APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
beginning to be more attuned to the present Soviet leadership than Gomulka's group ever was, and thus appeared to be in a better position to put relations with the USSR on a more equal footing. While Gomulka has good rapport with Khrushchev, Gierek - although he reportedly speaks Russian poorly - probably finds it easier to reach an understanding with Brezhnev. Both Gierek and Brezhnev belong to the first post-revolutionary Communist generation, and both tend to view the world as practical administrators rather than doctrinaire ideologists.
The good relations which the Gierek regime maintained with other Eastern European nations, including Yugoslavia but excluding Albania, in early 1973 has a somewhat more rocky beginning, and were conditioned by Gomulka's sometimes intricate maneuvering in Eastern Europe in the pursuit of what he saw as the Polish national interest. Gomulka's overriding concern for Communist unity was one major reason for his early alarm at the installation of the liberal regime of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in January 1968. Although internal and important external reasons soon became the main determinants of Gomulka's support for the August 1968 invasion, this support was suffused with some reluctance to accept the full implications of the Warsaw Pact action. Thus, while Gomulka stressed the justification of the invasion as an act of safeguarding the socialist community, his defense of the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of "limited sovereignty" of socialist states was lukewarm.
The fate of Czechoslovakia's "deviation" in 1968 probably vindicated in Gomulka's mind his own longstanding views of Eastern European-Soviet relations. These views were based on the belief that the growing diversity of Eastern European national interests and the established principle of internal party autonomy should not be allowed to lead to needless irritation of Moscow, preclude Soviet leadership of the international Communist movement, and negate the USSR's role as the ultimate guarantor of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Even before the Czechoslovak issue arose, Poland had shown pique at Romania's apparent disregard of Soviet and Eastern European interests in its independent moves toward the West, which led in January 1967 to the establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany. The Romanian move was made virtually without preconditions, and set in train a series of East German-Polish-Soviet countermoves centering on the conclusion of a series of new and renewed bilateral treaties of friendship and mutual alliance among the remaining Warsaw Pact members. These treaties were designed primarily to insure that potential, piecemeal, bilateral rapprochements between West Germany and individual Eastern European countries would not undercut the vital interests of any of them or of the area as a whole.
The "lesson" of Czechoslovakia came at what must have seemed to Gomulka to be a propitious time for reasons of foreign policy as well as for domestic reasons. The hoped-for tightening of the anti-German alliance by means of the treaties signed in 1967 had not materialized. The net result was an unprecedented Polish commitment to the inflexible demands of East Germany, with the prospect that this virtual identification of Polish with East German interests would lead to their joint isolation in Eastern Europe. It is significant, therefore, that the invasion of Czechoslovakia, a move supported for many of the same reasons not strongly by Poland and East Germany, should have ultimately resulted in a deterioration of relations between the two regimes. The long-term causes were disparate, but centered on apparent East German overconfidence in the strength of Poland's political commitment, and on the chronic unwillingness of East Germany to cooperate meaningfully with Poland in the economic area. In addition, serious frictions apparently arose over Pankow's self-arrogated right to seek a dialog with West Germany while denying the same right to its Eastern European allies.
By contrast, Poland's efforts to shore up the image of Eastern European solidarity in the post-invasion period by improving relations with its other allies bore better fruit. Relations with Hungary party leader Kadar, whose support of the invasion was most reluctant, were fully repaired. Despite short-lived polemics with Yugoslavia and Romania, the only countries in the area who openly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia, relations with both were restored to an even keel by mid-1969. Finally, the success of Polish efforts to cement relations with the more orthodox Czechoslovak regime of Gustav Husak, whom Gomulka had endorsed before Moscow had fully done so, was symbolized by the series of political and economic exchanges at the highest level which took place in the late spring and summer of 1969.
Most of Poland's Eastern European allies were gravely concerned over the turbulent December 1970 events that threatened to shatter the fragile stability that was established in the area following the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, noting the main lesson of the Polish upheaval, i.e., that prolonged indifference to public opinion can be fatal even to a dictatorship, they feared the potentially unsettling
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
