(2 of 6)
Serious Challenge. The sudden, dramatic riots were the first popular protests in the East bloc since the 1968 student demonstrations in both Poland and Czechoslovakia. The new Polish uprising showed that in a repressive state—despite the presence of 20,000 Soviet troops on Polish soil, a loyal army and police, and a tame propaganda press—the underlying forces of discontent cannot be indefinitely suppressed. Moreover, last week's eruptions were considerably more violent than the 1968 riots. They were closer in spirit to the celebrated "bread and freedom" demonstrations in the city of Poznan in 1956; both began with workers' marches, and both were directed against economic insufficiency. Poznan eventually brought Wladyslaw Gomulka—literally on the shoulders of workers singing his praises—to power as First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party Central Committee. In Gdansk and Gdynia, however, the protesters reviled Gomulka by name. The disorders presented Gomulka with the most serious challenge of his 44-year political career (see box). They could well cost him his job.
In one sense, the riots in Poland came as a complete surprise: in another, they were at least foreseeable. Following the repressions that ended the 1968 student demonstrations, the Gomulka regime had gradually begun to relax its repressive stance, and the country itself seemed to respond with an outward spirit of springtime effervescence (TIME, Nov. 16). The movement toward "normalization" received particular emphasis last month when West Germany's Chancellor Willy Brandt visited Warsaw to sign a treaty ceding to Poland the former German lands east of the Oder-Neisse line. Poles assumed that the gaiety surrounding treaty ceremonies indicated better times for Poland in general. The price increases, therefore, were a cold shower of reality.
Archaic and Expensive. Poland's diplomatic gains could not disguise the fact that its economic situation has steadily worsened. Choosing ideological rigidity over pragmatism, the party's Central Committee has steadfastly refused to relax central control over industrial production and quotas. Factories are slowed by declining efficiency, slipshod labor and stifling bureaucracy. Agriculture, which Gomulka has allowed to remain mainly in private hands to keep peasant support, is archaic and expensive. Human problems have been complicated by acts of God. For two years in a row the Polish harvest has been disastrous; as a result, the nation has lost the $500 million in foreign exchange that it would have earned through farm exports. Gomulka himself, in a recent speech to coal miners at Zabrze, admitted that because of fodder shortages, meat-loving Poland this year has fattened 205,000 fewer cows and 910,000 fewer hogs than last year.