Polish Politicians Clash as New Party Is Formed : East Europe: Reformers threaten a split, saying ‘a bag containing everthing will not do.’

Centrists in Poland’s dying Communist Party were locked in a daylong struggle Sunday to rid themselves of hard-liners in the hope of demonstrating to a skeptical public that their new party is something more than the old one with a paint job.

It was proving to be a hard fight because the hard-liners in the old Communist Party, known as the United Workers Party, have nowhere else to go but with their comrades, now looking for new political life as Social Democrats in the Western European mold.

A group of reformers is also threatening a split, complaining, their leader said, that a “hybrid party, a bag containing everything, will not do.”

The centrist--and largest--group in the party’s three-day congress is led by 35-year-old Alexander Kwasniewski, who has emerged as the likely leader of the Social Democracy Party of the Republic of Poland, as the new party was named in a vote Sunday night.

A protege of the outgoing party general secretary, Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, Kwasniewski has been a swiftly rising party liberal who is seen as offering a sharp generational break with the past.

Although giving some lip service to the idea of unity for the party, he told the congress--early in its 15-hour meeting Sunday--that he is not for “unity at any price.”

Many hours later, in the corridors of the Palace of Culture where the congress was going on, he told a reporter that he hopes the hard-liners will “go off and make their own party.”

“We have to make a pressure so that those people who would kill our credibility will not leave this meeting in our company,” said Ludwig Krasucki, the liberal editor of the party’s theoretical journal and a longtime advocate of party reform.

To apply the pressure, the Kwasniewski group forced through a platform billed as strictly “social democratic,” avoiding any reference to socialism in the platform.

The party’s hard-liners complained (“We are being pushed to the wall!” said one), but the platform passed overwhelmingly. At one point, the presiding officer of the congress turned off the microphone of Jerzy Micah, the conservative editor of the party’s newspaper, Trybuna Ludu. Micah, enraged, continued to shout.

“This is not the office of Trybuna Ludu,” the chairman said. “Stop shouting at me.”

Unhappy as they were, however, the hard-liners went along with the votes as dictated by the new generation in obvious control.

The reformist wing, led by Tadeusz Fiszbach, a member of Parliament from Gdansk, claimed to have taken away about 100 delegates, including, its spokesmen said, about 30 members of the United Workers Party caucus in the Parliament.

Fiszbach walked out of Saturday’s opening session of the congress. However, he returned Sunday to present his arguments to the assembly, asserting that “if we don’t make accounts for the past 45 years, we will be openly committing suicide together.”

The reception was decidedly cool for Fiszbach, who was accused of “personal ambitions.”

“It is not true that we are trying to split the party,” said one of the centrist group, Janusz Bryk of Warsaw. “The party has been split for decades. Successive leaders of the party tried to ignore this.”

Hard-liners fought back with their own speeches, which drew surprisingly lusty rounds of applause, indicating that, whatever the new political realities, old sympathies remain strong.

Jan Ryzhlewski, one of the hard-liners, warned of what he called a “right-wing totalitarianism” emerging in Poland and urged that the new party not surrender its former toughness. “We need a party with teeth,” he said.

Kwasniewski and other party figures have admitted that the party--under whatever name--will have a difficult time winning public credibility. Its first challenge will be local elections, now set for April. The Communists were trounced by Solidarity candidates in elections last June.

The United Workers Party has claimed 1.9 million members, but the new party’s leaders expect a sharp drop in membership.