POLAND: Sovereignty or Death

Like a great fissure in the earth’s surface, a crack opened wide last week in Russia’s Communist empire. The place was Poland, and the explosive force that erupted there was a submerged allegiance that runs deeper than Communism: patriotism.

What took place in six tense hours in Warsaw last week was an open defiance of the Kremlin, not by the oppressed people of Poland, but by their Communist rulers, who in an anxious testing moment acted as Poles first and dutiful Communists second. And for the first time in eleven hard years of Communist rule, these Communist rulers-tough, unloved Marxists-found themselves national heroes to the Poles.

Their defiance of Moscow was the biggest internal shock the Communists have received since Tito’s breakaway in 1948. In many respects what the Polish Communists did was a greater act of courage than Tito’s, for Tito when he defied Stalin had control of his own country and of its armed forces. The Polish leaders did not. They had only the passion of an idea, and the knowledge that in this, at least, they might count on the backing of their people.

Always the Rosjanie. In its thousand years of history Poland has been many times dominated from the East. Out of the eastern steppe have come barbaric conquerors, feudal overlords, religious crusaders, imperialists and Communists, but to the Poles they have always been the Rosjanie-the Russians. Though often overrun, cut up and reduced, the Poles-even Polish Communists-have never yielded the intense belief that they are a nation, separate and sovereign.

That passion stirred the small ruling group that gathered at 10 a.m. sharp one rainy morning last week in the cream-colored building of the Council of Ministers on Warsaw’s Stalin Avenue. This was the inner council, the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ (Communist) Party. They had two important items on their agenda. The first was to reinstate in the party hierarchy Wladyslaw Gomulka, 51, onetime party leader who, because he had refused to castigate Tito, had been disgraced and imprisoned by Stalin. The second item was more audacious: a motion to expel Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, famed Polish-born Soviet soldier who had acted as Stalin’s (and Khrushchev’s) proconsul in Poland since 1949.

This was independence with a vengeance. The Kremlin’s new leaders might be willing to bend with the times, to grant the satellites some easements in order to make their own control more secure. But now the Poles were asking them to loosen their tight hold on Poland. Of course, the Russians would not do so willingly; but perhaps they would have to. In making his submission to Tito, Khrushchev had acknowledged that there could be “other roads to socialism.” He had, at Tito’s urging, rehabilitated satellite lead ers (sometimes posthumously) who had once defied Stalin. He had permitted “liberalization” of Communism’s harsh rule, and when this liberalization had produced not gratitude but open resistance at Poznan, the Kremlin leadership had shown in the Poznan trials that it feared to return to repression. Perhaps Khrushchev could no longer control the forces he had unleashed. The time had come to find out, and the Polish Communists had found the man to make the test.

His name was Gomulka. He was medium-sized, bald and wiry, a resistance leader in World War II and a dedicated Marxist. Even after Stalin arrested him, he refused to crack, and it was said that in prison he confounded his inquisitors with his superior dialectical skill. Released from custody last April and now living quietly with his wife in the suburb of Praga, the bitter-memoried Gomulka had refused reinstatement by the back door.

The Polish Communists had to move fast. The Soviet Central Committee had recently circulated a letter to all satellites, warning them that the Russians were still the top directors of world Communism. Bulganin had recently warned the Poles in person against the Marxist heresy of “nationalist peculiarities.” Khrushchev’s surprise visit to Tito last month was evidence that a Kremlin reaction to liberalization had set in. The Poles decided to bring Gomulka in quickly by the front door.

Ready for Action. They did not expect to get away with it easily. Quietly, they told the Security Police that a coup d’etat might be expected, and put in command General Waclaw Komar, an old Gomulka comrade, who had himself been arrested for Titoism. Regional and district party leaders were alerted, arms put within reach of their party members. Before the Central Committee meeting it was arranged that workers in large factories should be prepared to stay on the job overnight and be ready for action. Students, enthusiastic supporters of “democratization,” were brought together in rallies, fed patriotic speeches and given resolutions to approve. The resolutions were framed in the usual Marxist doubletalk, except for one thing-the insistent frequency of the word “sovereignty.”

