Volume 16, Number 12 · July 1, 1971
Poland After the Uprising
By Neal Ascherson
It is always fine weather for the first of May parades in Poland, just as it always pours with rain for the Church's festival of Corpus Christi. The weather man on television, a habitual optimist who always wears sunglasses, said he would eat his umbrella if a drop of rain fell in Poland on the first. None fell. The enormous Warsaw crowd ambled past the new Party leaders for three hours in its spring clothes. Yet this was a new kind of May Day parade. There were no portraits of the Party and state leaders; Edward Gierek and his men had discouraged them. Instead portraits of the distinguished and sometimes controversial dead wobbled past the tribune: Rosa Luxemburg, Kostrzewa, and some of the other prewar Party figures executed by Stalin, Swierczewski, who commanded in Spain, even Kosciuszko.
Feature, 4082 words
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