PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JULY 3, 1981
PAGE 9
ON THE WORLD SCENE
POLAND: NERVOUS COUNTDOWN TO JULY 15 By the middle of this month, we should
know whether Poland's surging tide of liberalism--the Poles call it
"renewal"--is unstoppable, short of direct military intervention on the
part of the Soviet Union.
On July 15, delegates will assemble in Warsaw for the annual congress of the
Polish United Worker's Party, official name for the communist organization
which runs the country. Under pressure from the Solidarity union movement,
delegates to the congress are being selected by secret ballot, a process
unheard of in the communist world.
Solidarity, launched after last year's workers' strikes in Gdansk and
elsewhere, has deeply penetrated the party.
About one-third of party
members also belong to Solidarity. The Soviet Union fears that as a result
of the secret voting, the remaining pro-Soviet hard-liners will be drummed
out of party posts.
In April, Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's chief ideologist, paid a one-day
visit to Poland's communist party Secretary Stanislaw Kania. He demanded
that Kania scrap the secret ballot idea.
Kania refused.
His refusal
triggered a wave of reaction from Moscow, denouncing Poland's liberaliza
tion, blaming much of it on "conspiratorial forces" undermining Poland from
the West.
"Poland's democratic revolution," writes the journalistic team of Evans and
Novak, "now confronts the Kremlin with an impossible dilemma: Invade this
troublesome nation, or else permit its dramatic transformation within the
Soviet empire."
The Soviets, it is widely believed throughout Poland, are manipulating the
economic misfortunes in the country, slowly strangling the economy, pro
ducing the shortages of consumer items in an attempt to bring the Poles to
heel. The Poles are taking all this in stride, even making jokes about it.
(A current Polish joke has it that gasoline is in such short supply not only
because Moscow holds up oil shipments, but because Poles are hoarding
gasoline for Molotov cocktails with which to greet Soviet invaders.)
Nobody in Poland believes that the Soviet economic noose will strangle the
revolution. "Soviet bully-boy tactics no longer work here," observe Evans
and Novak, writing from Gdansk, adding that an "armed Soviet intervention
would almost certainly bring a bloodbath, from both guerrilla warfare and
resistance by Polish army units from the regiment level down." That leaves
Moscow with only one alternative, they report: "Permitting the keystone of
its empire to evolve into a Poland that, while not seeking to leave the
Warsaw Pact, is becoming � social democratic state in everything but �·"
Moscow's not-so-subtle pressure is only intensifying the average Pole's
contempt for the Soviet Union and Soviet-style socialism.
(In his 1972
boo �� Europe in Search of Security, author Peter Bender describes the
Polish people as "restless, emotional, freedom-loving sometimes to the
point of anarchy, and utterly non-communist.")
Polish resolve confronts the Kremlin, concludes Evans and Novak, with "the
� important political development since 1945, with unmeasurable cons"e=
quences for this tragic continent and the world."