The head of the Soviet KGB met with Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki on Saturday and said Poland's first non-Communist leader was "a solid man" who will succeed in solving the nation's problems.
Also Saturday, railroad workers in the city of Lodz ended their strike at the urging of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. The workers urged Mazowiecki to grant their pay demands.Walesa also met with Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole and Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, R-Kansas, and gave them a letter for President Bush, urging more U.S. economic aid to help Poland's struggling economy.
Mazowiecki's meeting with Vladimir Kryuchkov was his highest-level contact with a Soviet official since the Polish leader took office last week in a historic transfer of power from the Communist Party.
"I liked him," Kryuchkov told reporters after he emerged Saturday evening from seeing Mazowiecki at the Office of the Council of Ministers. "A solid man."
According to the KGB chairman, Mazowiecki spoke of his plans for Poland's government while he told Mazowiecki about social reforms in the Soviet Union. The talks were "productive and interesting," he said.
Poland's new prime minister "knows how to deal with things," Kryuchkov concluded. "We wished him great success, and he will be successful."
The irony of Mazowiecki, a longtime Solidarity activist and former political prisoner, receiving at his government office the head of the Soviet intelligence agency is another example of the remarkable changes overtaking Poland and the Communist world.
It also seemed to underscore the high level of Soviet concern as it begins adjusting to the new reality.
Kryuchkov turned up without prior public announcement Saturday and first met with Communist President Wojciech Jaruzelski and acting Interior Minister Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, whom Mazowiecki replaced as prime minister. Kiszczak then accompanied Kryuchkov to the meeting with Mazowiecki.
Poland is the Soviet Union's largest and most strategic East bloc ally, linking it to East Germany, the frontline state facing the NATO states in the West.
The KGB, the Committee for State Security, controls the secret police, intelligence gathering and border defense for the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov has been chairman since last year and has brought an unprecedented openness to the post, undergoing questioning from Soviet legislators and granting several press interviews.
-THE UNITED STATES and other countries must share the blame if Poland's ground-breaking experiment in non-communist rule fails, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa said in an interview with ABC News.
Walesa Friday declined to say how long it would take before the policies of Prime Minister Mazowiecki succeed or fail, but said the West cannot escape responsibility if they falter.
"I will say that if we fail, we can blame the world, even the United States," Walesa said through an interpreter over a satellite link from Gdansk. "That (if) you haven't contributed with cooperation in these conditions of civilization development, you will be to blame for Polish failure."
The interview with ABC's Barbara Walters was taped for broadcast on the network's "20/20" news program.