POLAND: This Is Not the Way

In the 14 months since Polish workers rose at Poznan crying for bread and freedom, the Poles have won half a loaf of freedom but very little bread. Out of their protests, Wladyslaw Gomulka rose to power, wrested control of the Polish Communist Party from the Stalinists, defied Moscow and won an election. But he inherited a mess: Poland was close to economic bankruptcy and moral anarchy. For all he tried to revive the Poles’ fierce national pride and to relax the grip of the police state, Communist Gomulka found no Red formula to solve the economic crisis.

“To be brief.” acknowledged a Warsaw radio commentator last week, “things are tough in Poland.”

And to be blunt, things are chaotic. Housing is miserable and overcrowded. Wages are so low (average: $65 a month) that many a Pole works overtime at two jobs, puts his wife and children to work, or steals what he can from the state-run enterprises, to stay alive. Gomulka had hoped that “creeping freedom” and his stand against the hated Russians would be enough to inspire the Poles to work.

Vodka & Freedom. But workers, no longer menaced by secret police, dreamed of a freedom of their own—the right to stay away from work. In the first half of 1957, absenteeism has more than doubled, to 26 million man-hours lost. To drown their woes, they took to drink at an increasing rate (7.5 liters hard liquor per head per year—30% above 1956). Gomulka warned the workers that he could not raise wages until they produced more; the workers replied that they would not work harder without some real evidence of a better life. They began agitating for wage increases, and—though strikes are forbidden in Gomulka’s Workers’ State—even staged scattered strikes.

Women & Tear Gas. In Lodz (pronounced Woodge), 75 miles southwest of Warsaw, the early shift of streetcar workers reported for work one 3 a.m. last week, but no cars left the barns. Instead, before the day was over, 6,000 men and women employees were on a sitdown strike, demanding that their 800-zlotys monthly pay (enough to buy one pair of shoes) be increased 50%. The militia fired tear gas and wielded clubs. A worried Gomulka dispatched a trade union chief, a vice-minister and a security general from Warsaw, called out the troops to keep order, pressed 750 trucks into action to provide transportation in Poland’s second largest city (pop. 675,000), and banned the sale of vodka to prevent “real trouble.”

When the vice-minister appealed to the sitdowners to end their strike, a woman in the audience held up a tear-gas canister and asked: “Is this what you use against women?” The militia used tear gas again the second night, and after routing strikers from the car barns got the trolleys moving, with guards on each. The strike was over, broken not only by a show of force, but by the government’s promise to look into the strikers’ complaints.

Significantly, remembering Poznan and Budapest, and the way protests can get out of hand, other workers in Lodz did not support the streetcar men; they knew that the Russians would use Gomulka’s downfall as a pretext to move back in. The government, with a moderation rare in a Communist state, allowed the strike to last until the cowed workers themselves agreed to resume work, and not a shot was fired. The 40 arrested were released. “They may even be in the right,” said the Warsaw radio, belatedly telling of the strike. But, said the Party newspaper Trybuna Ludu, “This is not the way. The division of our daily loaf of bread cannot depend on those who most strongly push the state to the wall.”