The New York Times, by John Darnton

By John Darnton

''People believe in socialism. The only problem is that some people at the top cannot believe that the people really believe in socialism.'' Adam Wendorf, Communist Party secretary at the Elmor factory in Gdansk.

WARSAW - Just six months ago, Polish workers took the measure of their misery and decided to act. The revolt they started in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk has gathered momentum, broadened and matured. Developing outlines of an ideology, it has turned into a movement and, some would insist, into a revolutionary force.

The question is whether the changes unleashed can be contained within political structures originally imposed by Stalin and still essentially a mirror image of the Soviet system. Will the Kremlin, which has based its security on maintaining such systems as a protective zone against the West, allow the ''Polish experiment'' to continue?

Already, structures have changed. Universities have gained partial autonomy. The press is struggling to escape censorship and there are union-written and edited newspapers. The writers' council and the journalists' association -institutions intended to reinforce party control - are under independent management.

Last week, the party appointed the Minister of Defense, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, as Prime Minister, breaching party doctrine that the military should be subordinate. Now the Politburo is contemplating the biggest reform of all -limiting party officials' terms of office and choosing them in secret elections with an open nominating procedure and more candidates than positions. Such a change could mean that all but a handful of the 140 Central Committee members would lose their jobs.

Such changes do not come easily. The leadership resists at almost every turn, but the Solidarity union is always there, insisting that the Gdansk agreements be honored, in spirit and letter. What Western editorial writers fail to understand when they write that ''Solidarity is going too far'' - by demanding a five-day work week or by agitating for removal of local officials - is that the union is not really a union at all. It is not a hierarchical, cohesive organization concerned with collective bargaining. It is a mass movement, a scarcely believable assembly of Polish nationalists, blacklisted writers, fed-up mechanics, establishment journalists, honest Communists, disgruntled farmers, alienated miners, student activists and angry housewives.

Solidarity has no alternative to waging political battle on behalf of all disaffected groups. Because the movement is amorphous and represents hope for improvement in the status quo, it has managed to unite industrial workers and farmers, who have traditionally been opposed, and workers and intellectuals, who rarely have been in contact. It cuts across all strata and all ages.

Solidarity is fighting for greater budget allocations for hospitals and housing and for a greater voice for workers in government. It is also battling against corrupt accumulation of wealth and party privileges, demanding fairer distribution of Poland's limited resources. ''We can all live on one crust of bread as long as we all get the same amount'' is a favorite rallying cry of Lech Walesa, Solidarity's leader.

Issues igniting strikes and strike threats recently were of a different caliber than before. In Bielsko-Biala, local officials had evicted workers from apartments and used funds for luxury housing. In Jelenia Gora, the issue was an exclusive rest home for Ministry of the Interior officials. In Katowice, it was the Government's assumption that miners should work fewer hours than other industry employees. Solidarity also has insisted that workers getting the lowest pay should get the largest raises. And the union is campaigning against inequities concealed in falsified Government reports. Recently, for example, it was disclosed that three million children were growing up in poverty and that more than two-thirds of old-age pensioners were living ''below the breadline.''

Touching the Revenge Nerve

This role puts Solidarity at odds with the Soviet Union, where special privileges for party members are a given. It adds something resembling a New Class struggle - workers against the party. When Mieczyslaw Jagielski, the Deputy Prime Minister, arrived to negotiate the Gdansk agreement and nervously eyed the strikers standing with locked arms, one shouted, ''Look straight into the eyes of a worker.''

Mr. Walesa, with an unerring instinct for issues that move bluecollar people, plays upon their sense of class revenge. Two weeks ago, surrounded by television cameras, he visited Arlamowo, the exclusive boar-shooting reserve in southeastern Poland, where Edward Gierek, the ousted party leader, had entertained in grand style. Rattling the gates, Mr. Walesa unsuccessfully demanded entry to see ''how the rich people live.'' The incident was not shown on Polish television, but the word spread and last week, the Prime Minister cut the preserve's size by two-thirds.

The party has little to offer to counteract this idealistic fervor. Long ago, it seems to have stopped believing in the righteousness of Marxism-Leninism; ideology is not even preached anymore.

