Poland: the traitors' hour?
Tim Garton Ash
Berlin Warsaw is not Prague, even though the Czechs say it is. The Slovakian Pravda recently described the situation of Poland today as `identical' to that in Czechoslovakia in 1968, The Slovakian Pravda is wrong and the Kremlin must know that it is wrong.
To be sure, the Polish Communist Party leadership of Mr Stainslaw Kania is coming close to defying Moscow as did Mr Dubcek's, At this week's plenary session of the Party's central committee, Mr Kania declared that the Soviet comrades were absolutely right in the concerns expressed in their seven page warning letter; present day Poland was a threat to the security of the `socialist community' in Eastern Europe, there were `dangerous tendencies' in the election of delegates to the planned Party Congress. All of which notwithstanding, he saw no alternative to the present reform course and therefore the Congress would go ahead as planned on 14 July. Symbolically the starting date of the Congress has been moved forward from 20 July, the anniversary of the Soviet 'liberation' of Poland in 1944, to the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, The Soviet leaders would have liked it to be moved back rather than forward. They invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, partly to preempt the extraordinary Party Congress planned for September of that year.
There, however, the differences begin. Unlike Mr Dubcek, Mr Kania is not spurring his party on to further feats of reformism. He is only trying to ride the wave. The movement for reform among the three million members of the Polish Communist Party has all the force of a tidal wave. To attempt to halt it is to play King Cnut: and, like King Cnut, the party leadership has tried to do so on occasion if only to demonstrate to the more blue-eyed courtiers that it cannot be done. The tide must come in.
Some 90 per cent of the delegates to the Party Congress have been elected for the first time. They are a new, younger generation — more technocrats, managers, intelectuals than workers — and if they have their way on 14 July they will elect a new Party leadership and go on to create a Communist Party such as has never been seen in the Soviet bloc. This is what the Soviet letter described as `revisionism' and 'opportunism'. Under the influence of Solidarity they are already holding free and secret elections. Indeed in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, where Solidarity was born last August, the Party election statute is now more democratic than the independent union's. They want top Party officials to be answerable for their actions, their period in office limited to two terms, and the socalled 'horizontal' structures of consultation, In Gdansk the Party counter-offensive has found considerable support among the workers. Indeed on a purely Machiavellian basis it can be argued that the only chance the Communist Party has of re-establishing its authority is to place itself at the head of 'renewal' in the country.
Now 'renewal' ( odnowa ) is a debased Party slogan. But it is also an accurate description of what has happened in Poland since August. Every time one returns to the country one finds the paradox more acute: everything has got worse — and everything has got better. The warnings from its neighbours are more ominous, the state of the economy is more catastrophic, production has sunk. Now there are no cigarettes in Poznan and no potatoes in Lodz, no petrol in Cracow and no Arab oil for the Gdansk oil refinery to refine. And yet, and yet. . .the atmosphere is somehow still improving: the Solidarity offices are working calmly, the self-confidence of its members increases, they are ever less afraid to speak their minds openly in the factory or the public meetings. You must know that until' August in Poland (and to this day in her neighbouring socialist states) the normal life of the citizen was a double life: with two opinions, two faces, two loyalties — the public and the private. Solidarity has meant the beginning of the end of the double life. And the energy which this has released, the revolutionary elan, is by no means spent. Only last week it became clear that even the police want to form their own branch of Solidarity.
No wonder the Party, too, is imbricated with this spirit. Of course the delegates will go much further than anyone in the Kremlin would like, and even than the Roman Catholic Church or the former dissidents of KOR might think advisable, `In the past we saw democratic centralism without demo cracy', observes the editor of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, `Now they want democratic centralism without centralism. . .we hope they will land up somewhere in between.' It goes without saying that the party thus produced would be ideological anathema to Leninist ideologues like Mr Mikhail Sus by. The question is whether pragmatic consideration of the incalculable, appalling consequences of an armed intervention can reconcile him and his comrades to the lesser evil. It should be clear by now that the most reformist Polish leadership would not challenge the vital national interests of the Soviet Union. The mounting barrage of criticism from Moscow, Prague and East Berlin does not tell us that the Russians , have made a decision one way or the other. Obviously they will use every available weapon in their psychological warfare arsenal to deter the reformers. The tension has increased, is increasing and will continue to increase.
But one point seems slightly clearer now than a few weeks ago. On past experience, a Soviet invasion needs an invitation. Of course some paltry traitor can always be found to sign the letter, yet the experience of Czechoslovakia suggests very strongly that it cannot be any old nobody. Messrs Dubcek, Cernik, Smrkovsky and Kriegel were, after all, already entombed in a prison in the sub-Carpathian Ukraine, when President Svoboda refused to accept the quisling proposed by the Soviets. As a result Dubcek was hastily released from prison and — in the event to the Soviets' great advantage — continued to lead the country (in name) for several months. That volte face in Soviet policy was achieved by the courageous words of one old man even as Red Army tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. The semblance of legi timacy is important to Moscow. Now in Poland there would be 35 million Svobodas. And the traitors? It is significant that the statements of the so called 'Katowice forum', approvingly quoted by Tass, were roundly and unanimously denounced by the Politburo. Moreover the prominent hard liner, Mr Stefan Olszowski, often billed as the Polish Husak , and a man who has in the last six months been giving a pretty fair imitation of Cassius to Mr Kania's Caesar (although in fairness it must be said that Mr Olszowski looks neither lean nor hungry), Mr Olszowksi of all men explicitly distanced himself from the `Katowice forum' last Friday. This may just be tactics. Or it may be that the traitors' hour has not come because in today's Poland, the traitors are really not to be found.
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