Edward Gierek, communist ruler, 88

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

Monday July 30 10:35 AM ET 
1970s Polish Communist Leader Dies
By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press Writer 

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Edward Gierek, the communist ruler who pushed for
reform during the 1970s but was forced from power over mounting debt and
strikes, has died. He was 88.

Gierek died Sunday morning at a hospital in the southern city of Cieszyn
of a lung infection stemming from his years as a miner, said Andrzej
Szarawarski, head of the Democratic Left Alliance in Katowice.

Gierek, who was born in Porabka, near Katowice, first became active in the
communist movement as a young miner living in France and Belgium.

After more than 20 years abroad, he returned to Poland in 1948 to join the
communist Polish United Workers' Party, becoming party leader in the
mining region of Katowice the following year. In 1956, he joined the
ruling national Politburo.

Gierek became party chief in 1970, promising more openness to the West and
internal reform. He succeeded Wladyslaw Gomulka, who was forced out after
security forces opened fire on Polish workers in the Baltic cities of
Gdansk and Gdynia, killing scores of them.

Awakening hopes for a better standard of living, Gierek launched a program
to modernize outdated Polish industry. He encouraged foreign investment
and took multibillion-dollar credits from the West.

``He put economic development above ideology, and his decade was that of a
great boom in Poland and great hopes at the start,'' Szarawarski said.

But much of the money was squandered in ill-fated projects. Rising prices,
deteriorating living standards and human rights violations sparked
dissatisfaction and strikes in 1976 and in 1980.

Gierek was forced to resign in the fall of 1980 after the anti-communist
protests that gave birth to Solidarity, the old Soviet bloc's first
independent labor federation.

Gierek's borrowing, meanwhile, saddled Poland with huge debts that
amounted to more than $40 billion by the time the communists were toppled
in 1989 and still have not been paid off.

Communist leaders blamed Gierek for Poland's economic woes and revoked his
party membership.

Gierek was briefly jailed after his successor, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski,
declared martial law in 1981.

In 1990, after the fall of communism, Gierek's recollections of the
tumultuous 1970s in ``The Aborted Decade'' topped Polish best-seller
lists.

Gierek, who had been living in the southern mountain resort of Ustron
after his retirement from politics, is survived by his wife, Stanislawa,
and two sons. His funeral was scheduled for Friday in Sosnowiec, near
Katowice. 



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