POLAND: Genie from the Bottle

As the week began, the people of Poland were headily engaged in a life-and-death gamble with their nation’s future. They had for the first time made a hero out of a Communist: taut, bald Wladyslaw Gomulka. He promised only to take . them on the “Polish road to Socialism.” Now everything turned on whether or not the U.S.S.R. would accept the new order peaceably.

To this deadly contest of wills, 51-year-old Communist Gomulka brought the twin advantages of an iron nerve and an unpleasantly intimate knowledge of Moscow’s methods. This was Gomulka’s second appearance as first secretary of the Polish party; his first tour wound up in his imprisonment in 1951 on charges of Titoism. And he had risen to party leadership in the first place largely because he was one of the few prewar Polish Communists of any stature available when Poland fell under the domination of the Red army at the end of World War II. This lonely eminence he owed to the fact that he had been in a Polish prison in 1938 and hence unable to accept a pressing invitation to Moscow from Joseph Stalin. None of Gomulka’s colleagues who made the trip returned alive.

This time Gomulka maneuvered with practiced adroitness to insure his own survival and that of Poland’s newly proclaimed sovereignty. His supporters encouraged Polish crowds to give full vent to their exuberance at Gomulka’s bold expulsion of Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky from the Politburo and Gomulka’s personal defiances of Nikita Khrushchev (TIME, Oct. 29).

Most of these mob scenes, organized or spontaneous, began as what one Pole called “demonstrations of happiness.” But as they continued, their temper turned bitter. In Wroclaw (formerly the German Breslau) demonstrating students who started off shouting “Long live Poland” gradually progressed to “Tell the truth about the Katyn murders”* and a steady chant of “Rokossovsky, go home.” (“What do they want from me?” lamented the dejected Soviet proconsul. “After all, I was born in Poland and my parents are buried here.”)

Chastened Caller. While his enemies in the party apparatus reeled under the mob’s hostility, Gomulka quickly began to consolidate his new position. Though he did not yet dare to dismiss Rokossovsky from his other post as Defense Minister, Gomulka installed as Deputy Defense Minister General Marian Spychalski, who in 1951 was jailed along with Gomulka for Titoism.

From Moscow a chastened Khrushchev telephoned to make his peace. Like wildfire word spread through the country that Khrushchev had apologized for his intemperate outbursts during his flying visit to Warsaw the week before. Most important of all, he was now prepared to accept Gomulka’s “national Communism.”

Selective Silence. Next day, when Gomulka appeared without bodyguards at a mass meeting held in front of Warsaw’s gaudy Russian-built Palace of Science and Culture, a crowd of more than 250,000 Poles gave him a hero’s reception. They cheered thunderously when Gomulka revealed Khrushchev’s promise to call off Russian troop movements and cheered when he added: “The Polish people can now trust their army. It is subordinate to its own government . . . All the Russian advisers in our army will be relieved if the general staff so decides.” But the applause faded into heavy silence when he added that the Communist government of Poland wants “wholehearted friendship with the Soviet Union,” and declared that Soviet forces would remain in Poland “as long as NATO keeps bases in Germany and as long as a new Wehrmdcht keeps being built up.”

The crowd’s selective silences were clear evidence that the genie which Gomulka had conjured up to confound Khrushchev was not one he could rebot-tle at will. Having capitalized on his countrymen’s historic hostility to Russia, Gomulka has to live with the danger that that hostility may get out of hand. Scarcely had he finished his speech when a good part of his audience proceeded to ignore his warning against further demonstrations, especially anti-Soviet outbursts. Hoisting Polish and Hungarian flags, more than 5,000 students marched to the Hungarian embassy to shout their sympathy with the Budapest rebels and their hatred of the U.S.S.R. If such demonstrations continued to gain in momentum, there was real danger that the Russians might feel compelled to change their minds about Polish sovereignty.

Between Russian fears and Polish patriotism, Poland’s new boss was left with little room for maneuvering, but within what space he had he maneuvered effectively. In his telephone conversation with Khrushchev, Gomulka had agreed that he would lead a three-man delegation to Moscow before the week was out to discuss with Soviet leaders the new relationship between Poland and the U.S.S.R. At midweek, convinced that this was not the moment, Gomulka postponed the trip indefinitely. Meantime, determined to prevent further anti-Russian outbursts in Poland, the new government began to organize workers’ militia units in industrial plants.

Excursion into Heresy. As Gomulka well knew, the popular tide which swept him into power was anti-Communist as well as anti-Russian. With the army and the secret police no longer dependable instruments of oppression, he more than ever would have to rest his power on his popularity with the Polish masses.

To keep his popularity, lifelong Communist Gomulka would inevitably have to take steps that would make an orthodox Communist shudder. Already, to save Poland from economic catastrophe, he had made an excursion into heresy in the field of economics. In a speech to the Central Committee the day before he was elected party secretary, Gomulka boldly called for a slowdown in collectivization of agriculture, noting that Poland’s private farms yield 16.7% more produce to the acre than her collectives. In a sardonic attack on the policy of top priority for heavy industry, he pointed out that Poland’s automobile industry, a highly touted Communist creation, produces “at disproportionately high cost a limited number of automobiles of an old type which consumes a great deal of fuel.”

Compromises with Communist economics by themselves were unlikely to be enough to ensure his popularity. The same crowds that supported Gomulka against the Russians set up an insistent outcry for the release of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who has been under house arrest since 1953. At week’s end Gomulka gave in to their pleas. There would be other cries: clamor for a real Parliament and free elections. Whether Gomulka can get the genie back into the bottle is the big question.

* The bodies of 4,000 Polish officers found in the Katyn forest west of Smolensk in April 1943. The Russians blamed the Nazis. But later investigations, including one by a U.S. House subcommittee, established Soviet Russia’s guilt.