Poland at Stalemate in Political War of Wills : Regime Imposing New Curbs, Appears Unwilling to Deal Decisively With Weakened Solidarity

Five years after the tumultuous “Polish August” of 1980--the workers’ revolt that riveted the world’s attention and gave rise to the independent Solidarity trade union movement--both the moderate reformers who now hold the upper hand in Poland’s Communist Party and the outlawed union’s underground organization are showing signs of exhaustion in a protracted war of political attrition.

Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski’s government remains unwilling or unable--opinions differ--to reach an accommodation with Solidarity or to crush it. At the same time, Solidarity is unable to mobilize worker protests of sufficient scale to break the impasse itself and bring the regime into the dialogue that the union and its cautious ally, the Roman Catholic Church, still seek.

In the midst of this stalemate, hard-liners in the party appear to have been increasingly successful in recent months in nudging the Warsaw government toward a more repressive stance.

Penalties More Severe

Penalties for political and economic offenses were made more severe as of July 1; a parallel system of summary justice has been established in the courts, and a new law on higher education adopted last month negates most of the academic reforms won by the universities three years ago.

Few observers, either Polish or foreign, expect this trend to lead to a dramatic crackdown on the hundreds of activists, some of them on the run from the police since martial law was imposed in 1981, who form the heart of the loosely organized Solidarity underground.

However, a partial purge of activists in the universities and research institutes is likely this fall. Many Poles also expect the government to launch a new attack on the still-robust and defiant underground press, which remains a virtual industry.

In the meantime, in the widely shared view of leading Solidarity adviser Jacek Kuron, the movement’s only realistic task for the indefinite future, given its inability to sway government policies, is the same as it has been since Jaruzelski declared martial law Dec. 13, 1981. “Solidarity’s task,” Kuron says, “is to survive.”

The government’s official view of Solidarity, shaped with an eye toward winning Poles to its side, is that it was begun for justifiable reasons--the bankrupt economic policies of former Polish leader Edward Gierek in the 1970s--but was led astray by “demagogues” who sought to overthrow the Communist system, an allegation firmly rejected by Solidarity founder Lech Walesa.

Gierek’s spendthrift borrowing left Poland with a crushing debt burden that is still growing as the country falls behind in interest payments. The debt, expected to pass $30 billion this year, remains the crux of Poland’s economic and social troubles.

“Solidarity had grouped millions of people who vested in it their hopes for clearing life of the deformations that contradicted socialism and for effective action in the name of renewal,” Jaruzelski said in a speech to the Communist Party Central Committee on Aug. 3.

The movement, he continued, became a “steppingstone (for) action by a band of anti-socialist demagogues . . . manipulators and counterrevolutionaries.”

The official line is that political normalization is all but complete now, as evidenced by the fact that most of the 5.5 million members of the new, government-sanctioned trade unions are former Solidarity members. The Solidarity underground, Jaruzelski told the Central Committee, is dying.

Reality, however, would appear to be more complex.

Three years after the lifting of martial law, Solidarity remains a powerful spiritual and emotional presence--an enduring embodiment of the same yearning for the rule of law and the civil liberties of the West that has animated the Polish nation for 200 years.

As an educational institution, Solidarity remains a potent social force. However, as a political organization, it has indeed withered and weakened, to the point of near-immobility.

Few Poles now wear Solidarity pins in public--the risk of arrest is too great--but millions still keep them at home. The ideal and the image alone, with no great organizational effort, still attract tens of thousands of people to brief, peaceful--but illegal--demonstrations on May Day and other political holidays. These, however, have become rituals of emotional release more than protests in the ordinary sense.

Demonstrations invariably begin at a Mass. The Roman Catholic Church, as much a patriotic as a religious institution in Poland, was an integral part of the Solidarity movement from the beginning. The bond is even stronger now, with the murdered Solidarity priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, widely accepted as a martyr to the common cause.

The people who turn out for demonstrations, and for the patriotic monthly--in some places, even weekly--”Masses for the Fatherland” begun by Popieluszko, form a remarkable cross section of the population, perhaps the closest semblance of a classless society that a Communist state has yet achieved.

