Word: gierek
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...have arrived. Behind what used to he known as the Iron Curtain, names like Cronkite, Ziegler and Archie Bunker have become as familiar to millions of TV viewers as Brezhnev, Gierek and Honecker. Local papers dutifully carrying the party line are losing a newsstand sales race to Stern, Paris Match and other Western periodicals laden with enticing advertisements. East-bloc vacationers swinging through London, Rome and Paris on American Express tours are surprised to find that the greatest evils in the treacherous West are city traffic and the new platform shoes. Why, they demand, can't the Warsaw Pact disband...
...farm 25 miles outside Warsaw, a ruddy-faced peasant pulled the cork from a home-distilled bottle of honey liquor and talked about the impact of Gierek's agriculture reform, in which a return to a free Western-style market has replaced central planning. One result: Polish farm income has risen 37% in the past year. Though 80% of Polish farm lands are still privately owned, the farmer during the Gomulka regime was a virtual serf to the state, which told him exactly what and how much to raise. Now a farmer is free to grow whatever sells best...
Through his reforms, Gierek has done just about all he can to improve Poland's situation. Now he is trying to convince Poles that they must help themselves. Last week 1,700 trade union representatives gathered in Warsaw for their first congress in five years; Gierek told them that increased productivity was the only way to continue the upward trend in wages and social benefits. Because of badly organized industries, antiquated equipment and a lack of incentives, Polish workers produce only about one-third as much as their American counterparts. "The state cannot give anything to anyone," Gierek declared...
...relations seem to be getting better. Last summer the Vatican appointed six longtime Polish administrators as the regular bishops of dioceses in former German territories, thus recognizing the Oder-Neisse line that West Germany had acknowledged in its 1971 treaty with Poland. On the home front, Party Chief Edward Gierek has accommodated the hierarchy by abolishing a law requiring bishops to keep inventories of all church assets, and by returning churches and convents in the former German territories to church ownership...
Most Communist nations in Eastern Europe treat their former citizens who have emigrated to the West like lost souls at best and traitors at worst. A notable exception is Poland. The 19-month-old regime of Edward Gierek has actively encouraged friendly ties between "Polonia," as the Polish Diaspora is known, and the Polish People's Republic. That campaign is being intensified this summer as Poland faces a special tourist boom: emigres and their descendants returning to the old country as visitors...