Poland

on the World Today

IN the few years since the Communists became its masters, Poland has been transformed from an agricultural to a predominantly industrial country. Viewed historically, this is probably the most important change that the Red regime has imposed. It has caused an upheaval in Poland’s entire social structure.

Before World War II, some 67 per cent of the Polish people were rural; today that figure has shrunk to 48 per cent. One result is that there is almost 50 per cent more land per rural inhabitant than before the war. Reliable estimates agree that in pre-war years the surplus population employed in Poland’s agriculture was around 6 million. In the past four years, 2 million have migrated to the cities, where most of them have been absorbed by industry. Before the war, industry produced only 30 per cent of the national income; today it contributes 53 per cent.

Agriculture is the source of greatest anguish to the Polish Communist government. Farm development in recent years has been lagging far behind that of industry. The rate of industrialization has been dizzy. Since 1949, Poland’s over-all industrial output has risen by 115 per cent, heavy industry by 135 per cent. But in the same period, farm production increased by only 9 per cent.

The government was constrained to spend large sums abroad to buy a million tons of grain in 1953. Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz said in March that another million tons or so must be purchased from foreign — mainly Russian — source in 1954. Capital expended for this purpose could be far more usefully devoted to the import of industrial equipment, farm machinery, or consumers’ articles.

Poland’s inadequate food production is in large measure clue to the peasants’ resistance against the regime. The top agrarian expert of the Polish Communist Party, Jerzy Tepicht, was candid enough to admit that a majority of Polish peasants are opposed to collective and state farms. He said that in the past three years 150 collectives have been disbanded because unwilling farmers have been dragooned into them or because these enterprises were too small to be efficient. The 8.5 per cent of the land collectivized in Poland is well below the average ratio of collectivization among other states in the Soviet camp. Another 12 per cent of Poland’s arable soil has boon organized into state farms.

The distinction between these two is plain. Peasants engaged on state farms are wage earners paid by the state, just as if they were hired in a nationalized factory. In contrast, the peasant on the collective remains the owner of his soil. If a member wishes to withdraw from a collective, he has the right to his own plot of land or to another of equal value. He must give one year’s notice before quilting the collective. This differs from the system in the Soviet Union, where the peasant on a collective enjovs no ownership of land whatsoever.

The farmers drag their feet

Of Poland’s 3 million peasant families, no more than 200,000 belong to collectives, and a further 300,000 to state farms. The peasants are conservative. Rather than expand their production only to let more flow into their compulsory deliveries to the state, they have tended to let output remain stationary or decline. About five years ago the government tried to accelerate the rate of collectivization. Farmers passively resisted. They slaughtered their hogs and devoured produce. Poland soon slit hered into a severe shortage of meat and fat.

At first the government met this resistance with force. Punitive expeditions were sent into the villages. Cattle were confiscated. Public trials were opened against recalcitrant farmers. In some instances, additional taxation was arbitrarily foisted on them. But these methods boomeranged. They simply stirred greater resistance. Communist party agents appearing on the farms were sometimes chased with pitchforks and scythes.

The government retreats

After a couple of years of these unsuccessful tactics, the Communist authorities confessed it had all been a blunder. A show trial was staged in Gryfice near Stettin with a local Communist party secretary and the chief of the district secret police us the villains. They were accused of excesses against the peasants and were condemned to long prison terms. ‘The government bestowed a maximum of publicity on this prosecution in order to assure the peasantry that the era of terror against them had ended.

The government then began substituting candy for the whip. The authorities promised premiums in money, clothing, and industrial products as rewards for larger food deliveries to the state. They offered land to newlyweds on easy installments. The state granted peasants cheap credits to enable them to buy cattle, improve farm buildings, and enlarge the cultivation of industrially important crops like flax, hemp, and oilseed. The government made available to farmers at reasonable prices such household goods as furniture and pots and pans. Upon delivering his fixed quota of produce to the state, the peasant received a certificate entitling him to buy necessities like artificial fertilizer, nails, bricks, cement, coal, and timber.

But the biggest concession by the stale to the peasant is this: if agricultural production rises in the years ahead, the state promises to abstain from increasing the farmer’s compulsory deliveries. This means that the peasant, who raises more food can sell his surplus on the free market, often at thrice the price he obtains from the state. Instead of being bullied, the peasant is now being coddled. Four and a half years after the Communists grasped power, the overwhelming majority of peasants have upheld the capitalist against the socialist system of farming.