These preparations did not escape the notice of the Soviet secret police. The Soviet-officered Polish army began moving into positions around Warsaw and other key centers. Taxed with responsibility for these movements, just before the Central Committee meeting, Marshal Rokossovsky shrugged his broad shoulders and insisted urbanely that his troops were simply “returning from maneuvers.” So far, both sides were wary. But, as the Central Committee gathered in session, Party .Secretary Edward Ochab had sensational news to report: Khrushchev himself-accompanied by Mikoyan, Molotov and Kaganovich-had just landed at the Warsaw airport.

Tubby Nikita Khrushchev and his party got into limousines and headed for Belvedere Palace, the now empty former residency of Polish kings. The Poles adjourned their meeting, and Ochab, Gomulka and a group from the Gentral Committee went over to see the Russians. To underscore the seriousness of the new situation, trailing along behind Khrushchev was egg-bald Ivan Konev, commander in chief of the Warsaw Pact forces.

Khrushchev was in a towering rage.

Brushing aside Gomulka’s hand, he called him “a traitor” and launched into the attack, his stubby arms flailing, his ruddy face the color of borsch. “I will show you what the road to Socialism looks like!” he said. “If you don’t obey, we’ll crush you! We are going to use force to kill any uprising in this country . . . Russian soldiers were slain on this ground . . . We will never permit this country to be sold to the Americans and the Zionists.”

This was the crucial moment. Party Secretary Ochab spoke up: “Don’t think you can keep us here and start a putsch outside. Our party and our workers have been warned, and they are ready. If you do not halt your troop movements immediately, we will walk out of here and break off all contact.”

Time to Tollc. The Russians decided to reason with the Poles, and for the next 18 hours the windows of Belvedere Palace burned bright. Meanwhile, the loyal Polish Security forces doubled the guard at the Warsaw radio station. According to reports, General Komar, facing Ro-kossovsky’s army at one point, indicated a line and threatened to fire on any soldier crossing it. A column of Russian tanks was reported driving into Poland from East Germany, and truckloads of army troops were seen moving fast over provincial roads. At Stettin a Russian detachment which attempted to force an entry into Poland was fired on by Komar’s men and withdrew. There were sharp brushes at other points, but it was evident that the word had not yet come from Marshal Konev to “crush” Poland.

By early morning Russians and Poles were still far from agreement, but it was agreed that a delegation from the Polish Political Bureau would continue discussions in Moscow. In the first light of dawn the Russians drove out to the airport. The last to bid Khrushchev farewell before he entered the plane for the return trip to Moscow was Gomulka. “Oh, Comrade Khrushchev,” he said, “I almost forgot to shake hands.”

As the Polish leaders went back to the Ministers building to take up their agen da, Warsaw woke to a new day unaware of anything that had happened. There had yet been no public mention of the Russians’ sudden arrivals and departures.

Riding the Tiger. Poland had won the first round because its Communist leaders had secured control of the Security Police —a startling departure on the old Stalinist order of things—and had avoided being arrested or, in Ochab’s words, becoming the victims of a putsch. But their real strength lay in the Polish people. After eleven years of Soviet domination and destitution the Poles, at a word from Gomulka, would have joyfully flung themselves into bloody battle with their masters. In this struggle it is doubtful if the Russians could have relied on Rokossov-sky’s Polish army or even on Soviet troops in the area. Such an upheaval, spreading westward to East Germany, or eastward to the Ukraine, might shake the Russian empire to its roots. It was a risk Khrushchev could not take, and the Poles knew it.

