Brzezinski Finds Fear of U.S.S.R. Supports Polish Communist Regime

"Fear of the external danger of Soviet Russia is all that supports Gomulka's government," Zbigniew Brzezinski, assistant professor of Government, charged last night in an informal discussion in the Kirkland House Junior Common Room.

He was summing up his impressions of the two months he spent travelling in his native Poland this summer.

At the same meeting, Richard N. Frye, associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies, spoke of the growing confidence the Russians have in the material production of their state, which he found on his trip to Russian Central Asia. He contrasted this with their growing uncertainty in discussing political and religious matters. "I met no atheists," he said, "only agnostics."

Brzezinski felt that "Poland can no longer be called a totalitarian state." It no longer has the single, monolithic Communist party, he stated, for at the top it is split into factions, and the lower echelons are in dedacy. Since October the power of the police has been neutralized, he noted, and there is now much greater freedom of speech.

Brzezinski compared Gomulka's government to a traditional dictatorship, with arbitrary limitation, but not elimination of personal freedom. This dictatorship is held up by popular fear of Russian intervention.

The situation is basically unstable, Brzezinski stated, for as the external threat fades, Gomulka will lose his internal support. This, he believes, would lead either to the substitution of a pseudo-Stalinist regime, causing an uprising by the Polish people, or the fall of Gomulka's government and its replacement by a more democratic government, which in turn would lead to Russian intervention.

He said that Gomulka is now trying to rebuild the Polish Communist Party into an effective internal support.