POLAND: Needed: All Hands, All Brains

Poland's Sixth Party Congress was shrewdly timed for dramatic effect. Only a few days before the anniversary of the worker revolts that brought the country to the brink of civil war last year, Poland's crew-cut Communist Party Leader Edward Gierek, 58, summoned the party's regional leaders and local delegates to Warsaw for the meeting.

Thanks in part to a secret $100 million Soviet loan, Gierek, who succeeded longtime Party Leader Wladyslaw Gomulka at the height of the 1970 riots, has made impressive progress in overcoming the food and clothing shortages that have...