Poland: A Flowering of Democracy

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It's one man−one vote as the party congress meets to chart the future

The extraordinary gathering was dominated by new faces, new ideas and new expectations. The members came from all over Poland: brawny shipyard workers from Gdansk, deeply tanned farmers from Poznan, professors from Cracow. Their average age was only 40. They had been chosen by secret ballots in elections at their local party units; 91% had never before taken part in such a referendum. But when the 1,955 delegates converged last week on Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science, a towering marble-and-granite edifice given to the Polish people by Joseph Stalin in the 1950s, they seemed determined to make the Ninth Congress of the Polish Communist Party a historic turning point for the whole nation.

The congress convened at a critical juncture. Nearly a year after Poland's striking workers had won an unprecedented set of liberal concessions from Warsaw's Communist bosses, the country was reeling under a deepening economic crisis, and the party was in disarray. Hard-liners were calling for repressive measures that could spark a new wave of labor unrest; radicals demanded sweeping reforms that some feared might send Soviet tanks rolling across the border. What was needed, above all, was a strong, credible leadership and clear policies for dealing with the country's problems.

For all its importance, the congress was initially greeted with skepticism and indifference by some Poles. Explained one Warsaw accountant standing near the Palace of Culture on opening day: "It's hard to be enthusiastic. Society's expectations have been disappointed so many times before." Yet the delegates approached their task with a sense of mission and hope rarely seen in the Eastern bloc these days. Explained Delegate Jozef Gajewicz, the mayor of Cracow: "A great explosion of democracy brought the delegates here. They have come to fight for what they believe in."

Fight they did. First they waged a battle to reverse the order of business. Party Boss Stanislaw Kania had hoped to ram through his re-election on the first day of the congress, and thus gain effective control over all subsequent proceedings. The delegates would have none of it. Instead, they decided to elect a new 200-member Central Committee first and then choose a leader by secret ballot from among its ranks. Never before in the Soviet bloc had such a tactic been used. Said one congress official: "They tried to push the delegates too far too fast, and they rebelled."

Next the delegates held up voting on the Central Committee to discuss a long-awaited report on official corruption. Result: ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek and six former associates, including ex-Premier Edward Babiuch, were summarily expelled from the party. More heads rolled in the Central Committee voting, when candidates on the liberal and conservative extremes were rejected, leaving the centrists in control. Among the prominent officials who went down to defeat were Politburo Hard-liners Mieczyslaw Moczar and Tadeusz Grabski; the latter had led an unsuccessful drive to oust Kania last month and was deemed a strong challenger for the party leadership. One of the highest vote tallies, 1,615, went to Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski—a solid expression of support for his pragmatic policies.