The speaker on the podium of the plush, red-upholstered Congress Hall of Warsaw's Palace of Culture let loose with a spirited 90-minute harangue against almost every aspect of the Polish government's economic policy. Social benefits, he asserted, were "much lower and much worse" than in other Communist-bloc countries. The national economy was collapsing due to "incompetence, lack of knowledge, the pursuit of private interests and bureaucratic swank and arrogance." Seldom since the heyday of Solidarity, the independent trade-union movement, had such harsh blasts been sounded at a Polish labor conference. But the times they are a'changing: the impassioned orator was chairman of the government-sponsored All-Poland Trade Unions Alliance, and seated behind him was Communist Party Chief Wojciech Jaruzelski, who listened to the blistering broadside with apparent equanimity.
As the surprising frankness of the second national trade unions conference illustrated last week, Jaruzelski appears to be taking a different tack to haul his economically and spiritually exhausted nation out of the quagmire. Most notably, the ramrod-straight Polish army general, who has lately tried to soften his austere image by mingling with factory workers and common folk, now seems prepared to pry loose the lid that clamped shut on critics of his regime after the military crackdown five years ago. Indeed, the Polish leader admitted last week that some actions recently taken by his own officials "were mishaps, like an elephant in a china shop."
The most dramatic sign of the government's changing mood came when Jaruzelski's regime released virtually all of the country's political prisoners -- 225 oppositionists, including leaders of the Solidarity underground -- between July and September. Hard-line opponents of the regime warned that the amnesty was merely an interlude before the next round of jailings, but others thought that a new era of peaceful coexistence might be beginning. Said Opposition Journalist Stefan Bratkowski: "In comparison to what has been happening until now, this is a major political shift."
There have been other clues that the government thinks the time is ripe for accommodation. At Poland's Tenth Communist Party Congress last summer, Jaruzelski unveiled a plan for a national "consultative council" to advise the government on economic and social policy. The body is to include leaders of the country's powerful Roman Catholic Church and politically moderate intellectuals. Two weeks ago, Premier Zbigniew Messner took the unprecedented step of withdrawing a piece of economic legislation from parliament for revisions after it had been publicly criticized as a blatant attempt by bureaucrats to undermine proposed economic reforms that Jaruzelski had originally introduced in 1982.