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180 Document No. 28: PUWP CC Report on Leonid Zamyatin’s Visit to Katowice January 16, 1981 Beginning in early 1981, a steady stream of Soviet delegations visited Poland representing different institutions: the CPSU CC, the military and the KGB, among others. Of course, the most important were the visits by high officials, such as Leonid Zamyatin, the head of the CC’s Department of International Information and a member of the so-called Suslov Commission on the Polish crisis. This meeting took place in Katowice, one of the centers of the PUWP hard line and home to Politburo member Andrzej Żabiński. These sessions were a kind of reconnaissance mission for the Kremlin, a chance to discover, for example, who in the PUWP might support stronger measures against Solidarity. Żabiński was seen by Moscow as one possible alternative to Kania. This report below is from the Polish side. See also Document No. 29 for the CPSU Politburo discussion of Zamyatin’s findings. REPORT From the visit to Katowice of a Soviet group with comrade L. M. Zamyatin on January 16, 1981 Program: Meetings at Trybuna Robotnicza, PR&TV, and with the leadership of the Voivodeship Committee chaired by Comrade A. Żabinski. The comrades from Katowice presented the political-economic situation honestly and firmly, putting great stress on the program and ways of overcoming the crisis. The delegation very much liked the way of thinking and concepts for solutions presented by A. Żabinski and other comrades. Comrade Zamyatin emphasized several times, outside of official meetings as well, that he did not understand why the party did not act firmly to isolate the enemy . According to him this is particularly needed in the mass media. Local authorities have to receive not only instructions for such action, but also assistance and constant encouragement from the central authorities. During the course of all meetings Zamyatin spoke directly after the host’s statement, expressing, in various forms, the following views and suggestions: 1. The criticism of mistakes which has taken place in the open public for several months in Poland produces only negative effects, deepens the crisis, and reduces the faith of the working class in the leadership’s ability to take the nation out of the crisis. Criticism without a program is harmful. 2. Solidarity by its mere existence deepens the crisis in Poland. It adds to the mistakes made by some comrades in the late 1970s. A group of intelligen- 181 tsia, also party intelligentsia, is assisting the enemy by supporting its demagogy which aims at destabilizing the situation in Poland. “The impression of improvement in the standard of living has long been created in Poland by giving people money with insufficient backing. This occurrence has been particularly pronounced during recent months.” Those who organized pay rises together with those who received them resort to criticism that the increases are not reflected in the supply of goods. So, everything turns against the authorities once again. This is a method of fighting socialist power in Poland preconceived by the staffs (including foreign ones). 3. In Poland, the enemy does not attack, it rarely even undermines the leading role of the party, but by organizing strikes (warning, hunger, solidarity and general ones), destabilizing the market and ridiculing the authorities it proves that the party is not prepared to govern. 4. You announce reforms and introduce changes in governance; you initiate discussions about it and make a lot of noise in the press, radio and television, but you do not agitate in favor of work or against chaos and strikes. 5. The enemy wants to weaken Poland, reduce its role in the socialist camp, weaken our community, weaken the Warsaw Pact, and reduce the effectiveness of the fight for peace and détente. “They (imperialists) know that they cannot defeat us militarily, they cannot physically violate our borders, because this would meet with decisive resistance. They have therefore chosen another (undeclared) war, a war of ideological sabotage.” Zamyatin repeated twice the statement by [President] Carter that currently they do not need missiles as much as they need new means to carry out a psychological war. (Currently, three radio stations have larger significance than ten missile complexes.) Lately, over 6,000 well-prepared specialists—wise enemies hired by RFE— have been working against us. They want to lead to our dissolution from the inside by taking advantage of Polish ideological weaknesses. Therefore, the fundamental problem lies in the educational and ideological work of the party, which is...

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