Baiting the Soviet Bear

By Thomas A. Sancton

Solidarity calls for more union freedom around the bloc

It began innocuously enough with three days of mind-numbing procedural debates and dreary readings of committee reports, all about as interesting as the minutes of the last PTA meeting. But on its fourth day, the national congress of the in dependent Solidarity union federation suddenly erupted into a full-fledged political convention, complete with floor fights, rousing speeches and foot-stomping ovations. Before the 892 delegates had finished their work late last week, they fired off a volley of provocative resolutions that struck at the very heart of Communist authority-- both at home and abroad. That action stirred TASS, the Soviet Union's news agency, to charge that Solidarity was engaged in "an anti-socialist and anti-Soviet orgy" and was preparing for a seizure of power.

First came a demand that the Polish parliament call a national referendum on the crucial issue of worker self-management. Under pressure from the union, the government had already put its own limited proposal on the issue before parliament. But Solidarity was now insisting on a far more sweeping plan that would give local workers' councils at most industrial enterprises broad decision-making powers, including the right to choose their own plant managers. Should the legislators fail to call a referendum and instead enact the government bill, the union threatened to boycott the law and "carry out the reforms in our own way."

There followed an even more audacious resolution calling on labor activists throughout the Soviet bloc to fight for their own unions, just as the workers in Poland did when they formed Solidarity after a nationwide strike wave in August 1980. The statement pledged Solidarity's support to "those of you who have decided to enter the difficult road of struggle for free and independent unions. We trust that our representatives can meet soon to share experiences." That motion's near unanimous passage sent a roar of applause echoing through the cavernous, flag-draped Olivia Sports Hall that housed the six-day convention in Gdansk.

Finally, the delegates boldly turned political by calling for free elections to parliament and local legislative bodies instead of the present system of party-controlled candidacies. In effect, the vote was a demand for Western-style representative democracy.

There were some limits to the delegates' temerity: they rejected a proposal to delete from union statutes a key phrase recognizing the Communist Party's "leading role" in national affairs. But then such expunging hardly seemed necessary. The convention had already challenged the party's monopoly of economic control and political power. Moreover, the meeting had raised the specter of "counterrevolutionary" contagion in the Soviet bloc, which Moscow and its allies have feared since Poland's labor rebellion first began to acquire cohesion.

The Soviets reacted to the Solidarity resolutions with an outburst of angry invective. The appeal to the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, said TASS, was an "openly provocative and impudent" act engineered by "a whole conglomeration of counterrevolutionaries of every ilk, including agents of imperialist secret services, all who hate socialism and the people's power in Poland."

But the strongest-- and most ominous-- Soviet condemnation of Solidarity's actions was the release by TASS of a letter said to have been approved by over 70,000 Soviet workers and addressed to their Polish brethren. The letter charged that Solidarity had discarded "all camouflage" and was calling "directly for a counterrevolution." The resolution urging workers to form their own unions was said to contain "nothing but malice toward socialism. Such provocations have always aroused anger and protest in the Soviet people. No other sentiments can be expected by those who raise their hands against a country and a heroic people to whom Poland and the leaders of Solidarity themselves owe their existence."

The Kremlin's tough talk was backed up by an impressive display of military might last week as some 100,000 troops staged war games in the western Soviet Union. Despite the scope of the exercises, U.S. experts did not believe that the operation, code-named West 81, presaged any imminent intervention in Poland.

In the face of this massive show of force, Solidarity's advice to the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that they have nothing to lose but their chains seemed to be no more than a bit of rhetorical nose thumbing. There are few signs of labor activism in any other Warsaw Pact country, nor is Solidarity taking any concrete steps to help launch free unions elsewhere. More than anything, the declaration was a statement of principle. Said Andrzej Gwiazda, Solidarity's second in command: "The resolution was some thing from deep in our hearts." There is little likelihood, either, of any imminent popular agitation for democratic elections in Poland.

But a real and dangerous battle is brewing over the issue of worker self-management, for with it rides the question of who will control the nation's economy. Blaming the country's worsening economic crisis on the blunders of central government planning, Solidarity officials and advisers claim that their self-management plan holds the only hope for national recovery-- and they are determined to carry it out. As Andrzej Celinski, secretary of Solidarity's national coordinating committee, told the convention last week: "It has become clear that we must take the improvement of [the economy] into our own hands." Warsaw's authorities are equally determined to resist the union's far-reaching plan. Explains one worried government official: "This puts Solidarity up against the middle ranks of the party bureaucracy. Control of the economy is all they have left. If they no longer control the personnel who run the economy, they have no power at all. They will not retreat on this issue."

Still, there might be some grounds for compromise between the union and government plans for self-management. Says Central Committee Ideologist Walery Namiotkiewicz: "A flexible attitude is needed here. There are some enterprises [such as industries related to national security and defense] that can only be managed by the state because of what they produce. But for the vast majority the range of self-government is very large."

Even as the self-management resolution was being passed, workers at the huge Katowice steelworks in the south voted that the state-appointed plant manager should be sacked and "carted off in a wheelbarrow" for suppressing publication of the local Solidarity newsletter. The government contemptuously refused to comply, and it was unclear what actions the workers might take to enforce the vote.

Just before Solidarity's meeting, Union Chairman Lech Walesa said in an interview with the Cracow party daily that he was fed up with radicals trying to politicize the organization. Said he: "The truth is that when the tanks move in I will meet them first. They [the radicals] will escape, but I will not. What are they up to?" At the conference, Walesa took no part in the debates over the controversial resolutions. Sitting quietly in his front-row seat, chain-smoking cigarettes, the former electrician said it was "my turn to listen." But he finally spoke up to oppose a move to dismantle the centralized union power structure that he heads.

Standing at the wooden lectern, beneath the emblem of a silver Polish eagle and a crucifix, Walesa told the delegates: "I am in the union to win battles and not to lose them. But if we do not have a strong leadership, we shall be losing battles." He added: "This will be my dictatorship for the coming two years. When we have nothing, and are headed for a clash quite soon, we have to be hasty and somewhat dictatorial." Criticizing the delegates for their internal bickering, he said that some of them were acting "like a bunch of clowns."

Later the convention gave Walesa its endorsement, but whether he can run his "dictatorship" and keep the radicals in check, let alone carry out his strategy of undercutting them before Solidarity's next meeting later this month, remains to be seen. Emboldened by the passage of last week's resolutions, the advocates of confrontation may ultimately seize control of the fledgling labor movement, especially if the country's economic debacle drives frustrated Poles to the boiling point. Said one government official in Warsaw: "The hard-liners in Solidarity play into the hands of the hard-liners in the party and vice versa. I am very worried that they will get the confrontation they seem to want."--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Richard Hornik/Warsaw

With reporting by Richard Hornik/Warsaw

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