The Polish leaders could not yield this advantage without putting themselves at Khrushchev’s dubious mercy. They too were riding a tiger. The day after Khrushchev’s departure, Gomulka launched an attack on the Russian position. Speaking reasonably and calmly, he defined his differences sharply. “Every country has the right to be sovereign and independent. I would say it begins to be so. In the Soviet Union the place of discussion within the party has been taken by the cult of personality. In such conditions how could the relations between the People’s Democracies and the Soviet Union be based on the principle of equality?”

As for the future, said Gomulka: “It is not enough to change the people in the government to improve the situation. It is necessary to make changes in the system of government. All bad parts in our model of socialism must be exchanged for better ones.” Some of the parts Gomulka would change: a strengthening of the cooperative movement, “private enterprise” to help out the lagging building industry, revision of the collectivized farm system^ Gomulka pledged a general election on Dec. 16, at which Poles would not only have “the right to cast votes,” but would also be in a position “to elect.” The Polish parliament, said Gomulka, “must control the functioning of the government and state organs.”

But despite all of these promises, Gomulka remained a Communist: the party must be “compact and monolithic ” and it must lead. “We shall allow nobody to exploit the process of democratization against socialism,” and once the Polish leadership is accepted as Russia’s equal t would “present a resolute opposition to the whispering campaign aimed at weakening our friendship with the Soviet Union.” He indicated that if the Kremlin accepted Poland’s “sovereignty,” collaboration in “equality” was still possible. In short, Poles might hope to be rid of the Russians, but not of the Communists. The model for Gomulka’s independent Communist state of Poland appeared to be not Tito’s Yugoslavia but Mao’s Red China. The Polish press has recently been full of praise of the way Communism “works” in China. And Foreign Minister Chou Enlai, meeting Ochab at Peking last month, said that he understood Poland’s “distaste at being dictated to on everything,” and encouraged the then Polish party secretary to go ahead with his efforts to obtain internal independence. As for Tito, his condemnation of the Poznan riots last June and his failure to give the Poles encouragement now, indicated to the Poles that for the present, at least, he was a Khrushchev man. The comfort ing thing in this pattern of events for the West was that, though Stalin’s empire was fragmenting into Communist, rather than democratic states, the Communist fragments were showing a capacity for deep and lasting divisions.

Gomulka had spoken out as the country’s leader of party and state, and with something of the old authoritarian voice he had used in the three years before his downfall. But he was not yet a member of the top party hierarchy. In taking up the agenda after Khrushchev’s departure, the Central Committee had to consider that, while Khrushchev had insisted that Rokossovsky remain, the nature of Gomulka’s speech made it impossible for both to serve on the same panel. It was either Gomulka or Rokossovsky. Gomulka’s speech was also, in effect, notice that once in power he planned to expel all the old Stalinists and rebuild the party from the top down. The possible Soviet reaction to a Gomulka clean sweep was not something the Polish Central Committee could take lightly. It took them, in fact, twelve hours to make up their minds. Their decision: to make Gomulka First

Secretary of the party and to throw out Marshal Rokossovsky and three Deputy Premiers.

The Political Bureau was reduced to nine members. Still in the top jobs were Gomulka backers Alexander Zawadski, chairman of the Council of State, Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz, Security Minister Roman Zambrowski and stouthearted Edward Ochab, who stepped down as First Secretary to make way for Gomulka.

For the moment, Gomulka had control of the Polish apparatus, but his difficulties were not over. Would a simple change to a Polish-style Communism satisfy Poland’s restless millions? The day might come when Gomulka would need the Kremlin’s help as badly as he now needed to defy it. This awareness lay behind his offer of a continued collaboration with Moscow. But could Nikita Khrushchev accept Gomulka’s cooperation on these terms? Khrushchev by his hasty flight to Warsaw had staked his own prestige on the event, and had suffered a rebuff.

Now began a contest of wills and a testing of strength. For Moscow, it involved a weighing of the advantages and the dangers to be had by joining battle or grudgingly accepting the new situation. It was the old Communist game of power, delicate but also deadly.