POLAND: Triumph And New Shocks

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The workers win and outgoes Gierek

Poland had scarcely begun to savor the remarkable triumph of the workers of Gdansk and the miners of Silesia in wresting a series of unprecedented reforms from the Communist government when there was unsettling news. There had been rumors all week long, perhaps inevitably in a Communist country, that the price for Polish Leader Edward Gierek might be stiff. One version had it that his entire Politburo had been called on the red carpet to Moscow. Nonetheless, in downtown Warsaw the country's parliament assembled on schedule to discuss and ratify the government's settlement with the striking workers. Then came the first shock: a bulletin that Gierek had been stricken with a "serious heart disturbance" and was being attended by five physicians, including the Minister of Health. But the proceedings continued, and in his televised address Premier Jozef Pinkowski eloquently recommended that the strike agreement be adopted so that the government could go on and "rebuild the confidence of the nation."

Half a mile away, a less advertised meeting of the Polish United Workers' Party's central committee had been suddenly convened. Cars of the Politburo and committee members converged on the Party House, their white sandstone-faced headquarters. There, something quite different was going on, and, in the ease of hindsight, perfectly predictable. Indeed, the script had been used before. At 1:30 a.m. Saturday came the official announcement that the ailing Gierek—whose malady might be more political than physical—had been replaced. The new boss of the Polish Communist party, the country's ruling authority, was Stanislaw Kania, 53, whose responsibilities for the past five years in the Politburo pointedly included, among other things, .security and defense. A tough, inside-party man, Kania had been largely overlooked in the betting on who might replace Gierek.

Gierek apparently learned about his fate last Wednesday when he met secretly near the U.S.S.R. border with Soviet Politburo Member Andrei Kirilenko. Western analysts assume that Gierek also learned then that he was losing his Politburo seat and Central Committee secretaryship. "His illness might have speeded things up a little more," said a West German specialist. "But now it seems the decision was made before."

Precisely what the change meant for the country, and for the victory the workers believed they had won, remained to be seen. There were those, understandably, who did not take much comfort in Kama's background. But there were also those who recalled that at the height of the strikes Kania had been quoted as telling the Gdansk party organization that it was a time "for a political solution—not for force." The only thing that could be reasonably certain, given the risky experiments the country and the workers had embarked upon, was that Kania was surely a man to Moscow's liking.