Poland: Government Shuffle

At the height of the Polish government's campaign of anti-Semitism last year, a top security official handed Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki a list of 14 Jewish diplomats with instructions to fire them. The charge: all were "politically unreliable" because of their Jewish backgrounds. Rapacki refused to go along with the purge, which he correctly viewed as an attempt to get rid of his own moderate allies in the ministry. When the demand was repeated, he reportedly added his own name to the list, then stormed out of the room.

From that day on, Rapacki's days as Foreign Minister were numbered. Last week he finally lost his job.

An urbane politician who headed Poland's Socialist Party before the Stalinist takeover, Rapacki spent most of his twelve years as Foreign Minister trying, with some success, to take the rough edges off his government's Soviet-dictated foreign policy. His major contribution was the so-called Rapacki plan of 1957, in which he proposed to the U.N. that all atomic weapons be prohibited in Central Europe, including East and West Germany. It was rejected by the U.S. for lack of adequate guarantees, but may have helped pave the way for the 1968 nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Rapacki's recent position was weakened not only by refusing to go along with the campaign against Jews, which other leaders, including Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka, joined only reluctantly, but also by opposing Poland's role in the Czechoslovak invasion.

Torpid Bureaucracy. Poland's new Foreign Minister is Stefan Jedrychowski, 58, a Politburo member and head of the state planning commission for the past twelve years. As an officer of the Soviet-sponsored political group that Stalin imposed on Poland in 1944—and a trusted Gomulka lieutenant—Jedrychowski can be expected to change none of the pro-Moscow fervor of Poland's foreign policy. But change may be in store for the nation's flailing economy now that Jedrychowski has left its top planning post.

Poland's foremost economists have long pleaded for reforms that would encourage promising light industries, introduce the profit incentive to both management and labor, and decentralize the huge, torpid bureaucracy that rules the country's industry. As long ago as 1957, Jedrychowski announced that the state had agreed to those reforms "in principle." In practice, he and most other top policy-makers never got around to doing much about them—and Poland's economy is very nearly at a standstill. The standard of living has risen only fractionally since 1956. The press is full of complaints about shoes that disintegrate in the rain and other examples of shoddy production. Many workers are so indifferent about their jobs that special police squads are needed to round them up at bars in the morning.