Communist leaders are obsessed by their minority position. (One Central Committee member confided that, in honest elections, an overwhelming victory would go to a party of Christian Democrats.) They are quick to spot anti-Communist conspiracies, even where they do not exist. Workers have taken great pains to try to assure them that their unions are not anti-socialist and accept the realities of political geography. But the leaders seem not to listen.

The Party's Restless Rank and File

To most Poles, socialism is something that came in on the coattails of the Soviet Red Army, but they are not implacably opposed to it. Several generations have grown up accustomed to the personal security and relaxed work rhythm socialism affords. But socialism is not taken seriously as an ideology that conforms to the national spirit. Although some people in the workers' movement advocate moving gradually toward party pluralism, or greater play for private ownership, in essence the movement is for more liberty and democracy under socialism, not for jettisoning the system.

It cannot be denied, though, that the movement is against the party, and the Soviet Union construes the erosion of party authority as counterrevolution, pure and simple. Many union leaders are deeply aware of the danger of Soviet intervention, but they press on, convinced the rewards outweigh the risks.

Besides the demands by Solidarity, farmers and students, party leaders must deal with a groundswell of revolt among their own three million members. The leadership cannot fix a firm date for an extraordinary party congress, expected in the spring, for fear the rank and file will overturn the leadership and search for a Polish Alexander Dubcek. It has retreated into empty denunciations and threats, lashing out at ''anti-socialist'' dissidents, but making no move to arrest them. It also demands the ouster of its own appointed local officials and does oust them.

Being seen to back down from each challenge is less important, some theorize, than taking the position in the first place. The intent is not to show Moscow that the party is in control, but to show it is still pure, at least at the uppermost level. Recently, for example, a Warsaw cabaret featured a blatantly anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist performance, even featuring a little revolving birdcage with a tiny Lenin doll inside. The authorities promptly forbade the cabaret to open; censors condemned the entire show - and then let it play every night. ''The important thing is to make noise about it, '' said a well-connected establishment journalist.

By John Darnton

Back when Poland was a different country - which is to say, eight months before the strikes of last year set off a chain of events that is shaking Poland's foundations and posing the most serious threat to the Soviet Union in decades - an exhibition called ''The Polish People - Self-Portrait'' ran at the National Gallery in Cracow. It drew huge crowds. People came from all over to see it, and they waited in line, a thousand at a time.

What they saw when they got inside were hundreds of paintings and photographs of Poles down through the ages: kings, noblemen, workers, peasants, revolutionaries, soldiers, priests. The next-to-last portrait was an impressionistic painting, clearly of Pope John Paul II, entitled ''Pole of the Year.'' The last ''picture'' at the exhibition didn't bear any title at all - it was simply a mirror.

Though they may have bypassed one or two portraits on display, everyone stopped in front of the mirror. As they peered into it, what reflections did they see? Themselves in the ermine of kings, or wrapped in cloaks concealing daggers as they planned to assassinate the czar, or in a bishop's mantle and miter - or as they were, in peasant garb, workers' coveralls or business suits? Whatever the reflection, the message was unmistakable. ''You are part of a great and varied lineage with one thing in common - you are all Poles.''

Part of the great awakening taking place in Poland now is a process of intense self-examination. The whole country - from rarefied Communist intellectuals clubs to grime-infested factory assembly lines - is one big debating society. Who are we really, Poles are asking, and where do we belong? Are we Communists or non-Communists? Are we with the West or the East? Are we truly masters in our own house, or have we betrayed our heritage and history?

The same sort of self-absorption has marked all of the great Polish insurrections. And because the Polish response to oppression has traditionally followed a cyclical pattern - one generation's resignation followed by another's revolt - the Poles posing the questions and seeking solutions today are, in large part, young people. They are part of a new generation that has come of age under Communism, unmaimed by the psychic burden of World War II and the heroic, but futile, Warsaw uprising of 1944. ''I call it the generation with 10 fingers,'' says Andrzej Wroblewski, a journalist from Polityka, the most respected Communist newspaper in Eastern Europe, in describing the generation that has not been injured by the war.

