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Poland. Wladyslaw Gomulka, 54, is the only satellite leader ever to face down Khrushchev and the ruler of the only Warsaw Pact nation to accept U.S. aid. A "homegrown Communist," who is alive today only because he was in a Polish jail in 1937 when Stalin liquidated the rest of Poland's Communist leadership, Gomulka is an irascible, puritanical man who hates conviviality and chitchat; he has strictly forbidden his aides to publicize his private life—which is largely given over to swimming, volley ball and his Russian-Jewish wife Zofja. Like Hungary's Kadar, Gomulka was arrested in 1951 for Titoism, but unlike Kadar he refused to crack despite three years' confinement. Reinstated as First Party Secretary in Poland's near revolution in 1956, he defied Khrushchev's threat to turn Soviet troops loose on Warsaw and granted his people considerable economic and social freedom. But as Poland's deep economic difficulties and bitter church-state conflict showed no signs of solution, his natural crotchetiness and distrust of "liberals" reasserted itself. (Says one of his associates: "Asking Gomulka to be reasonable and listen to advice is like asking a bear to be good-natured.") Bit by bit, the liberties of Poland's people have been curtailed, and the world has learned that though Wladyslaw Gomulka may be a Polish patriot, he is, above all, a dedicated Communist.
Rumania. Along with Gomulka, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (pronounced Ghee-or-ghee-you-DAYGE) is one of the rare satellite leaders to enjoy some degree of genuine popularity in his own country. A small-town boy from Moldavia whose education stopped with elementary school, Gheorghiu-Dej, 58, began his real schooling when he was jailed in 1933 for organizing a bloody railway strike near Bucharest. After eleven years in prisons and work camps, he was allowed to escape in 1944, as a gesture to the advancing Red army, began rising rapidly through Rumania's Communist hierarchy. (To distinguish himself from the rest of the Gheorghius, who are as common in Rumania as Smiths in the U.S., he took the added name "Dej," in honor of one of the many towns in which he had served time.) Since 1952, when he ousted the unlovely Ana Pauker, Gheorghiu-Dej has ruled Rumania without challenge, first as Premier and currently as First Party Secretary. Slow and obstinate in his mental processes, Gheorghiu-Dej is frequently mocked by Rumanians for his ignorance. But, at bottom, his cynical, pleasure-loving countrymen are proud of the fact that Gheorghiu-Dej, alone among the satellite bosses, is famed as a heavy-spending bon vivant and lady killer.