The leopard changes spots
Tim Garton Ash
Berlin Not the least extraordinary thing about the Polish Communist Party's extraordinary Congress, which opened this Tuesday on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille,is the fact that it is taking place at all.
If the Russians had had their way, it would probably have been postponed indefinitely. When they realised that the Polish Party leader, Stanislaw Kania, was determined to go ahead with the Congress which he had first announced on coming to office last September, they attempted to unseat him. But the fraternal broadside from the Soviet to the Polish Central Committee backfired. Kania not only survived — he emerged with his position significantly strengthened. fle used his enhanced authority to bring his hardline colleagues in the Politburo — the very men who had tried to unseat him days before — through the preliminary elections to the Congress. At the same time the depth charge of the Soviet letter scuppered some of the more extreme party reformists in the Warsaw and Cracow regions.
Nonetheless, over 90 per cent of the delegates— 2,000 — to the Congress are there for the first time, most of them democratically elected from regional party conferences. They are a new class of delegates — overwhelmingly white-collar workers — and they have gathered together to create a new kind of Party: a Party which can work with Solidarity. Nearly a quarter of the delegates are also members of the Independent Workers Movement. We do not know in advance what they will decide — which is worthy of remark, because in all other Party Congresses in all other Soviet bloc states the outcome is rigged by the central Party leadership.
The Polish United Workers' Party, to give the ruling Communist Party its formal title, has for a long time been neither united nor the workers'. By the end of the Gierek era, the low, dishonest decade of the Seventies, it had virtually ceased to exist as a mass organisation. Its leaders were hopelessly out of touch with most of the three and a half million rank-and-file members, and almost totally discredited in the eyes of the population.In the wake of the 'Polish August' as many as half a million plus joined Solidarity.
Then a strange thing happened. Instead of leaving the Party, people started getting together to try and change it — from below. The 'horizontal' pressure groups in Torun, Krakow, and Gdansk, flew in the face of all the Leninist principles of Party organisation, alarming Moscow, the Polish Party leadership, and even the dissidents who feared that a Party reforming itself from within would bring in Soviet tanks as it had in Prague. In the event the emancipation of the Party has not gone as far as seemed likely two months ago. For various reasons the more radical Party reformers are not strongly represented among the Congress delegates. Instead Mr Kania seems to have succeeded in isolating the extremists to right and left, while himself capturing the broad middle ground of 'renewal'.
What kind of a Party will be born again from the Congress? For a start it must be more genuinely democratic. The test case here will be the election procedures for the Politburo and the Party leader. Then delegates will look for new institutional checks and balances within the higher reaches of the Party, perhaps in the form of Boards of Control, to ensure that never again can a Party leader embark on the vast, Neronian schemes which Mr Gierek launched without proper consultation. Already before the Congress it became clear that Mr Gierek is set fair to be expelled from the Party, and his former Prime Minister to face criminal charges in the courts. Mr Kania and his colleagues are loud in criticising their predecessors' abuse of power: and in so doing they are bound also to criticise the system which made such abuses possible. Instititutional controls will now be written into the Party statutes. Furthermore, Party officials may be made directly responsible for their decisions, and directly answerable to their basic Party organisation (as it were their constituency) for their actions.
The first effect of these reforms should be to restore a measure of self-respect and cohesion within the Communist Party itself. The second intended effect is that the credibility of the Party within the country at large should be 're-established'. It must be doubted if the second effect will be quickly achieved. The Soviet-imposed Party, more artificial than any other in Eastern Europe, has enjoyed scant credibility at the best of times. Now it has the workers' and the peasants' Solidarity to compete with.
The best chance Mr Kania's new Communist Party will have of establishing its claim to legitimacy is economic reform. The road to credibility goes via the swamp of economics. If the Party can come up with some effective economic cures for the disease which they themselves have spread, then they may be accepted at least to the extent that bosses are accepted in a capitalist system. At the moment it is wholly unclear how far Solidarity wishes to operate as workers' control mangement as well as trade union. They would be well advised, however, to stick mainly to the latter role. The plans of economic reform floated by the government to coincide with opening of the Congress envisage a drastic cut in the standard of living, perhaps effected by price rises of up to 50 per cent for meat and other key foodstuffs. Solidarity has to decide how far it will take responsibility for administering this bitter medicine. Given a good harvest the country has a few months' grace, but the crunch will come at the latest this autumn. By then Solidarity will have held its first (and certainly also extraordinary) General Congress, planned to open on 31 August, the first anniversary of the historic Gdansk Agreement.
What we are seeing, in short, is the emergence of the first pluralist political system (although Poland has long been a pluralistic society) in the Soviet bloc since Stalin reduced the central European states to petrified uniformity at the end of the Forties. The balance of forces between the Communist Party, the workers' and the peasants' Solidarity, and the Catholic Church, has still to be established. But the conduct of Mr Kania's leadership, and the behaviour of his Party, over the last six months, suggests that it may yet be possible to find a modus vivendi. In other words, against all expectations, this particular leopard may actually be capable of changing spots. The question will then be: could this only happen in Poland?
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