Other Polish writers have also been struck by the thought that underneath the convulsion of the labor revolt a new group is coming to power in Poland. The past three decades have been without war and partition, for the first time in centuries, and those who have grown up during this era, far from becoming the ''new'' socialist man and woman, have turned into Solidarity activists whose agitation is implicitly against the Polish Communist Party. They want more from life than peace.

Still, it would be misleading to impose the notion of a generation gap on events in Poland today; the remarkable thing about Solidarity - the union launched by Lech Walesa, the 38-year-old obscure laborer who has since become an international figure - is the loyalty it commands from everyone. It is not a case of the young against the old, but of the young leading the old. ''Our children are acting for us, and they could not have become what they are without us,'' says one Polish schoolteacher. ''They are our contribution to Polish history.''

What that history will be will depend largely on developments over the coming months, and in particular on a special Polish Communist Party congress, scheduled to begin on July 14th, and on Solidarity's own first national congress in August. These two forums will attempt to deal with all the contradictory impulses pulling at Polish society. The issues to be debated there - whether the party should turn from the fake democracy of the past to genuine democracy or to a new centralism, whether the union will espouse egalitarianism or lean toward free-market individualism - will mask the larger question: Is Poland moving irrevocably away from the Soviet Union?

This question is best answered by looking closely into the mirror of the Polish character throughout history.

Poles are content about one thing - at last, once again, they are back at center stage. That is, they believe, precisely where they belong. Poles were not born to be history's supernumeraries.

Self-effacement does not rank high on the list of Polish virtues. After all, a country that was obliterated from the map of Europe for a century and a quarter did not come back into being by observing good parlor manners. Something more was required - a lot of fighting, a lot of shouting and no small dose of fanatical patriotism.

During the 1919 Paris peace conference that reassembled Poland, even the Western delegates sympathetic to the Polish cause flung up their hands in exasperation over the interminable quarrels among competing Polish representatives. They were aghast when the supplicants, who a year before had no country to speak of, unfurled maps awarding themselves the lion's share of Central Europe. An apocryphal anecdote sprang up in which an Englishman, a German and a Pole were asked to write monographs on the subject of the elephant. The Englishman wrote about how to hunt an elephant. The German described the elephant's physiology. The Pole began his monograph with the words: ''L'elephant, c'est une question Polonaise. ...'' (''The elephant, it is a Polish question... .'')

Stubbornness, recklessness and emotionalism - these are the strains of the Polish character, together with a penchant for disorganization and a love of God and country that seems anachronistic in the late 20th century. ''The perfect way of death for a Pole,'' says Agnieszka Osiecka, a contemporary poet and songwriter, ''is to die on his horse while fording a river under a hail of enemy bullets.''

It is easy to romanticize the Poles because they are so given to romanticizing themselves. They are masters of the grand, dramatic gesture but have problems with more quotidian commitments. A Pole will willingly lay down his life for his country but finds it exacting to get up at 6 A.M. to go to work on an assembly line, especially under a regime that has little claim on his affections.

Poles tend to disparage their neighbors, the East Germans and the Czechs, for their industriousness and efficiency. Inverse snobs, Poles tell jokes about their own misadventures in planning. What other country, they ask proudly, would produce car radios that don't fit into the dashboards of the cars they are intended for?

That the Polish mind was meant for higher things than fitting bolts on nuts is the implication. Before World War II, a full 10 percent of the population counted itself among the nobility. ''Imagine that,'' said one literary critic, ''one out of every 10 people feeling superior to everyone else. That explains a lot about the national character.''

Stemming from the romanticism is narcissism. So there is a certain satisfaction in Warsaw these days, as the world follows every twist and turn of the Polish crisis, and so much of the nightly newscasts from Polish correspondents abroad consists of what is being written and said about Poland in far away places. The news may be unsettling, but how much worse to be ignored altogether!