The continuing hold

However, neither the peasantry nor the government’s other formidable adversary — the church — is sufficient ly organized to put up active resistance. Indeed the church hierarchy has capitulated and sworn allegiance to the Communist state. At the same time the power which the church exercises over nine tenths of the Polish people is unbroken. The government’s effort to create a “patriotic” or subservient wing of the church has failed. Lay Catholics, placed in charge of this fellow-traveling branch . of Caholicism, are attempting the impossible by trying to reconcile Catholic dogma, with Marxism.

Churches in Warsaw, Breslau, and Cracow are overflowing with the faithful. Worshipers even stand in the streets because there is no more room inside. On Corpus Christi Day last year more than a million holes walked or rode to Czestochowa, the country’s religious center. When the government removed Cardinal Wyszynski from the primacy in 1953, attendance in the churches grew.

State and church are struggling for the soul of Polish youth. Many have joined the Union of Communist Youth, some from conviction and others to promote their careers. The same young people continue to go to church in obedience to family custom. This ambivalence is making cynics of many of them.

How did it come to pass that the church leaders surrendered? On September 26, 1953, about 23 members of the episcopate from scattered dioceses of Poland were brought to Warsaw under escort. They were informed that the Primate had been stripped of all his church functions. Cardinal Wyszynski, who fought against Communism for thirty wars, had refused to approve the condemnation of Bishop Kaezmarok to twelve years of imprisonment. Members of the Catholic hierarchy were “ requested “ to sign a manifesto calling on the people to cooperate with the Communist government in ihe common interest of church and state. They signed.

This act merely put “paid to a bill presented to the church leaders three and a half years previously. On April 14, 1950, the episcopate and the Polish government signed an agreement regulating their relations. Its most ominous article recognized the Pope as supreme head of the church in matters of faith, morality, and church jurisdiction, “while in other matters the episcopate would be guided by Polish state interests.” The pact neglected to say who decides the nature of “other matters, in which state interests shall dictate the church s attitude. This gave the government a bridle with which it could and did curb the church.

Rebuilding the eities

The Red regime can claim certain accomplishments in some fields. Most tangible of those is housing. Slums arc disappearing in one city after another. In their stead are rising new homes for factory and white-collar workers and their families. Above all, the rebuilding of Warsaw is an attainment of unflagging, devoted labor performed by 75,000 construction workers and 500 architects. At the close of the war Warsaw was nothing more than a name on a map. Bombs, shells, and flames had left just one house out of twenty habitable. Today the capital is far along the road toward becoming a modern city. Admittedly, some of the construction is shoddy. But the government had to order houses erected hurriedly as some 2 million peasants deserted the farms in favor of factories and poured into the cities. The rebuilding of Breslau, Stettin, Danzig, and other cities has been equally impressive.

The second major achievement is in the field of industrialization. The Polish people have paid a steep price for this advance. One fourth of all capital investment has flowed into heavy industry, letting all but a privileged handful of citizens hunger for articles of everyday use which we take for granted. The 48-hour week is normal and overtime is widespread.

Government and party have decided on important changes in tile national economy in the next couple of years. The accent of investment is to be switched from heavy industry to agriculture and light industry. In 1955 such investments are to be 45 per cent larger than in 1953 for fanning and forestry, 38 per cent bigger for consumption industrics, and 25 per cent higher for housing and public services. But capital investment in heavy industry in 1955 is to drop from 46.7 per cent of the 1953 total to 40.4 per cent.

Since 1949, Poland has been creating industries it never knew before. For the first time in their history, the Poles are manufacturing their own tractors, passenger autos, synthetics, machine tools, and equipment for steelworks and coal mines, chemical factories and shipyards. Since 1953 the Poles have been producing even their own jet planes. While demanding harsh sacrifices of the people, this forced expansion, of heavy industry has now supplied the basis for creating light industries. Consumer goods, long absent from the market, are reappearing in the shops in growing volume.

If yon ask a worker or peasant whether he wants the land returned to the feudal proprietors or the great new industries given to private capitalists, he replies unequivocally, “No,” although he is aware of the role of thts secret police, the failure of wages to keep pace with high prices, and the absurd manifestations of a swollen bureaucracy. And even the most implacable foes of the Communist government leap to its support at the mention of West German rearmament or revision of the Oder-Neisse frontier.