The Nay Sayers

Like any other Communist-dominated parliament, Warsaw's glass-domed Sejm is a house of political zombis. Last week, meeting for the first time since the general election, the Sejm was still Communist-dominated, but this time it was Wladyslaw Gomulka's Polish Communists, and not Moscow's stooges, who were in command. The difference was startling.

For the 3,000 people who got passes for the public galleries, the first sign of dying zombiism was the seating of the 457 Deputies. In previous parliaments the few non-Communist Deputies had been isolated and surrounded by Communists. This time each Deputy filing into the semicircular chamber took his place on the green seats with others of his party: 237 Communists on the left, 118 Peasant Party members in the center, then 39 Democratic Party members, and on the right twelve Catholic and 51 unaffiliated Deputies. U.S. television crews swarmed over the floor. The first sign of change came in the voting for the 15 members of the State Council (which functions as a national presidency and has been, in the past, the real government of Poland). The Sejm buzzed with excitement the first time two hands were raised in abstention. After this first tentative show of independence, few State Council candidates got unanimous support. One Catholic writer collected seven abstentions and a former active Stalinist got two outright nays. The worst treatment was given former Stalin Prizewinner Leon Kruczkowski, who hit four nays and seven abstentions. But the most excitement was caused by a single vote raised against the re-election of Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz. Said the man who cast the vote: "I just don't like him." Nothing like it had happened in Poland in a long time.

Poles do not compare the new Sejm to a Western parliament, for there is no organized parliamentary opposition. The most they hope for--and it is a hope which already gives a certain pride to the faces of the Sejm Deputies--is that it will become a place in which some men may raise their voices.

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