Given his still-weak position, Gierek sought to build a broad coalition of support for his policies among the public. Worried about his internal party rivals and having made pledges to disaffected workers that his economic policies would emphasize the supply of badly needed consumer goods, Gierek embarked on a spending spree. Lacking domestic resources, however, he resorted to borrowing from the West to finance growing import bills. Although these policies were aimed at securing workers’ backing for the first secretary, they inadvertently intensified rifts within the party. In particular, the shift away from dependence on the Soviet Union galvanized the conservative faction, for whom reliance on capitalist credit was anathema.43
As tensions within the party mounted, Gierek’s strategy of building his support coalition among industrial workers was proving unsuccessful. After a few years of calm, in 1976 labor protests erupted again. Discussions within the PZPR about an appropriate response to the unrest further exacerbated divisions within the party leadership. The conservative faction called for deploying more repressive measures against the striking workers and their increasingly assertive allies within the intelligentsia. Others within the leadership felt that full-scale repression would be counterproductive at a time when the regime was in the midst of debt-rescheduling negotiations with Western creditors.44 Wanting to maintain a decent public image, this faction was therefore receptive to workers’ demands and willing to extend substantive concessions and, in particular, to increase wage levels and consumer subsidies. Once again, internal party factionalism provided labor with an opportunity to expand its resources.
This liberal faction, however, thought that wage increases were at best a temporary solution and sought new strategies for extricating Poland from the growing economic crisis. To this end, it encouraged various groups within the party to explore possible reforms. In November 1978 a midlevel party group called Experience and Future was created to serve as a forum for examining potential reform strategies. Soon the group began publishing the results of its discussions, including calls for “reduced censorship, economic decentralization, limitation of the party’s role, revitalization of representative organs and a new relationship between the rulers and the ruled.”45 Not surprisingly, these ideas exacerbated conflicts within the party leadership.
The conservatives were not the only PZPR leaders concerned about the group’s proposals. Although the liberal faction was interested in reforms, it was not prepared to endorse these suggestions and withdrew its support for the forum. Nonetheless, responding to the growing support among the party’s rank and file for implementing changes within the party, a number of Politburo members, and in particular Stafan Bratkowski and Stefan Olszowski, continued promoting the group’s activities. More ominously for Gierek, in 1979 Olszowski began encouraging opposition figures to more forcefully criticize the party and helped provincial party leaders mount a letter-writing campaign criticizing Gierek’s leadership.46
By early 1980, party meetings were increasingly raucous affairs. No longer willing to toe the party line, rank-and-file members began voicing open criticism of the leadership. Most criticized were the constant food shortages; the lack of accurate information about domestic economic and political developments; and the absence of any genuine representation of workers’ interests at the enterprise level, where workers viewed both the workers’ councils and trade unions as part of the management structure.47 Dissident leaders quickly seized on the growing discontent among the PZPR rank and file. Some regime opponents began making direct appeals to party members and encouraged them to push for reforms from within the party.
By the summer of 1980, the PZPR was faced with an unprecedented challenge to its authority. As had also happened earlier, tensions within the party set off a vicious cycle. It made policy making more difficult, thus hindering crafting of responses to the economic crisis. The deepening economic crisis, in turn, sparked popular protests that further exacerbated factionalism with the PZPR. Growing factionalism then made it easier for labor to extract concessions from the regime.
Although the debates within the party were new and focused primarily on how to respond to Solidarity, the lines of cleavage reflected the long-standing differences between the conservative and the liberal, or “nationalist,” factions. These divisions permeated all levels of the party apparatus from the Politburo to local offices. The splits immobilized the party, with most factions taking a wait-and-see attitude rather than responding to the growing public anger. The Solidarity period thus further exacerbated internal struggles within the PZPR.
The disunity and factionalism of the PZPR had far-reaching consequences for its effectiveness as a political party. During the Gomułka period, fear of showing party disunity led to strict control over information that was presented to the public and of communication within the party itself. The circle around Gomułka was concerned that open debate and discussion of policy options, instead of providing an opportunity to devise new and better strategies, would expose the thinly suppressed rifts within the party and the government and thus result in the weakening of social control. As Bielasiak notes, “On the one hand, these factions neutralized one another; on the other, hostility among them escalated. Since balancing these various factions tended to lead to no decisions at all on important issues—for fear that any innovation would damage the fragile ‘checks and balances’ system—social and economic problems were ignored and popular dissatisfaction increased.”48 Furthermore, although the power hierarchy was nominally well defined within the party and the government structures, the conflicts among party leadership led to weakened control over regional party centers. Local leaders, cognizant of the center’s weakness, formed alliances to promote their own economic and political objectives and played various central factions off against one another to achieve these local goals.49
As the regional centers increasingly pursued their own policies without informing and often in contradiction of the center’s directives, Gomułka, uncertain of other party bosses’ support, increasingly bypassed institutional structures of the state. Toward the end of the 1960s the PZPR Politburo and the Central Committee for all intents and purposes stopped functioning as policy-making bodies. Most decisions were made by Gomułka and his closest advisors, without consultation with either the state or the party apparatus. The Politburo, nominally the highest policy-making body, was often unaware of directives being sent to the regional centers, while the provinces implemented Gomułka’s instructions selectively.50
The PZPR leadership was aware that the constant factional battles undermined its ability to govern effectively and made it more vulnerable to workers’ demands, and on a number of occasions the party initiated internal structural reforms. The first round of these came after the 1956 workers’ demonstrations, with the party’s abandoning the repressive policies of the Stalinist era and shifting to a strategy of providing positive incentives to encourage and maintain public support. The most ambitious restructuring took place following the December 1970 clashes between the regime and striking workers. Gomułka, along with a number of other high-level party officials, was expelled from the party. Other leaders resigned on their own, taking personal responsibility for the crisis.51 Gierek’s faction, however, believed that the crisis was caused by more than poor judgment on the part of individual leaders and could be traced to the deterioration of effective channels of communication with the public. In their view the party no longer functioned as a political-mobilization organization and was increasingly alienated from society. Over the following two years, an animated discussion continued within the party about how best to establish constant and effective dialogue with social groups.52
As a result of these debates the Central Committee decided to expel from the PZPR those who belonged to the party for reasons other than political conviction. Unlike previously, when the party was primarily interested in expanding membership rolls, now it emphasized member quality rather than quantity. Extensive interviews were conducted with almost 50 percent of the party membership and an was effort made to improve member qualifications through more intensive political training and education. Finally, new internal party information and communication channels were put in place. The goal was to create a more coherent organization with new incentives to promote loyalty to the party and make it less susceptible to factionalism.
Improving the quality of party cadres