Poland’s Communists Fold Their Tent, Take Down Party’s Flag After 41 Years : Politics: The successor organization is likely to be regarded with much suspicion. A new chairman is elected.

The last hurrah for Poland’s Communists was in fact a hush, an unplanned and unrehearsed moment of utter silence that fell over the hall in the small hours of the morning Monday when the flag of the old Polish United Workers Party was taken down and carried out.

After 41 years, it was finished. The United Workers Party, which had presided over an epoch that most Poles clearly regard as a dark age, was gone, replaced by a “social democratic” party that, for the foreseeable future, is likely to be regarded by the public with as much suspicion as the organization whose banner was hauled out.

“When they carried that flag out, I felt as though I were at the funeral of a dear friend,” said Gerard Kulas, 46, a delegate to the party’s final congress and a man who has spent the last 18 years as part of what he calls “the apparatus”--in other words, a full-time party employee. Soon, he may be looking for another job.

The United Workers Party was replaced by the awkwardly named Social Democracy of the Polish Republic, which sounds more like a government than a political party. By the acknowledgment of virtually all its members and its new leadership, the renamed party is a long way from the kind of election victory that might allow it to take up once again the reins of power in Poland.

That distinction is now firmly in the hands of Solidarity, which last June sent the Communists to a crushing defeat in their first real test at the polls in four decades--a test the Communists had accepted only reluctantly. The party was forced to make a more radical change--in fact, to kill itself off--in order to have any chance of survival in the freely competitive political system that has been put in place for future elections. The first round of those elections, for local offices, is scheduled for April.

The death throes of the old party were prolonged over two days of extensive debate and parliamentary maneuvering, but the outcome was never in doubt. The main force of the new party, bent on projecting a new, youthful and modern image, tried strenuously to force a public walkout by veteran party conservatives.

Such a walkout, the new leaders felt, would have advertised to the public that the reconstituted party was, in fact and not just in name, a new party purged of its grim Communist baggage. In the end, however, the hard-liners refused to give the new generation that satisfaction, and some of the most prominent conservatives stayed on, now and then bellowing their objections into switched-off microphones but determined to cling to the ship.

The new party’s chairman, elected Monday by an overwhelming margin, is Alexander Kwasniewski, a 35-year-old party activist who began with the Communist youth organization and rose to head the government sports committee. Leszak Miller, 43, was elected general secretary, the party’s chief administrative office.

The number of votes tallied in Kwasniewski’s election suggested that about 400 delegates, out of 1,580 present at the opening of the congress, had disappeared.

About 100 left along with a Gdansk member of Parliament, Tadeusz Fiszbach, a party reformer who had actually won the endorsement of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa as his choice to head the new party. In this gathering, however, the endorsement amounted to a kiss of death for Fiszbach, who is considering the formation of his own party.

Walesa criticized the old party for “political arrogance” in turning over its property to its successor. “In the conditions of revised political pluralism,” Walesa said, “none of the parties can start from a privileged position.”

There have been widespread public appeals for the government to confiscate the party’s extensive property holdings, and a commission has been appointed to review the issue. A spokesman for the new party said it would abide by the commission’s decision and return any property shown to have been acquired illegally.

The other 300 missing delegates are believed to be made up mostly of members of that older generation of party activists who withdrew quietly after seeing that the new configuration holds no place for them.

“A clear generational break has occurred,” Miller told journalists. “Mostly, we are people who cannot bear any kind of responsibility for the Stalinist period. . . . The difference is obvious.”

The generational break is indeed obvious. The party’s Supreme Council--roughly analogous to the Central Committee of its predecessor--is packed with new faces, most of them under 40. But Kwasniewski acknowledged that the party has a long way to go before it can regain credibility as a left-wing party in Poland.

“The problem of confidence looks difficult for us,” Kwasniewski said. “After 40 years of real socialism, the people are allergic to words associated with left-wing values. They frequently have left-wing sentiments in their hearts--a desire for social security, equality of opportunity--but socialism is also associated with plenty of mistakes.”

Kwasniewski said that he and Miller will try to lead the party to rebuild itself from the grass-roots, “proposing local solutions for local problems.” He promised that, unlike the Communists, it will try to organize voters, not its own centralized structures.

“Now for us,” Kwasniewski said, “the most important thing is votes, not members. The better party is one with 100,000 members that can get 1 million votes, rather than a party with 1 million members that can get only 100,000 votes.”

For party officers such as Gerard Kulas, who has been the first secretary of the old party in the northern Polish town of Koscierzyna, the new party means a new world.

“I am not the first secretary any longer,” Kulas said. “If there is money, I will help organize the new party there. If there is not, I will look for a job in a factory enterprise.”

Kulas said he felt no need to apologize for his years in the party.

“If the party made mistakes over the last 20 years, it was not from the rank and file but from the leadership,” he said. “I think the party had some good points. It protected Polish borders. It ended illiteracy. As much as possible, we tried to introduce the Polish element into socialism.

“External conditions (the attitude of the Soviet Union) have changed, but before that, the party had to be the way it was. Under Stalinism, we fared better than the Czechoslovaks, the Hungarians or Romanians. We avoided the full collectivization of agriculture. Our churches were not turned into warehouses.”