Poland, everyone knows, is a simmering cauldron with fierce heat underneath -- but which by some miracle of social thermodynamics, has for long refused to reach boiling point. The heat seems to come from two sources. On the one hand the people are hungry. Meat has vanished from the butchers‘ stalls to stray black-markets accessible only to the privileged. Shops are empty. Queues for what is available get longer and longer every day. Only vegetables seem in plentiful supply, but then Poles are hardly ardent vegetarians. On the other hand the Damocles' sword of Warsaw Pact intervention hangs by a very thine thread indeed. The military presence both inside and across the frontiers is massive and menacing.
Solidarity, Lech Walesa's giant union of trade unions, commands a moral force at least thirty times as great as that of Kanni's feeble government. Yet, Walesa and his people know well that to seek to crush or topple that weak government is surely to invite catastrophe from across the frontier.
Of course, Poles have been given to know that the whole West and the Pope besides are solidly behind Solidarity. Yet, when the storm finally breaks out, who but the Poles will be there to bear the burden of the casualties?
Are the people starving? The west likes to think so, and food parcels come in by the tens of thousands from the west. It must give a sinister pleasure to western governments and agencies to be able to help the poor Poles suffering from too much socialism! Solidarity's independent newspaper takes delight in reporting these western gifts in detail, and to point out that the government newspapers report only the Soviet shipments of meat and food supplies, which incidentally come in by the tens of thousands of tons, despite an anticipated bad harvest this year in Russia. By European standards, the Polish people are underfed. Meat and coffee are in short supply. But bread is plentiful and was so cheap and subsidized that farmers used to feed it to the cattle until the government recently raised the price.
The more important question is - can the economy recover? The debts incurred to date are so enormous that if the Soviet Union takes over the Polish Government they will find this very heavy burden. Shops are now empty. Production is way down below installed capacity.
Economic recovery is not within the power of Kania's or any other government. Only solidarity can make the workers work and produce, since they control at least 60% of the trade unions.
The Soviet Government knows that the occupation of Poland by Warsaw Pact forces will not yield a permanent solution to the Polish problem. Polish hostility to the Russian people is several centuries -- perhaps more than a millennium old.
Poles are slave. So are the Russians. But the western slaws of Poland regard Russian slavs as somewhat inferior, having somewhat freely inter-married with Asiatic Tartars.
Poland was dismembered in 1795, by Tsarist Russia, Prussia and Austria ~ all imperial powers The memory of Poland's being thus wiped out from the map at the end of the lst century does not fade easily from Polish minds.
A decade or so later, Polish nationalism took shape again with the grand—duchy of Warsaw, which sought to regain their independence by playing Napolean and Tsar Alexander against each other. It is the same game today - playing the West against Russia. From 1812 to 1814 Poland was forgotten in the huge wars between France and Russia.- the wars that inspired Tolstoy's famous novel War and Peace.
For a century since 1815 the majority of Poles were subjected to Russian Tsarist rule. This brought unbearable suffering to the Poles - mostly because Poland regarded itself as the Bastion of western civilization and western religion, over against the half-byzantine, half-Asiatic, barbaric, eastern Orthodox Slavs of Russia.
In 1917, as the Bolshevik took over Russia from the Tears, the hatred and the contempt were transferred to the Soviet Union. The new independent Poland was again the defender of Western European civilization against the barbaric eastern Slavs. This led to the Polish - Soviet War of l920, started by the Poles, taking advantage of a Russia which had lost the First world War and was weakened by the civil war. Poles marched up to Kiev, the ancient capital of Russia and were beaten back. The Soviets marched up to Warsaw and were beaten back.
The Peace treaty of 1921 was mainly on paper. The mutual distrust was as deep-seated as ever. For the Soviets, Poland is always a potential ally of the West. For the Poles, neither Russia nor Germany, their two neighbours could be trusted.
By 1934 the specter of rising Nazi Germany gave Poles some second thoughts about the Soviets. Then General Pilsudski of Poland made that fetal mistake -the alliance of Poland in 1934 with Nazi Germany through a ten year pact, so when war finally broke out, Stalin‘: Russia annexed the "eastern lands" of Poland, which had been part of Russia till 1917, inhabited mainly by non-Poles (Ukrainians, white Russians and Lithuanians)