APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
FIGURE 9. Party leader Edward Gierek and wife Stanislawa on the way to the polls, 19 March 1972 (U/OU) (picture)
For the Polish voter, the 1972 elections, like others preceding it since 1947, were not a means of expressing his political preference in the Western sense, but merely an opportunity to facilitate in greater or lesser measure the Communist regime's determination to place its chosen personnel in positions of responsibility. The public, insured to viewing the Communist electoral process in this light, thus considers participation in the process as a perfunctory fulfillment of a civic duty and not as a means of making known its opinions on the issues facing the country or electing its leaders accordingly.
D. National policies
1. Introduction (C)
The basic concern of Poland's Communist leaders in the postwar period has been to formulate domestic policies designed to overcome the fundamental weakness of communism in Poland as much as possible, and to formulate foreign policies designed to serve the country's national interests without violating fundamental Soviet desiderata. Poland during the Gomulka era played a major role in forging new principles for Eastern European-Soviet relations in general - principles of relative domestic autonomy balanced by uniformity of foreign policies. This accomplishment, however, was soon outweighed by Gomulka's conservatism which, together with the energy-sapping intra-party factionalism, gradually resulted in Poland's lagging behind other countries in the area with respect to social and economic development. Moreover, as domestic conditions worsened, Gomulka became increasingly less willing to exercise even that degree of leeway that the USSR has granted to its allies.
The cumulative impact of domestic neglect and policy immobility was brought home by the upheaval of December 1970. In its wake the new regime of Edward Gierek was faced with monumental tasks. These tasks, however, did not consist of radically revamping Poland's national policies, but rather of bringing them up to date and of putting the country once again in step with, and in some ways in the forefront of, the gradual reformist trends prevailing elsewhere in the Communist orbit.
In taking over power and asserting control, the Gierek regime necessarily had to dwell on the failures and mistakes of its predecessor. These were numerous and undeniable, but the accomplishments - within the context of their own time - were equally impressive, and in many ways set the state for Gierek's moderate reformist programs after 1970.
Whatever policy failures and setbacks Gomulka may have suffered after his 1956 restoration to power, his greatest accomplishment was to change himself from a nationalistic outcast barely tolerated by Moscow into perhaps its most sincere ally. After 1956 Gomulka gradually won Soviet acceptance of his ideas and policies - at that time considered unorthodox - by coordinating with Moscow his views on issues of primary importance to the USSR. Essentially, these issues concerned foreign policy towards the West and mutual support within the Communist movement in the face of poly centric trends in general and the growth of the Chinese Communist challenge to Moscow's primacy in particular. In order to accomplish this, Gomulka not only had to reassert party control at home, but to convince a hostile Soviet leadership that his concept of "different roads to socialism" posed neither a threat to the Polish-Soviet alliance nor an ideological challenge to the USSR. Unlike the liberal Communist leaders of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Gomulka succeeded in convincing Moscow; that he did so was partly the result of historical circumstances but mainly
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
