Battered Communists Seek New Polish Role

Poland’s Communist Party on Monday launched a potentially historic effort to pull itself back from the brink of political destruction and become the first Communist party in the East Bloc to find a niche for itself in a pluralistic system.

“This is a very special moment,” Leszek Miller, a member of the party Politburo, said as he opened the party’s first leadership meeting since it gave up its monopoly on power to a Solidarity-led coalition government earlier this month.

He said the party will transform itself into “a new socialist party” able to compete in democratic conditions, or “we will inevitably be pushed aside to the margin of political life, and we will be dominated and removed not only by Solidarity but also by other political forces.”

In an unprecedented action meant to underline the party’s commitment to a new style, the party Central Committee opened the first phase of Monday’s meeting to the Western press.

The leadership meeting was called to begin preparations for a congress early next year that is expected to overhaul the party’s ideology, its statutes and possibly its name. It is known officially as the Polish United Workers’ Party. The current session is to take place in two parts, with no decisions made until later this month after a plebiscite among party members on alternate strategies.

Skepticism Over Survival

Many analysts are skeptical about whether the party can survive local elections scheduled for next year and national elections in 1993 no matter what it does. Others expect the party to split under the pressures of trying to reform itself, with either the more liberal wing or the conservative hard-liners breaking away if the debate over strategy goes against them.

“It never happened that a Communist party could cope with democracy and freedom,” Solidarity official Bronislaw Geremek said Monday in an interview. He is chairman of the labor movement’s 161-member parliamentary delegation and principal adviser to its chairman, Lech Walesa.

“That’s the end of the Communist Party,” Geremek went on, “and I think one can say it proudly. They know it and we know it. The question is only how to go about it.”

He said the future of the Communist Party is “the main political question at the moment, and it was so from the beginning of this process.”

The Communist parties of Western Europe compete in pluralistic systems, but they have never been in a position of obtaining power and then having to relinquish it.

The Polish Communists, installed in power by Soviet troops nearly 45 years ago at the end of World War II, were soundly defeated by Solidarity-backed candidates last June in elections for Parliament.

They now control four of the 23 Cabinet-level posts in the new coalition government and the presidency.

In a televised address last week, party First Secretary Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski warned “all members and sympathizers to understand that there is no return to the party’s old role.” And he added: “With the mechanisms of power in its hands, the (party) has been growing weaker and weaker over the years. It is now ridding itself of many burdens and faces a historic opportunity to boost its political vitality and influences.”

From a peak of over 3 million members in the late 1970s, party membership has fallen to a reported 2 million, while the average age of its members has risen from 40 to 46.

At least a million party members, according to Rakowski, hold jobs in the civil service and the country’s economic administration under the so-called nomenklatura system of reserving key jobs throughout society for party members. And they feel particularly threatened as the Solidarity prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, begins to overhaul the government and economic bureaucracies in an attempt to halt a national tailspin.