These are not the rowdies and fanatics that the authorities profess to see, but clean-cut students, factory workers, white-collar bureaucrats, intellectuals, even gray-haired grandmothers--all of them joyously flashing the Solidarity “V” sign and chanting slogans like “Greetings from the underground!” and “Freedom through Solidarity!”

Safety-Valve Gatherings

The authorities seem to have understood the safety-valve function of these gatherings, which are usually dispersed with only a show of force. Now, though, the regime’s attitudes appear to be hardening.

The church also shelters a vibrant alternative culture, which is inspired, and to a large extent organized, by the Solidarity movement. Uncensored exhibitions, plays, poetry readings, concerts and lectures--some staged in private homes, but most held in churches--attract some of the country’s most talented artists, writers and performers. A network of political discussion groups for workers also still exists across the country.

Yet the political and organizational underpinning of this alternative society, as many Poles call it, has weakened considerably in the last two years.

A loosely federated structure of autonomous regional Solidarity commissions persists in most, but not all, areas of Poland.

The regional commissions are linked to secret factory commissions (some of them dormant, others highly active) as well as to the Temporary Coordinating Commission, whose most prominent member is Zbigniew Bujak, a charismatic, 30-year-old electrical technician who has been in hiding since the martial-law clampdown in 1981.

This umbrella commission, in turn, is said to coordinate most of its activities with Walesa, the 1983 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who works at his old job as an electrician in the V.I. Lenin Shipyards of Gdansk.

An amnesty last year brought several of the best-known underground figures in from the cold, mainly to be reunited with wives and children. They have been replaced by other, less well-known activists, some of whom remain anonymous.

Anonymity Needed

According to reliable Solidarity sources, the underground maintains a strong presence in research institutes and in larger factories, where protective coloration is easier among the many work crews.

Here, according to these sources, about 15% of the workers still pay dues to the Solidarity underground. Nationwide, however, dues are still being collected from only 3%--or, according to the most optimistic estimates, 5%--of the union’s pre-martial-law membership of 9.5 million members, a significant drop from the estimated 10% two years ago.

One reason for the decline is that it has become harder for sympathetic workers to know to whom they should give their dues. As the point men of the underground, dues collectors run the greatest risk of being fired or picked off by the police.

The government, however, contends that popular interest in Solidarity is fading. Col. Stanislaw Kwiatkowski, head of the official Center for the Study of Social Opinion, said in an interview that surveys show a consistent drop in the number of randomly selected adults who acknowledge having been members of Solidarity--from 28% last March down to 20.2% in June and July. This trend can also be explained, however, by growing public caution in responding to government pollsters.

Rightly or wrongly, the government interprets its opinion surveys as showing that the “social base” of the opposition--those willing to identify themselves to government pollsters as holding anti-government or anti-Communist views--is no more than 5% of the population, down from 8% in 1983. Similar polls, however, show 64% of the population holding negative views on the state of the economy and the government’s ability to improve it.

“You must not confuse criticism with opposition,” Kwiatkowski cautioned.

Whatever its real base of support, probably larger than these polls show, Solidarity has recently been unable to mobilize significant strike actions to make itself felt. A call for a one-hour strike on July 1 to protest the third and final phase of food price increases this year went largely unheeded, even though Walesa, who remains a highly popular figure, risked prosecution by implicitly endorsing the work stoppage.

Costs vs. Gains

The lack of response stems at least partly from the perception that a worker has everything to lose in a strike--starting with his job--and little or nothing to gain.

“We are in the same situation we were four years ago,” Solidarity adviser Kuron said in an interview in his apartment in northern Warsaw, a block from St. Stanislaw Kostka Church, where scores of mourners filed past Popieluszko’s grave even on a weekday afternoon.

“One thing is for certain: We will not make an uprising. An uprising would be doomed. We would condemn ourselves to failure. There are, therefore, no effective measures by which you can put pressure on the authorities, because they are not sensitive to social pressure.

