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regime's ability to fulfill them creates a potentially destabilizing situation. The people, especially the older generation, are still disappointed by what they regard as Gomulka's betrayal of the promises of 1956, and may adopt an attitude which considers any slackening of Gierek's course as an abandonment of his entire program. Such skepticisms could lead to a self-accelerating shirking of efforts, and endanger the very reforms that all of the people seem to want. In short, Gierek's chances of succeeding are necessarily dependent on maintaining a psychological climate conducive to a high degree of broadly based popular support.
In this respect, Gierek has been at the head of regime spokesmen who had repeatedly pointed out that they mean to remedy the mistakes of the past. They have stressed that it is not so much the lack of material or moral resources in the country but rather the inability of former leaders to exploit them which has been responsible for the stagnation of Poland's social and economic conditions. At the same time, they have emphasized that while the quality of political leadership is all important, it is the work ethic and the energy of the people that ultimately determine the success of that leadership. At the party conference in January 1973, Gierek and other leaders summed up their view by saying that alongside the "creative unrest" and "constructive dissatisfaction" which they welcome, there must also be among the people a "patriotic feeling of responsibility for honest toil."
In viewing the regime's own prospects for stability, its leaders must recognize that the main key is the future performance of the economy, with the attitudes of both labor and management as the most important elements. The regime is placing the most competent people at all levels of economic management regardless of party membership; at the same time it must overcome the strong resistance of the middle and lower echelons of the bureaucracy - not all of which has been, or could be, purged - to the adoption of such new criteria. One of the main threats to regime stability, therefore, continues to be the existence to powerful vested interests in the political and economic bureaucracy who Geel that passive resistance to Gierek's reforms will permit them to outlast even this latest threat to their sinecures.
Most educated Poles ultimately are brought face to face with the fundamental question of whether or not the Gierek regime will be predisposed to expand the political freedom in Poland, and, if so, whether this will enhance or detract from the prospects for stability. The Gierek regime has so far trod very careful in the arena, certainly taking no irreversible steps. Among the main factors that inhibit the regime from taking positive and decisive measures to increase political freedoms is Gierek's inherent caution in assessing the degree of economic and political change in the system that Moscow will tolerate. The fate of the Czechoslovak heresy, which was rooted in the sin of political spontaneity, is an ever-present lesson. More recently, the Soviet criticism of Hungarian economic reforms must also make the Poles wary. Moscow's concern that the gradual Western acceptance of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe will weaken the ideological justification for it may be another reason why any meaningful overhaul of the political system in Poland is unlikely. An ancillary factor inhibiting change in this area is the very success of the Gierek leadership in gaining its present degree of stability. Despite the marked difference in outlook between the new leaders and those of the Gomulka regime, there is probably a strong tendency among them, as in any totalitarian regime, to view internal stability as a mandate to disregard public opinion. Moreover, the Communist system, with its inherent tendency towards inertia, is one to which the present leaders - no less than their predecessors - are wed, i.e., the desire of the party to protect its power is, as it has been in the past, the main inhibitor of political reform.
Finally, there is the issue of the "proper" degree of popular pressure on the regime, and its relation to that kind of stability which would enhance and not inhibit chances for reform. Too little pressure could generate overconfidence in the leadership and produce a regression toward the former inertia. Too much pressure could raise anew the specter of a loss of party control, possibly bringing about a situation in which the use of force - by the Polish regime itself and/or the Soviet Union - could become the only recourse.
On balance, the Gierek leadership probably feels that the second of these possibilities is remote, despite the vestiges of militancy among the working class and the regime's own measured encouragement of "creative unrest." Not only are the Polish masses, after a generation of Communist rule, psychologically handicapped when facing a determined and cohesive leadership (by December 1970 Gomulka's group had possessed neither of these characteristics), but the political realism of a great number of the Polish people also inhibits them from exerting what they would now regard as counterproductive pressure. Whether this political realism and resultant restraint will continue to be an important factor of stability remains to be seen. The new generation that will gradually become dominant during the 1980s could well fall under the
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
