POLAND: Sovereignty or Death

Like a great fissure in the earth's surface, a crack opened wide last week in Russia's Communist empire. The place was Poland, and the explosive force that erupted there was a submerged allegiance that runs deeper than Communism: patriotism.

What took place in six tense hours in Warsaw last week was an open defiance of the Kremlin, not by the oppressed people of Poland, but by their Communist rulers, who in an anxious testing moment acted as Poles first and dutiful Communists second. And for the first time in eleven hard years of Communist rule, these Communist rulers-tough, unloved Marxists-found themselves national heroes to the Poles.

Their defiance of Moscow was the biggest internal shock the Communists have received since Tito's breakaway in 1948. In many respects what the Polish Communists did was a greater act of courage than Tito's, for Tito when he defied Stalin had control of his own country and of its armed forces. The Polish leaders did not. They had only the passion of an idea, and the knowledge that in this, at least, they might count on the backing of their people.

Always the Rosjanie. In its thousand years of history Poland has been many times dominated from the East. Out of the eastern steppe have come barbaric conquerors, feudal overlords, religious crusaders, imperialists and Communists, but to the Poles they have always been the Rosjanie-the Russians. Though often overrun, cut up and reduced, the Poles-even Polish Communists-have never yielded the intense belief that they are a nation, separate and sovereign.

That passion stirred the small ruling group that gathered at 10 a.m. sharp one rainy morning last week in the cream-colored building of the Council of Ministers on Warsaw's Stalin Avenue. This was the inner council, the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' (Communist) Party. They had two important items on their agenda. The first was to reinstate in the party hierarchy Wladyslaw Gomulka, 51, onetime party leader who, because he had refused to castigate Tito, had been disgraced and imprisoned by Stalin. The second item was more audacious: a motion to expel Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, famed Polish-born Soviet soldier who had acted as Stalin's (and Khrushchev's) proconsul in Poland since 1949.

This was independence with a vengeance. The Kremlin's new leaders might be willing to bend with the times, to grant the satellites some easements in order to make their own control more secure. But now the Poles were asking them to loosen their tight hold on Poland. Of course, the Russians would not do so willingly; but perhaps they would have to. In making his submission to Tito, Khrushchev had acknowledged that there could be "other roads to socialism." He had, at Tito's urging, rehabilitated satellite lead ers (sometimes posthumously) who had once defied Stalin. He had permitted "liberalization" of Communism's harsh rule, and when this liberalization had produced not gratitude but open resistance at Poznan, the Kremlin leadership had shown in the Poznan trials that it feared to return to repression. Perhaps Khrushchev could no longer control the forces he had unleashed. The time had come to find out, and the Polish Communists had found the man to make the test.