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To keep his popularity, lifelong Communist Gomulka would inevitably have to take steps that would make an orthodox Communist shudder. Already, to save Poland from economic catastrophe, he had made an excursion into heresy in the field of economics. In a speech to the Central Committee the day before he was elected party secretary, Gomulka boldly called for a slowdown in collectivization of agriculture, noting that Poland's private farms yield 16.7% more produce to the acre than her collectives. In a sardonic attack on the policy of top priority for heavy industry, he pointed out that Poland's automobile industry, a highly touted Communist creation, produces "at disproportionately high cost a limited number of automobiles of an old type which consumes a great deal of fuel."
Compromises with Communist economics by themselves were unlikely to be enough to ensure his popularity. The same crowds that supported Gomulka against the Russians set up an insistent outcry for the release of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who has been under house arrest since 1953. At week's end Gomulka gave in to their pleas. There would be other cries: clamor for a real Parliament and free elections. Whether Gomulka can get the genie back into the bottle is the big question.
* The bodies of 4,000 Polish officers found in the Katyn forest west of Smolensk in April 1943. The Russians blamed the Nazis. But later investigations, including one by a U.S. House subcommittee, established Soviet Russia's guilt.