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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, September 5, 1980
Page 11
Party officials in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania are now worried
that the stunning economic and political reforms conceded by the Warsaw
regime will spread to their areas too.
Timing Perfect
The Polish strikers, supported by dissident intellectuals who helped
frame the workers' demands, knew exactly when and how to act. The
spark was the government's sudden announcement in mid-August of a sharp
increase in meat prices. But this merely provided the justification by
the strikers to go far beyond calls for increased wages and better
working conditions to demand almost the unthinkable: that their country's
Communist Party divest itself of its monopoly of power.
The strike leaders were both bold and cautious. Unlike work stoppages
which led to riots and government crackdowns in previous years, the
strikers were forbidden to attack party headquarters or other symbols
of party or governmental authority. Instead, the workers, deprived by
their leaders of vodka, sought quiet refuge in their Catholic faith.
Perhaps most importantly, the strikers were convinced that
military might would not be brought to bear against them.
that the Russians were bogged down in Afghanistan and that
never get involved militarily in two places at once unless
necessa . ry.
Political Power Next
the Soviet
They knew
the Soviets
absolutely
The workers made Polish party boss Edward Gierek eat humble pie. They
forced him to purge the upper echelons of the party of officials the
strikers didn't like. Then, in a remarkable show of penance, Gierek
went on Polish television to confess that his regime was guilty of
"vacillation and weakness."
In granting the workers the right to form their own independent unions,
the government gained a dubious trade-off. The workers agreed, on paper,
not to turn their new union system into a political party. The workers
also accepted, they said, the Communist party's leading role in Polish
society and the so-called "reality" of Poland's alliance with the Soviet
Union.
How long will this agreement stick, however? The West German newspaper,
Frankfurter Allgemeine, predicted that "the demands of the strike committee
remind one more of historical declarations of independence...than of posi
tions in a labor struggle....A labor organization, independent from the
party...would soon become the core of a second party which the people
would join in droves."
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Hamburg's Die Welt added: "One can imagine what would happen in the
East Bloc if the Poles succeed in making independent labor unions offi
cial partners of the regime in an on-going dialogue. There would then
be an institutionalized pluralism for the first time within the Soviet
power area. Even if these free unions obligated themselves not to touch
any sort of a political problem (at which the question would soon have
to arise--what really is not political?) through their sheer existence,
these unions would rise up as a democratic island out of the sea of
totalitarianism."