Word: warsaw
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...government blamed the Gdansk upheaval on the Reagan Administration's increasingly strident criticism of martial law. In particular, they attacked the U.S.-sponsored telecast Let Poland Be Poland, which was beamed by satellite to at least 50 countries last week. Complained Warsaw's party daily, Trybuna Ludu: "It is not by accident that the street demonstrations in Gdansk coincided with the so-called Solidarity Day [Jan. 30] proclaimed in the United States...
...have to dress, but we do have to eat," complained a woman waiting in a long line at one downtown Warsaw supermarket. When shoppers there reached the white enamel butcher's counter, they found that the popular zwyczajna sausage had gone up from 40 to 190 zlotys (51? to $2.42 at the official exchange rate) per kg. A small canned ham had jumped from 200 to 600 zlotys ($2.55 to $7.75). A white-haired woman who had been hovering on the edge of the meat line turned away with only a loaf of brown bread in her wire basket...
...Allowing Warsaw and its overbearing Soviet sponsors to avoid the real and symbolic consequences of bankruptcy made it seem that the Administration was not willing to back up with substantive, tough action its tough talk about punishing those responsible for last December's military crackdown. Poland is clearly bankrupt; there is no way it can meet all of the interest payments on its outstanding $28 billion debt to Western nations and banks. With a public declaration of default, hard-liners argue, the credit of all Communist countries would be justifiably jeopardized and the failures of their economic systems exposed...
...Treasury and State Departments, however, officials argue that there is nothing to be gained at the moment by declaring default. The current payments merely continue the process, which was begun last year, of rescheduling Poland's debt obligations. The U.S. action does not relieve Warsaw of the duty to pay the money eventually. The Poles are currently not being allowed to borrow more, nor do they have enough assets that could be seized to cover their debt. Poland is at least attempting to pay off some of its interest obligations to private Western banks, and has met close...
...divorce has long been in the making. The independent-minded Italians have been at odds with the Kremlin ever since they criticized the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The quarrel escalated into open conflict last Dec. 30, when the P.C.I., headed by Enrico Berlinguer, published a resolution denouncing the imposition of martial law in Poland and declaring Soviet-style Communism to be an "exhausted" force. Last week, after the P.C.I.'s Central Committee overwhelmingly approved that resolution, the Soviet party daily Pravda unleashed an attack of almost unprecedented ferocity...