Tadeusz Mazowiecki

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev asserted Tuesday that Poland cannot solve its problems without the Communist Party, a party spokesman said. Gorbachev, who leads the Soviet Union's Communist Party, spoke for 40 minutes by telephone with Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, head of Poland's Communist Party, party spokesman Jan Bisztyga said.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's vow to let each Communist country chart its own future--his unspoken promise to make the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine a policy of the past--has been put to its toughest test yet by the decision in Poland to appoint a Solidarity leader as prime minister.

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.

Several thousand cheering Poles greeted Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Solidarity activist nominated as Poland's next prime minister, in the trade union's stronghold in Gdansk on Sunday. Amid chants of "Solidarity! Solidarity!" Mazowiecki told a crowd of about 10,000 outside St. Brigida's Church that "we have to get rid of this feeling of hopelessness. This nation, this fantastic nation, can fix things so that we will live a better life."

Historic change and daunting challenges in Poland were bannered in the Western press Saturday but given decidedly less coverage in the East Bloc. A smiling Pope John Paul II called the developments in his homeland "a step forward." "All that has been done is very important," the pontiff, visiting Spain, said of the nomination of his friend, Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as prime minister. "It's not easy." Coverage in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria was restrained.

President Wojciech Jaruzelski on Saturday formally nominated a longtime Solidarity adviser, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as Poland's new prime minister, who will put together the first non-Communist government in Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. The historic step was announced in a four-paragraph statement issued by the Polish news agency and climaxed a swift and incisively orchestrated drive by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa to wrest the government from Communist control.

In a dramatic reversal of 45 years of Communist rule in Poland, President Wojciech Jaruzelski is expected today to offer the post of prime minister to newspaper editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a longtime opposition activist and a key Solidarity adviser. Mazowiecki, 62, known as a soft-spoken conciliator among his Solidarity colleagues, met for two hours with Jaruzelski on Friday and afterward told reporters that he expected a formal offer of the post from the president.

As speculation on the choice for Poland's prime minister shifted like the clouds of cigarette smoke in the gallery behind the floor of the Polish Parliament, a longtime observer of opposition politics saw little hope for the prospects of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the editor of Solidarity's weekly newspaper, who had risen to sudden prominence virtually out of nowhere. "I don't think so," she said. "He's a moralist, not a politician."

President Wojciech Jaruzelski today chose Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to be the new prime minister and lead the East Bloc's first non-communist government, a government source said. "I can expect such an offer. I am ready to accept it," Mazowiecki told reporters after meeting with Jaruzelski this morning.