Shaking the Foundations of Communism

Karl Marx could hardly have imagined that a socialist empire based on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would one day be shaken to its core by a son of the working class. Yet in 1980 an unemployed Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, rose from the masses to become one of the Communist world's most charismatic figures. When he scaled the gates of Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk last August, Walesa did far more than seize the reins of an angry strike movement. To millions of Polish workers, he became the symbol of their dreams for a better life. In the process, he helped launch a bold experiment to bend the rigid lines of Communism in a new direction--and hurled a defiant challenge at Moscow's control over its East European satellites.

Walesa did not personally launch this revolution like some latter-day Spartacus. The strikes themselves made him a leader, just as the country's catastrophic economic condition had engendered the protest. Standing only 5 ft. 7 in., with a drooping, reddish-brown mustache and an impish twinkle in his eye, Walesa, 37 speaks the simple, sometimes, ungrammatical language of the Polish worker. His education was limited to high school level vocational training; his leadership abilities were honed during years of underground labor organizing--activities that eventually cost him three jobs and landed him in jail on several occasions.

But from his first appearance in the striking shipyard last August, Walesa showed an instinctive ability to inspire crowds and win their trust. Standing atop the shipyard gates, a microphone in one hand, the other raised in a clenched-fist salute, he mesmerized his audiences with a mixture of folksy quips and deadly serious admonitions.

Walesa proved equally adept at hard-nosed political bargaining. After eight days of tense face-to-face negotiations with Polish Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, he won a historic agreement that made Poland the only Communist country to have independent trade unions. It was a daring deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that potentially challenged the Communist party's monopoly of power and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the East bloc.

Fresh from that triumph, Walesa became the leader of Solidarity, the 10 million-member union federation, and led a tough legal battle to get its status recognized by a Warsaw court. As Solidarity moved toward new confrontations with the Warsaw government, 55 Soviet divisions massed on the Polish frontiers, a chilling reminder that Moscow would tolerate only so much innovation and defiance.

Walesa insists that he is simply a "union man" and not a politician. Yet the labor upheaval that toppled Party Boss Edward Gierek also made Solidarity's leader one of Poland's three most powerful people. The other two--new Party Boss Stanislaw Kania and Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, spiritual leader of Poland's 32 million Catholics--now confer with this diminutive union man almost as if he were a high state official. Walesa takes his dizzying rise to eminence in stride. Says he: "I am not concerned with fame in the least. I have a job to do and I do it." So far, he has done it remarkably well.

Shaping the Future of Life

Though they seldom command the daily headlines, scientists by their deeds sometimes possess the potential for the greatest impact upon the world's future. Consider such works as the green revolution, the transistor, antibiotics, computers: in the past few decades, all emerged rapidly and unexpectedly to alter the course of civilization.

No individual scientist symbolized the new maturity of this arcane art more than Herbert Boyer, 44, a curly-topped, rumpled-looking biochemist at the University of California at San Francisco. In the 1960s Boyer was taking part in antiwar protests in the streets of Berkeley. Last year he led a different type of demonstration: the parade of scientists who are taking gene engineering out of the laboratory and into the marketplace, where it promises a host of wonders, from new drugs and foodstuffs to pollution-gobbling bugs.

Boyer first came to public attention in 1973, when he and Stanley Cohen of Stanford University helped point the way to such miracles. They devised a relatively simple method of taking genes--which contain instructions for one or more inherited characteristics--out of one living organism and splicing them into the genes of another. The resulting hybrid usually a variety of the common bacterium E. coli, then makes the substance ordered up by its new gene. So powerful a tool is recombinant DNA, as it is called, that the rapidly proliferating bugs can act like little microbial factories churning out great quantities of material.

Three years later, Boyer joined with a young entrepreneur named Robert Swanson, then 28, to exploit this amazing--and, in some eyes, dangerous--new technology. Only lately has their firm, Genentech Inc., begun to turn a profit. But its prototype bacterial factories have been extremely busy. They have already produced half a dozen different substances, including insulin, human growth hormone and interferon, the antiviral agent being investigated as a cancer cure. Genentech (pronounced jeh-nen-tek) has also paid off handsomely for Boyer (his initial investment: $500). Offered publicly last October, its stock shot up within 20 minutes to $89 a share from an initial price of $35. Even near year's end, after it settled back to around $40, Boyer's own holdings were worth $37 million.

Though Genentech was the most prominent of the new biotechnology firms to go public, it is only one of many contenders in this rapidly expanding business, which got a strong boost last year by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that new life forms are patentable. (The first gene-splicing patent was for Boyer and Cohen's work.) Nor is Boyer, who remains at the University of California, the only academician with commercial ties. In 1980 dozens of scientists signed up with gene-engineering firms.

Some of Boyer's colleagues carp that the Genentech connection has tainted his reputation as a "pure scientist." There has also been talk that it cost Boyer a Nobel Prize--one of the 1980 awards was shared by Stanford's Paul Berg for recombinant DNA research. But Boyer, whose only real ostentation is a new Porsche, has every reason to shrug off the criticism. After all, he argues, the full benefits of genetic engineering--say, the curing of diseases--can never come out of a university setting alone. "Business is more efficient," he says. "It will bring benefits to the public much faster."

Pursuing His Three Strategic Principles

He is living proof that those tough old men in the Kremlin often thrive on adversity. A year ago, Moscow was rife with rumors that he was on the brink of retirement if not death, that a faith healer from the Caucasus was treating him for mysterious, possibly terminal ailments, that his colleagues on the Politburo were bypassing or overruling him on key decisions.