“So when you call on people to take part in a strike--even a one-hour strike, which the authorities can choose to see or not to see--you are calling on them to take part in an act of pure heroism. You know you can be fired from your job. You know you can go to prison. But you cannot win anything.”

Under these circumstances, Kuron said, “Solidarity’s task is to survive” in the knowledge that “a movement has to move--either forward or backward.”

Greater Repression

Evidently believing that Solidarity is retreating, the Jaruzelski regime has shown a slow drift in the last six months toward more repressive action.

By official count, the number of those charged with politically motivated crimes--including the four secret police officers convicted in the murder of Popieluszko--has crept up steadily from 11 (after the July, 1984, amnesty) to 231, as of Aug. 1.

The adoption of summary justice procedures in July, by which 1,700 non-political arrests have already been processed, and the revocation of academic reforms last month also point to this drift.

Still, in most respects, Poland remains the most liberal country in Eastern Europe. Travel abroad is relatively easy (the U.S. Embassy expects to issue about 30,000 visas this year), the official press is lively and disputatious on domestic issues and the independent Roman Catholic press remains unique in Eastern Europe, as does the government’s release of negative opinion polls.

Even so, Western diplomats note, the trend toward harsher measures is significant. Some believe that the regime has simply gained confidence in its ability to take more repressive steps without igniting unrest. As one experienced diplomat put it, “I think we’re seeing more of an expression of their natural inclinations.”

Solidarity activists and other Polish observers believe that a more intricate political process is at work--that the restraining influence of moderates in the Communist Party has weakened in recent months as hard-liners have grown more impatient with the country’s economic morass and with workers they see as dispirited by the nay-sayers of the opposition.

Unintended Twist

Ironically, the Popieluszko murder last October had a role in hardening the attitudes of the authorities. Although both the church and Solidarity urged the public to remain calm, the absence of unrest helped convince the authorities that their opinion polls were accurate: The mood of the workers is sullen and pessimistic, but not volatile.

The successful introduction of price increases added to this impression and further weakened the cautionary voices of party liberals, some Polish observers believe.

“This is a war of attrition,” Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the former national spokesman for Solidarity, said in an interview.

“The liberals thought their political program would be good enough, but it has failed. There is a kind of exhaustion here. You can see some of them drifting away--disillusioned, becoming less involved.

“They feel a need to do things to please the other power group, the hard-liners, to respond to their demands. In a way, the hard-liners are the idealists in the party now,” said Onyszkiewicz, a mathematician at Warsaw University.

“At the same time, Solidarity has just about exhausted the possibilities of clandestine or alternative political activity,” he went on. “There is very little room for growth. . . . It is in a period of stagnation now.”

Steadily Tougher

Although the new legislation provides the legal tools for a major crackdown on Solidarity, few expect more than a steady tightening of the screws. Anything more dramatic, this theory goes, would jeopardize the regime’s efforts to obtain new Western credits. In any case, as Poles are fond of saying, when it comes to repression, Poland is a nation of half-measures.

And to reinforce this, Soviet leaders are said to be interested mainly in seeing that Poland produces no political sensations of any kind.

“There will be no crackdown--a little repression maybe, but no crackdown,” a liberal party member and intellectual predicted.

Still, the liberal reformers are facing a showdown of sorts next spring at the first Communist Party congress since the summer of 1981 prior to martial law, which produced the country’s most liberal Central Committee. Since then, more than a million members, a third of the original Communist membership, have left the party. The great majority appear to have been disillusioned moderates departing of their own volition.

Western diplomats expect that the Central Committee to be chosen next spring will reflect the resulting shift in party membership toward orthodoxy. However, one of the party’s liberals predicted, “We will win”--but in so saying, he left the impression that there will be a fight.

Jaruzelski, while under no apparent challenge for the leadership, could not ignore a new, more conservative consensus in the Central Committee. It may be impossible to extinguish Solidarity altogether, but the result will almost inevitably be still greater pressure on the surviving remnants of the “Polish August” of five years ago.