Word: gierek
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With northern ports, factories and transportation at a standstill, sugar and flour shortages were mounting; gasoline was no longer available to the public in Gdansk. Communist Party Leader Edward Gierek, shaken by a purge precipitated by the workers' actions, seemed increasingly in jeopardy. Poland and the watching world were rife with rumors that Gierek's days in power were numbered...
Reeling from the force of the strike and its growing popular support, Gierek suffered a major political blow when a sweeping purge that soon became known as the Sunday Massacre removed six of his 19-man ruling Politburo. The party leaders had gathered at a Central Committee meeting simply to discuss the strike. Instead, Gierek found himself thrown into a bitter confrontation with his party rivals. He clearly emerged the loser. Ousted were some of his closest colleagues, including Premier Edward Babiuch and Jan Szydlak, head of the government's official Central Council of Trade Unions...
...shake-up also marked the return of two rivals whom Gierek had removed from ruling circles in the past two years. One is former Foreign Minister Stefan Olszowski, 49, a man who has often been mentioned as a possible successor to Gierek. A pragmatic but dedicated Communist who has the Kremlin's confidence, he is also a longtime advocate of economic reform. Olszowski is said to have been highly critical of Gierek's economic performance. According to Western intelligence sources, the heavy-set Olszowski also tried in the past to jockey himself into position to take over...
...secretary of the local party in Konin. Grabski had complained bitterly in 1978 of the "chaos and confusion in our economy." That candor, widely circulated in the underground press, provoked his ouster from the Central Committee last year. The reinstatement of Grabski and Olszowski was an implicit condemnation of Gierek's disastrous economic record, marked by a $20 billion foreign debt and severely declining growth in 1979. To compound his humiliation, the Party Leader was forced in a nationally televised speech to praise "those comrades who perceived earlier the growing irregularities and tried to counteract them, and whose voice...
...society where the trade-off for the lack of individual freedom was to have been a steadily improving standard of living, the potential for a political explosion is always present. Explains Teacher Kowalska "The mood in the country is worse than it was ten years ago, when Gierek came to power. There are greater shortages and higher prices. The system seems to hav collapsed. We have made the sacrifice! But for what...