The Comrade & the Cardinal

No democracy could have managed it. Of the 18 million eligible voters in Poland's free general election last week, 94.14% went to the polls, and of that number, 98.5% voted the straight Communist ticket. The result, which surprised even the Communists, was no indication of how the Polish people feel about Communism: it merely showed how much they preferred the Polish brand of Communism to Soviet intervention. Roman Catholic Cardinal Wyszynski, recently freed from a Communist prison, had quietly advocated support of the party ticket, and his word was obviously effective in a land perhaps 95% Roman Catholic. This way Poland got a new Parliament, dominated by Communists, but with Democratic, Peasant and Catholic parties represented, which was far more than the Soviet Union had shown it would stand for in hapless Hungary. Moscow, making the most of it, grudgingly hailed the election as "a big victory over reaction ... a vote for the unbreakable friendship with the Soviet Union."

Small gradations within the overwhelming vote cast for leading Communist candidates showed how the Poles were thinking. In Warsaw's First District, for example, the highest vote (98.63%) was received by Professor Jerzy Bukowski, who had helped students organize a militia during the October crisis, while the lowest vote went to Central Committee Secretary Jerzy Albrecht, a Stalinist. On these terms, Party Secretary Gomulka has a mandate to make a clean sweep of Stalin ism and Stalinists. They had battled him during the campaign with clandestine leaflets, smears, whispers, and every other trick in the agitator's manual. They had pictured a pygmy Gomulka beside a huge Cardinal Wyszynski. Now it was time for a reckoning. But instead of rushing to make the changes demanded by his enthusiastic supporters. Gomulka counseled caution. There was still danger of provoking the Russians. Radio Moscow warned Poland last week: "National Communism is nothing but a crafty form of bourgeois nationalism." The press, free-speaking to the point of recklessness, needed to be more circumspect, he suggested, and he also implied that he was getting Com munist criticism for permitting the teaching of the Roman Catholic religion in the public schools, as a concession to Wyszynski.

Last week Gomulka postponed the Polish Workers' Party Congress, at which he would have had to announce executive and policy changes. Poland was now the country of the Comrade and the Cardinal. The election had reaffirmed the importance of the Cardinal, but the Comrade was still running things.

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