A Torrent in Eastern Europe : It Hit Poland Like a Flash, and Now Walesa Cannot Go Slowly

The crisis in Poland is the crisis of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe. The turning point has arrived. For Poland to form a non-Communist government is to change the nature of the Soviet-East European relationship fundamentally and--short of military intervention--irreversibly, ending what began in the Red Army’s brutal slog across Europe to conquer Berlin, crush Nazi Germany and assert the Soviet Union’s claim to be one of the world’s great powers.

No one expected events to move so fast. In January, this writer had a long conversation in Warsaw with Jerzy Urban, the government’s official spokesman, who admitted the possibility that the Communist Party could find itself in the minority in a new parliament--which has happened. But he also believed that the key minority parties, the United Peasant Party and the Democratic Party, would stay loyal to the Communists, leaving them in control. For 40 years those two parties have been the powerless shells of prewar political movements, forcibly incorporated into a Communist-controlled National Unity Front in 1948-49.

Other officials in Warsaw in January recognized that if the two parties found themselves with power to make or break governments--to act for Poland, one may put it--it was by no means certain that they would remain docile allies of the Communists. Thus has it happened. Their support has gone to Solidarity.

Yet in those conversations seven months ago, everyone took for granted that this movement toward what Urban called “higher” political structures--”euphemism,” he remarked, “covering return of the non-Communist parties”--would be gradual and evolutionary.

Instead it has come like a flash. The leaders of the Peasants and of the Democrats have responded not only to opportunity but to inevitability. They have abandoned the Communists because popular feeling in Poland has outstripped all practical notion of prudence and gradualism.

The people of Poland are in a desperate mood. Lech Walesa does not control them; they drive him, limiting what he can do. He would almost certainly prefer to go more slowly, to let the Communists take, or share, responsibility for the drastic measures now necessary to deal with the economic crisis.

Walesa cannot go slowly. His insistence that Solidarity will respect Poland’s Warsaw Pact engagements and his assurance that the Communists must hold the two key cabinet security posts, defense and interior (which means the national police), are the best he can do to slow what amounts to a revolutionary tide of popular repudiation of the Communist Party and of communism.

The economy is in chaos. People now have been urged to go to the countryside and search for food, to bring it back to the cities to sell privately--anything to get food to people amid a virtual breakdown or paralysis of the official mechanisms of agricultural production and supply. At the start of last week the outgoing government ordered all food stocks onto the market--even those held for the special shops where the party’s privileged buy.

Food prices have soared since subsidies were ended Aug. 1. Inflation overall runs at 236% and is expected to be 300% by the end of the year. More than 200,000 people were on strike last week to protest price rises.

The fact is that no one knows how to get from a centralized command economy and agriculture to the market system the Poles now are determined to have (and which is a condition of the European Community’s emergency food aid, now moving to Poland). One can only thank heaven that it is summer, and that Poland’s agriculture was never fully collectivized (80% remains in private holdings, limited to 50 hectares--123 1/2 acres). It remains capable of producing a surplus, given the means and incentive.

Can, however, any new government--non-Communist or not--put order and method into this uproar, to give people confidence that they will be provided food, clothing, fuel they can afford, an economy that works? It is a terrifying question. Good will is fine. It exists. But how is this to be done? Can it be done?

The new Polish parliament’s agenda was exceptionally amended a few days ago to consider a resolution condemning the Polish army’s participation in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, crushing the reform movement there. The motion carried overwhelmingly, a number of Communist deputies joining Solidarity and the two small parties. Hungary’s government has just made an equivalent declaration. The Czech government--installed by that invasion--voices outrage. The Soviet Foreign Ministry says that what is happening in Poland is “reasonable,” and in any case it is Poland’s business so long as Poland’s “obligations” to the Warsaw Pact are respected.

The center does not hold. Those who rejoice at this must also understand that discarding the past confronts Poland and the Soviet Bloc with a situation possessing characteristics of what science describes as chaos: a phenomenon where slight changes are capable of producing critical and unforeseeable outcomes. The usual example is torrential turbulence in a fast-flowing liquid, caused by slight change in the channel. Change itself in the East now is torrential--welcome, overdue, necessary, chaotic, above all dangerous.