POLAND: Crisis & a Question

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Poland's diehard Stalinists had been waiting the opportune moment to make a comeback. In the seven months of Wladyslaw Gomulka's leadership, no longer tied to Moscow or supported by police terror, the Polish Communist Party had lost much of its former authority and force. The time had come, said one opportunistic Communist leader, Boleslaw Piasecki, to end the "ideological chaos" and get closer to the Soviet Union.

For three months Gomulka, the man on a tightrope, had delayed calling the ninth plenum of the party's 80-man Central Committee while he attempted to discipline his highly vocal anti-Stalinist left supporters, who are demanding increasing democratization and secretly hope for a breakthrough to a Western European type of socialism. Last week, under increasing pressure from the Stalinist right, Gomulka suddenly called the Central Committee together.

In a five-hour speech he reaffirmed his intention of traveling his own "road to socialism." The distinguishing marks of the Gomulka road: worker participation in management but not ownership, the right to strike, more local self-government, limited private enterprise, peasant self-management (collective farms, he said, did not "stand the test of life"). Said Gomulka: "The way to socialism on which the Soviet Union advanced is not at all necessary or useful for other nations."

Two Fronts. Admitting that his "understanding with the Catholic Church" found no precedent in any other socialist state, or even "in such capitalist countries as the U.S. and France," Gomulka insisted that the kind of socialism he envisaged for Poland would in the long run "depend on the shaping of relations between the People's State and the church." Nevertheless the guiding power on Gomulka's road would be a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat. Inside the party he promised "full freedom of speech," but outside no party member (and presumably no private person) would have the right to express opinions which are out of harmony with party policy. This was a direct slap at his left supporters, whose "ideological confusion and revisionist tendencies," he said, "undermine unity and sow disbelief." Then Gomulka turned on the Stalinists: "Not only revisionism disarms the party—the same, though in a different way, results from dogmatism and conservatism."