Word: warsaw
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Moscow's hawk flies to Warsaw with a warning
Just a "friendly visit." That was how the official Polish press described the sudden jaunt to Warsaw last week of a high-level Soviet delegation headed by hawkish Politburo Ideologue Mikhail Suslov. But friendship, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. For hard-lining Polish Politburo Members Stefan Olszowski and Tadeusz Grabski, who were on hand to greet their Soviet comrades at Okecie Airport, the handshakes must have felt fraternal indeed. For Warsaw's Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, who led the delegation, and who has shown a tenacious commitment to reform, Suslov's arrival may have...
...within their own ranks. Last week some 500 delegates from local Communist Party cells throughout Poland converged on a university lecture hall in the northern city of Torun, birthplace of the astronomer Copernicus, for an extraordinary conference on party reform. Speaker after speaker at the eight-hour meeting criticized Warsaw's Communist leadership for tailing to carry out its promised "renewal." Calling for greater democratization within the party, one delegate declared. "We are fighting for an idea. The top people in the party fight only for their jobs...
...independent labor movement. Indeed, the situation seemed increasingly to resemble that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when a party-led reform movement finally brought on a Soviet-led invasion. In the case of Poland, the immediate invasion threat appeared to be receding last week; State Department officials confirmed that most Warsaw Pact units had returned to their barracks after three weeks of intimidating maneuvers in and around Poland. But Moscow was maintaining strong political pressure on Warsaw's leaders to resist further reform...
Those efforts do not seem to have been very successful so far. For the past month, TIME has learned, the Soviets have been urging Warsaw to impose martial law. But the Poles have refused, arguing that such a move would almost certainly provoke a general strike. That, they fear, would in turn force the Soviets to invade. At the same time, Soviet efforts to shore up the hard-lining members of the Polish Politburo Stefan Olszowski and Tadeusz Grabski, also appear to be faltering. According to one well-informed Polish official, the two might soon be purged from the party...