Solidarity operating with 'skeleton command'

The last Western news agency message out of Warsaw -- from Reuters on Monday night -- quoted a statement from Solidarity's ''underground national commission, '' which is reportedly functioning from the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk.

The statement claimed that a skeleton command had begun to direct activities in place of the union's interned national and regional leaders.

Official broadcasts did not differ greatly from Solidarity claims of standstills at plants in seven industrial centers, including Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. Reports on Polish radio and television admitted there were stoppages in a number of factories.

Warsaw Radio said that ''professional agitators'' were at work to spread confusion to ''make it more difficult for normal working to get under way.'' It claimed that most mines, steel works, light industrial plants, and food industries were carrying on.

Predictably, the emergency move is lauded by Warsaw's East European allies, including Hungary. It was Hungary's example of liberal but politically prudent and economically successful reforms that moderates in the Polish Communist Party (and in Solidarity) hoped Poland might follow.

But the bloc's hard-liners will be urging that the Polish leadership, now that it is taking a tougher line, must carry the process further and end ''revisionism'' in Poland - just as the post-Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia has done since 1969. Prague is already foreshadowing a party purge.

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