APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
and mutual trust. Despite Gierek's evident good will and the willingness of the people to give his regime in its early years the benefit of the doubt, the task is formidable. The population is only slowly emerging from the great social changes attendant upon rapid industrialization and urbanization. Against this backdrop, the postwar struggle for moral authority has produced general disorientation and a tendency to indict the system of Communist rule as a whole. The psychological state of uncertainty and confusion over permissible and impermissible behavior has created widespread moral disintegration.
Under such conditions, the chief cohesive force in society has been Polish nationalism, combined with a desire to rejoin a European family of nations devoid of East-West ideological antagonisms. The impetus toward nationalism is being cautiously exploited by the Gierek regime with the awareness that these efforts must remain ideologically acceptable and within the limits of the Polish-Soviet relationship. The national desire for becoming once again a part of the European family of nations similarly has been useful to the government in obtaining wide popular support for various proposals designed to spur European detente.
Throughout the postwar period, even more so than in past historical eras, most Poles of all ages were chiefly concerned with national survival and the integrity of Poland's postwar frontiers. For this reason, they welcomed the conclusion of the 1970 Polish-West German treaty giving finality—in Polish eyes—to the country's western border. To most Poles, this step marked the essential precondition for their own security as well as for general progress towards European detente. Though increasingly looking to their own future in an all-European context, the people realize there is no present realistic alternatives to continued alignment with the Soviet Union. While most of them continue fundamentally to oppose the Communist regime, they are inclined to support those domestic and foreign policies and initiatives of the Gierek regime that are demonstrably in the national self-interest. Moreover, the country's new leadership, aware of this potential for support, has sought to harness it. Although the Gierek regime is as intent as its predecessor to prevent adverse popular attitudes from crystalizing into political opposition, it has opened the way—within the present institutional forms—for greater popular participation in the decision making process, and has increased the flow of information between the people and those who lead them.
Historically rooted anti-German and anti-Russian sentiments continue to exist among all strata of the population, the former reinforced by the experiences of World War II and the latter by its identification with an alien Communist social order imposed from the East. Although the postwar generation now assuming positions of leadership has been instrumental in the gradual political reconciliation with West Germany and the German nation as a whole, most older adults still feel that the enormity of the wartime Nazi crimes in Poland will prevent social reconciliation between the two nations for at least another generation. In this regard, most Poles, including ranking party members, make little distinction between West and East Germany. Anti-Russian sentiments, mainly conditioned by a history of Russian and Soviet domination and brutality, also contain significant elements of cultural, political, and social disdain and an almost automatic rejection of virtually all material achievements and ideas of Russian origin. Almost equally well-rooted in national history and consciousness, however, is a persistence of good will for the United States, whose constitutional ideas and material well-being have traditionally inspired admiration. Moreover, heavy Polish emigration to the United States, especially at the beginning of this century, has engendered both read or claimed family ties with the United States on the part of most Poles. Despite varying degrees of Communist-inspired isolation, these feelings among the Polish population appear to be unshaken, and have counterbalanced the regime's partial success, especially among the youth, in exploiting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
Despite the longstanding conflict with their German neighbors, the Polish people are traditionally Western-oriented and pride themselves on being the often unappreciated bulwark of Western European culture against encroachment by Eastern despotism. Poland won a reputation as the guardian of Christianity by stopping the westward advance of the Tatars in the 13th century and was responsible, through King Jan Sobieski, for the defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683, both events being popular examples of national heroism and of Poland's contribution to Western civilization. The symbols, heroes, and events which evoke national pride are for the most part connected with periods of struggle for the independence of Poland as well of other nations. Poland's contribution to the American Revolution in the persons of Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746-1817) and Count Kazmierz Pulaski (1748-79) illustrated the historical motto of Poland's expatriate military leaders: "For our freedom and yours." The heroic figure of the Polish knight, as depicted by 19th century Polish painter
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3
