POLAND: The Bad Old Ways

No nation can long exist with an economy half Communist and half free. And yet this is what Wladyslaw Gomulka has tried to bring off in Poland. Being a Communist, he did not intend it that way either, but had to react to the situation of Poland’s arrested revolution of October 1956. His compromising never sat well with the diehards of the Stalinist era, who believed in tough and tidy centralized control. Gomulka allowed more local authority for factory managers and town bosses, and peasants were permitted to abandon the collective farms to till their own plots—and did so with such fervor that only 12% of Polish agriculture is now collectivized. The mixture has been unstable since it began, and last week, as Poland suffered from another of its perennial economic setbacks, Gomulka sent for the old tough crowd.

The New Crowd. Into a post as Deputy Premier went Eugeniusz Szyr, longtime Stalinist and admirer of Red China’s

Great Leap Forward techniques, who once was denounced by Gomulka himself for his mistakes as chief economic planner from 1954 to 1956. Another deputy premiership went to Julian Tokarski, the pre-Gomulka Minister of Motorcar Industry whose clumsiness in rebuffing worker demands led to the Poznan riots of June 1956. A third advocate of harsh centralized controls, Moscow-oriented Tadeusz Gede, was elevated to a prominent post in the State Economic Planning Commission.

As a scapegoat for his economic problems. Gomulka fired Minister of Agriculture Edward Ochab, once a Stalinist too, but later a collaborator of Gomulka’s in liberalizing agriculture. Ochab had been home barely a week from a trip to the U.S. when the blow fell (he got a new post in the party secretariat). By implication, he was blamed for the colossal meat mess this year that has left Poland, once a substantial food exporter, hardly able to feed itself. To make matters worse, inflation is a major threat, largely because of higher bonuses and wages that factory chiefs have been allowed to grant on their own initiative. Bungling Warsaw planners pegged meat prices so low that workers, with extra money to spend, ate more and more. At the same time, farmers’ profit margins on livestock were reduced to the point where incentive to raise animals was almost destroyed. In 1959’s second quarter, meat consumption increased 14% while production slumped 6.3% below 1958. Hastily, Gomulka raised meat prices 25%, but it was too late. Long queues now form daily before near-empty butcher shops, and meatless Mondays have been decreed in Warsaw.

Risk of Trouble. Poland is in further trouble in its foreign trade. Although sales of coal, the nation’s biggest export, have slumped sharply, Poland’s imports are soaring. The balance of payments deficit—$142 million last year—rose to $120 million in the first six months of 1959 alone.

Apparently Gomulka hopes to seek his cure in a return to the doctrinaire methods of the Stalinists, but he can only do so at the grave risk of political upheaval. Many a loyal Gomulka supporter is beginning to grumble. One of them, 41-year-old Politburo Member Jerzy Morawski, one of Gomulka’s closest lieutenants, turned in his resignation last week at news that the old tough crowd was back.