Communist Party Poland

The Polish government has begun what promises to be a long struggle to find a fair, affordable means of compensating private owners for property confiscated or nationalized by the Communists. At issue are thousands of properties with a total value estimated as high as $20 billion. They were once in private hands but were taken over by the state beginning in 1946. The post-Communist government has established a new ministry to oversee the "reprivatization" process.

Three years after the former Communists and their rural allies won control of the Polish government in splashy parliamentary elections, their remarkable comeback has quietly penetrated virtually every aspect of political life.

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa warned Poland's Communist Party on Monday to back off from a strategy of "threats and blackmail" in an effort to increase its role in a Solidarity-led government. Walesa spoke out as Solidarity and the Communist Party fired the first exchange in what is likely to become several days of sharp debate over the extent of Communist participation in the new government.

Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former Communist who was elected last week as president of Poland, resigned Saturday from the party of ex-Communists he founded nearly six years ago. Kwasniewski said his resignation from the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland was intended to send a signal to a nation severely divided by his victory over incumbent President Lech Walesa, though critics doubted that it will have any significant healing effect.

The Polish Communist Party announced its choice for a new premier Monday, selecting Mieczyslaw Rakowski, a former newspaper editor known for his mixture of liberal views and his tough stance against the banned Solidarity union. Rakowski, 61, the party's chief of propaganda, was recommended after a daylong meeting of the Central Committee. The choice will get the rubber-stamp approval of the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, today.

Poland's Communist leaders met Saturday to prepare for what will probably be the last congress of their discouraged party, a meeting at which members will vote on a name change and create a new party from the remnants of the old one. The Communists are hoping to regain some credibility and hold on to what power and members they still have by shedding their past. A draft platform rejects long-held Communist slogans and says Stalinism was imposed from abroad.

Centrists in Poland's dying Communist Party were locked in a daylong struggle Sunday to rid themselves of hard-liners in the hope of demonstrating to a skeptical public that their new party is something more than the old one with a paint job. It was proving to be a hard fight because the hard-liners in the old Communist Party, known as the United Workers Party, have nowhere else to go but with their comrades, now looking for new political life as Social Democrats in the Western European mold.

The Polish Communist Party took the first steps toward dissolving itself Saturday and to lay the groundwork for members to become "social democrats" in "a new Polish party of the left." But the old Polish United Workers Party--as the party is formally known--took up nine hours of its congress entangled in a legal debate over how to pass on its property holdings to its successor.

Poland's Solidarity union announced that it will boycott nationwide elections June 19 for local and provincial councils. "The boycott will be an expression of our resistance to the deprivation of our rights," the outlawed Solidarity said in a communique. The vote will be the first held under a new election law that requires at least two candidates for each seat and secret ballots. But the balloting still is structured so that the Communist Party is guaranteed a majority of the seats.

Poland's Communist Party has ruled out any possibility of Solidarity being reborn as a result of talks with the banned trade union later this month, according to a confidential party document. The document, telexed to party chiefs in factories across Poland on Sept. 26 and later given to Western reporters by Solidarity sources, said a rebirth of Solidarity is the main danger facing the party.

The campaign materials of Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former Communist who hopes to be elected Poland's next president on Sunday, never lack for images of his wife, Jolanta. His most recent eight-page newspaper supplement features a giant cover photograph of the couple. Inside, there are pictures of Jolanta on their wedding day, Jolanta campaigning, Jolanta chopping cabbage in the kitchen, Jolanta at home with their daughter, and Jolanta and the family dog in a snow-swept meadow.

President Lech Walesa appointed Poland's new government Monday, the sixth to take office since democratic reforms in 1989 and the first to be headed by a former Communist Party official. The evening ceremony at the presidential palace ended months of wrangling between Walesa and the left-wing coalition that has governed Poland since former Communists and their allies won parliamentary elections in September, 1993.

Jozef Oleksy, a top official in Poland's last Communist government, moved a step closer Wednesday to becoming the country's next prime minister. But President Lech Walesa continued to make life difficult for the former Communist Party boss and his left-wing coalition. The Sejm, the lower house of Parliament, voted to oust the 16-month-old government of Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak and turned to Oleksy to form a new one. The vote had been expected after Pawlak agreed on Feb.

Polish voters issued a stunning rebuke to the country's aggressive economic reformers Sunday, giving two parties with Communist-era roots a majority of seats in the lower house of Parliament, according to preliminary projections early today. In just the second free parliamentary election since the collapse of communism in 1989, the biggest winner was the opposition Democratic Left Alliance, the successors to the former Communist Party.

Polish voters will go to the polls Sunday to elect a new Parliament, one that will replace the Communist-dominated assembly that has complicated political and economic reform here for more than two years. Although it will be the first fully free parliamentary election here since the end of World War II, public opinion surveys suggest that a low voter turnout is expected, largely because of a poor public regard for politicians and political institutions.

The paintings portray a Poland oppressive in its past, uncertain in its present, optimistic of its future. The work of artists Jerzy Wojciech Bielecki and Miroslawa Smerek, a husband-and-wife team from Poland, will be displayed at a convention this weekend of the Polish National Alliance, a 111-year-old nonprofit fraternal and insurance group to help Poles and Polish-Americans.

The Polish government has begun what promises to be a long struggle to find a fair, affordable means of compensating private owners for property confiscated or nationalized by the Communists. At issue are thousands of properties with a total value estimated as high as $20 billion. They were once in private hands but were taken over by the state beginning in 1946. The post-Communist government has established a new ministry to oversee the "reprivatization" process.

It looks like a baby's shoe with wheels attached. It is cranky, noisy, suffers horribly in cold weather and goes from zero to 60 in about half a day. But it does go, and, as Poles say, you have to love it. It is the people's car, the maly (small) Fiat. Or maluch , as it is called--a word that once meant "baby" but now refers almost exclusively to the tiny Italian-designed vehicle, produced under license in Poland since 1973.