It began with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and ended with the threat of an invasion of Poland. In between came a plague of humiliations: outpourings of international protest over Afghanistan; a partial boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games; reports of brief but ominous incidents of labor unrest in SOviet factories; the second disastrous harvest in a row; new tensions with China; the collapse (at least temporarily) of arms control negotiations with the West; the election of a new American President whose rhetoric is explicitly anti-Soviet; and finally the Polish crisis, which posed the most serious challenge to the Soviet empire since World War II.

Brezhnev came through those difficulties physically more vigorous and politically more powerful than before. On his state visit to India earlier this month, he had to be helped up and down stairs, but otherwise looked alert and vital. In February he is expected to preside over the 26th Communist Party Congress, which will sing his praises as it sets the tone and direction of Soviet policy for the next five years.

In recent years Brezhnev has gained enough authority and prestige to put his portrait and quotations on propaganda posters all across the U.S.S.R. Yet so far he has avoided responsibility for chronic failures of the economy and agriculture. That onus he thrust upon other comrades, particularly his longtime partner Alexei Kosygin, who died in late December, less than two months after his resignation as Premier. Now more than ever, the gerontocratic leadership of the U.S.S.R. is dominated by Brezhnev appointees and proteges, with neither an obvious heir nor a challenger in their midst.

Despite the embarrassments and rebukes that followed the Afghanistan invasion, Brezhnev and his colleagues have hewed unswervingly to a foreign policy based on three principles. First, they seek detente with the West in the form of trade, arms control agreements and cordial political atmosphere--as long as these goals can be achieved without compromising what the Soviets see as their security interests. Second, they are always looking for--and frequently finding--ways to weaken and distract Moscow's main adversaries, the U.S. and China. And third, once they have decided that the Soviet Union's vital interests are threatened, they exert force massively, without compromise or vacillation.

In 1980 all three principles were in evidence--and sometimes in conflict. The 85,000 Soviet troops "invited" into Afghanistan a year ago are hunkered down for a long occupation despite the profound damage that the invasion did to relations with the West and the Third World. In conciliatory meetings with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany last summer and with Senator Charles Percy near year's end, Brezhnev said that he was willing to call a truce in the new cold war and make a fresh start in 1981.

Events in Poland will largely determine if that is possible. The Western Europeans are eager to preserve "Eurodetente" regardless of the tensions between Moscow and Washington; yet they clearly could not maintain a business-as-usual approach in the face of another Soviet invasion, this one chillingly near by. Brezhnev and his Kremlin comrades would love to seduce the Europeans from Washington's orbit, and to maintain Communist rule in Poland merely by the posturings of force. But no one doubts that if necessary they will resort to its use, just as they did in Afghanistan last December and in Czechoslovakia twelve years ago.

Dominating American Thought and Policy

His blindfolded face has become a symbol of both personal and national agony--the continuing ordeal of the 52 American hostages remaining in Iran, and the grinding frustration of a U.S. that has been unable to win their release from almost 14 months in captivity. But to the millions who see his often published picture, he is a man without identity; the unknown hostage. The State Department will not disclose his name, for fear of upsetting his already distraught family.

That too is symbolic: as individual human beings, the hostages have all but vanished from the world's sight. No outsider has seen the main group of hostages since April 6, when a number of AMerican clergymen held Easter services in the seized U.S. embassy. There has been no reliable word on how they are being treated since July, when the Iranians released Richard Queen, who is suffering from multiple sclerosis. Queen reported that for a while after the embassy seizure the hostages were often bullied, and even threatened with execution, by their militant captors, but that early this year the militants eased off and the hostages' main problem was coping with the boredom of sitting in small rooms for endless hours with nothing to do. It is no longer known where they are being held. They were said to have been dispersed from the embassy to 15 cities throughout Iran last spring, and are now, so the Iranians boast, in Tehran hotels. The militants say they have turned over the hostages to the Iranian government, but the government has never confirmed it.

Out of sight, however, in this case is the very reverse of out of mind: never before has a largely anonymous group so dominated American thought--and polity. Jimmy Carter confessed that early in the year he had been obsessed with the hostages' fate, and his first words when the Iran-Iraq war broke out concerned not only the threat to world oil supplies and the menace of expanding Soviet influence in the Middle East, but also the possibility of trading military spare parts for the hostages' release.

All year long, efforts to win that release were frustrated. A U.N. initiative broke down in March, and Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini said the fate of the hostages would be decided by the Iranian parliament. He later insisted on an American "apology" for "crimes" against his nation. A military rescue attempt in April left eight dead in flaming wreckage on the Iranian desert and an impression of U.S. incompetence and impotence in millions of minds abroad--and at home. When at last the Iranian parliament on Nov. 2 voted to set conditions for the release that looked to be a least negotiable, its act only reminded many Americans of the bitter humiliation of the preceding twelve months. Far from helping Carter, the news added force to the Reagan landslide two days later.

Just before Christmas there seemed to be new hope. Negotiations focused on technical financial questions of returning frozen Iranian assets, canceling U.S. claims against Iran and disposition of the late Shah's wealth--if it can be found--that should be solvable. But Iran's highhanded demand that the U.S. deposit $24 billion in Algeria raised anew the question of whether the often irrational and always faction-torn Tehran government can summon the political will to free the captives. After so many disappointments, few Americans will believe that it can until all the hostages are actually on a plane that has cleared Iranian airspace.