'Rallying the masses'

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Brezhner congratulates Jerus: BUREAUCRATIC leaders always have strange concept of "mobilising the masses". Ruling Stalinist bureaucracies have particularly strange notions - and "masses" who refuse to be "mobilised" have a tendency to wind up under mass arrest or facing physical liquidation.

It was in this tradition that Leonid Brezhnev this week greeted Polish martial law chief General Jaruzelski by praising his "long standing record of commitment to rallying the masses.

So far Jaruzelski has-on official figures. "rallied" over 6.000 into jails and internment camps OVCr it from art ill National Salvation (WRON) imposed the crackdown in December, has also successfully "rallied" crippling national indebtedness to Western bankers, and an economy plagued by inefficiency, incompetence and corruption:

Real As a result, they have prompted the real masses to rally behind the banners of the 10-million strong Solidarnose trade union. whose demands for decent living standards, democratic rights and (increasingly) for workers control of the nationalisa «conomy dachsed a ihe most susiri pbical challenge 1o t: a poionged period anha clements of the Polisi leadership had stempted unsuccesstully to head off the movement or politically incorporate the Solidarnosc leadership into its own apparatus of control, came the decision by Jaruzelski and his fellow political and military leaders to impose the crackdown.

Brezhnev's warm speech to greet Jaruzelski, defending the martial law measures as "timely" and promising further Soviet economic aid is no surprise. It is an open indication of the concern felt by the Kremlin that all forms of political opposition should be stamped out in the Stalinist states.

Tighter

Behind the assured pronouncements that "stabilisation is setting in" • Brezhnev is aware that the Kremlin's chiet spokesman, Leonid Zamyatin was calling

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Wor Thursday tews-