Gorbachev Expresses High Praise for Polish Leader

WARSAW — In a ringing endorsement of the Polish leadership, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Monday praised Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski as an “outstanding leader” who saved Communist rule in Poland by suppressing the independent Solidarity trade union.

Gorbachev’s comments, in a nationally televised speech to the first Polish Communist Party congress in five years, were the warmest in recent memory for the Warsaw leadership. They made clear the Kremlin’s satisfaction with political trends in Poland.

The Soviet leader described the Solidarity era, without mentioning the 10-million-member union by name, as a “struggle for the very existence of socialism in Poland,” with vital lessons for the rest of Eastern Europe.

Socialist Poland, he declared, owes its preservation largely to the “outstanding” leadership of Jaruzelski and his “energy and political insight, breadth of approach and ability to find solutions to very complex problems and to uphold firmly the interests of his people, the cause of socialism.

“I say this, comrades, not out of politeness but out of conviction,” Gorbachev said.

He noted that it was particularly important that the Polish authorities were able to rely on their “own resources,” an indirect reference to Jaruzelski’s use of the army and police under martial law to suppress Solidarity in 1981.

This was also an implicit reminder that in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union found it necessary to send in its own troops to suppress popular movements for democratic reform. Jaruzelski himself has always justified martial law as the lesser of two evils but has never spelled out the alternative.

In keeping with the Soviet Union’s own ideological interpretation of Solidarity, Gorbachev said it was not a “protest of workers against socialism” but against “distortions of socialism” which the West allegedly exploited in order to foment unrest.

This view ignores deep-seated anti-Russian and anti-Communist attitudes in Polish society and the wide following that Solidarity leaders still enjoy, despite their inability to influence the state.

The goals of the party congress, however, appear to include papering over the remaining tensions in Poland, declaring a formal victory over Solidarity and getting on with the task of rebuilding the Communist Party’s self-confidence after five years of inner turmoil and paralysis.

At the last party congress in July, 1981, three months before Jaruzelski assumed the leadership and five months before martial law was imposed, Moscow severely criticized Polish Communists for failing to confront the challenge that Solidarity posed to their monopoly of power.

Standard Complaints

Turning to foreign policy, Gorbachev repeated standard complaints that the United States alone was responsible for the lack of progress in arms control talks. But he avoided linking his remarks to prospects for a second summit conference and instead appealed to the West to take Moscow’s arms proposals seriously.

Arms talks in Geneva have “not budged even a single millimeter because of the American Administration’s open obstruction,” he said.

“Still worse, Washington is destroying the remaining brakes that still contained the arms race,” Gorbachev said in a reference to statements by President Reagan and White House officials that the United States will stop observing the terms of the unratified second strategic arms limitation treaty sometime later this year unless the Soviet Union modifies its behavior and curbs its military buildup.

‘No Laughing Matter’

“One could respond with humor to these claims by the American Administration to play the role of schoolteacher and give sovereign states marks for their behavior,” Gorbachev observed. “But this is no laughing matter.

“We say to the West: Take seriously our proposal for the elimination of medium-range nuclear weapons, take seriously the proposal for reduction of conventional armaments (in Europe), and the possibility will arise of easing tension substantially on the Continent.”

He added that troop reductions in Europe are a realistic possibility, at least under terms proposed by the Soviet Union. “Our troops in other countries are not on dead anchor. But the anchors should be raised simultaneously, and by all,” he said.

In a brief reference to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April, Gorbachev came closer than in previous statements to apologizing for radioactive contamination that covered most of Europe but affected Poland more seriously than any country outside the Soviet Union itself.

‘This Misfortune of Ours’

“Comrades,” he said, “I want to thank you for solidarity displayed in connection with this misfortune of ours. We know this misfortune did not bypass you--the more so we appreciate your support.”