party. For practical purposes, it has all but disappeared. Displaying a military man's love for order and a discernible chain of command, Jaruzelski filled virtually every important party post at last month's plenary session with officials who are loyal to him, and he has used the army to handle such details of the economy as issuing coupons necessary for the purchase of farm machinery, fertilizers and seed.

The Roman Catholic Church, the other major force in Polish life, has been reluctant to provoke the military government openly, fearing that such a move might lead to more stringent controls and possible "fraternal" assistance from the Soviet Union. Some church sources have conceded in private that Solidarity, as an organization, may have to disappear in order for its ideas to live on. Still, in the absence of any formal opposition to the regime, the church has tried to press the authorities for some form of national dialogue. Last week Archbishop Jozef

Glemp, the Polish Primate, told a crowd of well over 100,000 pilgrims in Czestochowa: "The dialogue could begin to build toward an agreement and relieve the hatred that can sometimes be invisible when people keep silent and grind their teeth."

As Poles began to mark the two weeks of emotional anniversaries that will climax on Aug. 31, the date when the Polish government signed a national accord two years ago with Solidarity, the true depth of the "invisible" hatred had yet to be measured. However unlikely another outburst of widespread national unrest seemed last week, it still could not be counted out. There is a precedent: two years ago at the Lenin shipyard, when one strike came to an end and another of a totally different sort began.

--By John Kohan.

Reported by Richard Hornik/Warsaw

With reporting by Richard Hornik

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