Poland's Communist Party Chief Edward Gierek arrives in Washington this week for an eight-day state visit, bringing with him a reputation as one of the East bloc's shrewdest leaders. Since 1970, when dock workers' strikes over high food prices brought him to the head of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party, Gierek has overseen booming economic development and the evolution of the Warsaw Pact countries' most politically permissive society. Relying heavily on foreign credits (and risking what he hopes will be temporary trade deficits), Gierek has purchased huge amounts of Western technology and capital equipment in an effort to create viable export industries. Though the country's stan dard of living remains far below that of the West and even below that of neighboring East Germany, Poland has sustained a growth rate of 12% a year under Gierek, while the average national in come has risen a respectable one-third since 1970, from $825 to $1,100.
Gierek has shown great flexibility in ideology and politics. Poland, in fact, since the Stalinist days when it was a dispirited Soviet satellite, has turned into a rather un typical socialist state. Private farm ownership is tolerated, ordinary citizens are comparatively free to travel abroad, and churches are packed on Sundays — all made accept able to the Soviet Union by internal stability and a close adherence to Moscow in foreign policy.
Unlike his predecessors, Gierek has tried to avoid an open battle with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, to which more than 90% of all Poles be long. Western books and periodicals are readily available on Warsaw's news stands, while even such capitalist cultural phenomena as the Rolling Stones and avant-garde theater groups have been invited to Poland, where they drew capacity crowds.
Gierek is unique among Communist leaders: he lived for many years in the West, and he comes from a genuinely proletarian background. The son of a mine worker who died when Gierek was four, he worked in French and Belgian coal mines from the age of 13 until his early 30s. He returned to Poland after World War II, where he quickly became active in the party. In 1957 he was named first secretary of the party in Silesia, where he gained a reputation for protecting the interests of miners and other industrial laborers. When worker unrest threatened to wreck Communist rule in 1970, Gierek, who clearly spoke a common language with workers, was a logical choice to succeed Wladyslaw Gomulka and save the tottering party.
Last week Gierek met with TIME Correspondents William Rademaekers and Gisela Bolte in his office on the third floor of the labyrinthine Central Committee building in Warsaw. Nattily dressed in a steel blue suit, white shirt and matching tie, Gierek seemed relaxed and sure of himself as he discussed the problems of Poland and the world. His views: