Word: gierek
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Sept. 5: The Central Committee ousts Edward Gierek as the Communist party's leader, replacing him with little-known functionary Stanislaw Kania...
Each side blames the other for the parlous state of the Polish economy. The party leadership criticizes the union, claiming that strikes and obstruction have cut productivity during the past year. The union blames the government and the party for a decade of mismanagement under Edward Gierek, who was ousted last year after the rise of Solidarity. Poland has a skilled labor force, ample farm land and considerable mineral wealth, but Gierek's grandiose heavy-industry schemes have left the country virtually bankrupt and $27 billion in debt to the West. And Solidarity now goes further: it has zeroed...
Next the delegates held up voting on the Central Committee to discuss a long-awaited report on official corruption. Result: ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek and six former associates, including ex-Premier Edward Babiuch, were summarily expelled from the party. More heads rolled in the Central Committee voting, when candidates on the liberal and conservative extremes were rejected, leaving the centrists in control. Among the prominent officials who went down to defeat were Politburo Hard-liners Mieczyslaw Moczar and Tadeusz Grabski; the latter had led an unsuccessful drive to oust Kania last month and was deemed a strong challenger...
Following the ouster of Party Boss Edward Gierek in September, the Kania regime dismissed hundreds of officials for corruption or incompetence. Many local party units began demanding more internal democracy and "horizontal" relations among themselves, reversing the orthodox Leninist top-to-bottom party structure. Unable to stamp out such trends, Kania has endorsed a series of reforms that, if approved by this week's congress, would make the Polish Communist Party the most liberal in the Soviet bloc. The Sejm, Poland's parliament, is already the most representative and outspoken legislative body among the Warsaw Pact nations...
...purge of the party's middle-level leadership. The eleven-man Politburo emerged from the voting largely intact, losing two full members and two alternates. Far heavier losses were sustained by the Central Committee, which is still dominated by holdovers from the regime of deposed Party Boss Edward Gierek: less than a third of its 146 members were chosen. Some three-fourths of the 1,964 delegates will be attending their first party congress...