Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Statesmen often act in a Machiavellian manner, but could a whole people be Machiavellian? Could Poland knowingly vote a Communist government into power, not because it likes or wants Communists but because that way it avoids trouble with the Soviet Union? This was the question some 18 million Polish voters, free from secret-police threats and reprisals for the first time in 19 years, had to answer this week...
Coming to power last October on a wave of popular resentment against the Soviet Union, Party Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka had been forced to promise that the postponed Polish general election would be "free" and held forthwith. Gomulka arranged that the 459 seats in the Sejm (Parliament) would be contested by 723 candidates (chosen from a list of 60,000 names), about half of whom would be members of the Polish Workers (Communist) Party. Although the slate was rigged in such a way that the Communists would obtain a majority, for the first time in a Soviet country the electorate...
...elections were rigged so that the Communists could not fail of a majority, but the danger was that the number of cryptodemocrats hiding beneath the Communist Party label threatened to produce non-Communist combinations in the new Parliament. A non-Communist Polish government now, to judge from Hungary's experience, would be an open invitation for Soviet armed intervention. To avoid this possibility, Gomulka last week ordered the electoral commission to remove from the approved list any candidates who "are weak of character and have shown lack of responsibility." He had another worry: What if thousands of voters boycotted...
Belief & Practice The relations between church and state in Poland are distilled in an anecdote, current on the Continent, about the visit of Queen Mother Elisabeth of the Belgians to Warsaw last year, before the cleavage between Russian and Polish Communism became official. When the Foreign Office protocol officer assigned to the Queen accompanied her to Roman Catholic services on Sunday, she asked him if he was a Catholic. "Believing, Your Majesty, but not practicing," he answered with some embarrassment...
...unlike most other concertmasters in the U.S., Polish-born Richard Burgin gets two or three weeks a year on the podium. Last week he led the Boston Symphony at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, in a concert of Vaughan Williams, Beethoven and Shostakovich, which he delivered with craftsmanship and no melodrama whatever. "I know what I want, I know how to tell them what I want, and they give it to me," he said, adding as an afterthought: "just as they give it to any other conductor, only maybe to me a little quicker...