Word: plenum
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...Jaruzelski, who is thought to side with the moderates, the general also seems to be an indirect target. But Jaruzelski's position appears to be secure: not only does he control the army, he seems to enjoy the full confidence of the Kremlin. On the eve of the plenum, the Soviets publicly invited the general to consultations in Moscow this week. The timing was widely seen as a show of support...
When Polish Communist Party Secretary Stanislaw Kania took the floor last week to open an emergency Central Committee plenum in Warsaw, he faced one of the gravest challenges to confront the leader of a Soviet client state. Three days earlier, the Polish party had received its latest warning from a Soviet Central Committee increasingly disturbed over the course of Poland's "socialist renewal." The near ultimatum to the Poles came in the form of a toughly worded letter that, for the first time, criticized by name both Kania and Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Soviet threat, similar to one sent...
...less remarkable were the specific reforms proposed by Kania and subsequently adopted by the plenum. Among them: a limit of two terms for all party officials, the banning of multiple officeholding by party members and the direct election by local party groups of delegates to the July 14-19 party congress...
...Kania's lip service to the Soviet bloc, the Central Committee's actions seemed to fly in the face of Moscow's injunctions. Only six days before the plenum began, hard-lining Soviet Ideologue Mikhail Suslov had flown to Warsaw to deliver what was presumed to be a stiff warning to hold the line against further democratization. Shortly after that, a sizzling article published by TASS, the official Soviet news agency, charged unnamed Polish party reformists with "revisionism"-one of the gravest epithets in the Communist lexicon and one that was invoked against the reform-minded Czechoslovak...
...measures did not satisfy the representatives of the Torun group who had gone to Warsaw to monitor the Central Committee plenum. Said one of their spokesmen: "We're not concerned with approaching democracy. We're concerned with democracy now." But that expression of impatience was itself an indication of how far Poland had come along the road to democracy. Where else, under Moscow's dominion, could one imagine the spectacle of government representatives sitting down with members of an independent trade union and treating them as equal bargaining partners? What other Communist government would endorse a legislative...