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Barry Kalb, TIME'S Eastern Europe correspondent since December 1978, has been to Poland six times, visiting nearly every region and major city of the country. As long ago as last winter, he reported that the troubled Polish economy was deteriorating sharply, bringing strangling inflation and a plummeting standard of living. "Despite the painfully obvious problems, the Communist Party seemed to be doing nothing of substance to improve the situation," he recalls. "Intellectuals and dissidents were warning that the people's patience was about at an end." Last week Kalb was back in Poland, talking with shipyard workers...
...major frustration for a journalist covering a foreign country for a long period of time, Kalb notes, is that he amasses much more information about the people, politics and institutions than can ever make its way into print. But, he says, "a story like the Polish crisis, which demands an analysis of an entire society, utilizes everything and everyone you know. It is a reporter's dream...
...every shop and factory, red-and-white Polish flags fluttered in the faint breeze off the Baltic Sea, giving Gdansk the festive look of a holiday. But traffic was only a trickle of the normal midday rush. At high noon on a working day, the streets were almost empty of people. The only crowd converged on the Lenin Shipyard, the center of the strike and the focal point of the nationwide crisis. TIME Eastern Europe Correspondent Barry Kalb visited the strike scene...
...become an authentic hero. Wherever he walked across the idle yard, workers would break into spontaneous applause. A few would run up for his autograph. Each evening when he climbed the flower-covered main gate to deliver news of the strike, the crowd would cheer and break into the Polish song Sto Lat (May He Live a Hundred Years...
Asked how the Polish economy could afford to lower meat prices as the workers have asked, he made it clear that his own priorities are more political than economic. "We are aware of what we are demanding," he said. "We don't want to drown Poland. We want to rebuild her. I am willing to work for a plate of soup a day, but I must feel that I have the right to say something about the situation...