All the authorities - the Communist Party, the Roman Catholic Church and the Solidarity trade union - have tried to bring the Polish people to their senses. They issue warnings that events could spin out of control, unhinging the strategic status quo that has prevailed in Europe since the end of World War II, and lead to an East-West conflagration. The assessment is certainly realistic, but one senses at times a certain comfort in the notion that Poland's destiny is tied to a general apocalypse. ''The Polish question,'' said Express Wieczorny, Warsaw's largest-selling newspaper, ''has more than once in history become the ember of conflicts touching people who did not really know where to look for Poland on the map.'' That is more than an observation; it is a threat to East and West alike: Watch out, if Poland goes, everybody does.

It is extraordinary how nations can sometimes be straightforward magnifications of the people who live in them. Occasionally, a small or medium-sized nation comes along that, by dint of a special quirk of national character, geography or circumstance, plays a role in world events out of all proportion to its size and resources. By acting larger, it becomes larger, and it thrusts itself upon history.

Israel is one such country, and Poland is surely another. Both are what might be called new old countries, resurrections of greater states that went before. They manifest a late-blooming and especially potent nationalism, the kind of nationalism in which, as Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who will be making his first visit to Poland this week since he chose to exile himself 30 years ago, remarked, ''passionate attempts are made to relate it to a half-legendary past.''

Others see similarities between Poland and Ireland, two seemingly cursed lands that produce good writers, heavy drinkers and a lot of priests. G.K. Chesterton, the British essayist and critic, lumped both the countries together in the category of those ''certain things in this world that are at once intensely loved and intensely hated.'' Expanding the thought, he noted: ''They are naturally things of strong character and either very good or very bad. They generally give a great deal of trouble to everybody; and a special sort of trouble to those who try to destroy them. But they give most trouble of all to those who try to ignore them.''

But while the Irish have been the Achilles' heel of the United Kingdom, the Poles have been the despair of all Europe. For two centuries now, the ''Polish question'' has been a preoccupation in the search for a stable continent. It has been the central topic of major international conferences from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the Yalta Conference in 1945. Where, precisely, to draw the boundaries around this irrepressible tribe? The Poles are not troublesome as aggressors, but as victims who refuse to lie down.

Victimization is what accounts for the driving force of the Roman Catholic religion in Poland. The church has been the final repository of statehood during partitions and occupations, in the same way that the Polish primates were interred under the medieval kings.

The power of the church increases, naturally enough, during times of repression and the Marian cult grows even stronger. When Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski was held under house arrest in the Stalinist 50's, he was transformed into a national martyr-saint - he was captive as Poland was captive - and so his funeral two weeks ago opened floodgates of mourning that even the Government had to join in. His successor will not speak with the same authority.

There is a strong messianic complex in the Polish mentality. It is most noticeable in the romantic literature, which is closely tied to history. Poland is the Christ among nations, taking the suffering of all the others upon itself. Mary is its queen. and one day, God will come to rescue Poland, and armies from heaven will descend from billowing clouds, as they do in the enormous battlefield canvases of Jan Matejko, Poland's most popular painter.

Almost a century and a half ago, in the early 1840's, Juliusz Slowacki, one of the three great romantic poets of Poland, prophesied that one day God would strike an enormous bell and open the way for a Slavic pope to ascend the throne of St. Peter. It would be, the poet said, a great awakening of the Polish people, but also a time of convulsive change. The Pope's words ''will be so powerful,'' Slowacki wrote, ''that our blood shall flow backwards.''

Today, with the events that began with the August strikes of 1980, many Poles believe that their messianic mission will be to disseminate a new form of Communism, democratic and egalitarian, or to smash the Soviet empire from within.

Poles love to tell foreign visitors that if they are really to understand the country, they must know Polish history. The unstated suggestion is that this is impossible, that the history is too rich and convoluted, with mystical overlays that Poles themselves can only intuit.

There is, in fact, a bewildering succession of kings with tongue-twisting names, plots and alliances running down through the ages. But the common thread is easy to discern: opposition to external conquest and resistance to occupation, whether by Teutons, Turks, Tatars, Muscovites, Prussians or Swedes. Early travelers to the land, who seemed to come mostly in large groups and with cannons, noticed the hardheadedness of the inhabitants who defended it.

That hardheadedness has not disappeared over the millennium, although Poland has risen and fallen. The great kingdom, whose control in the 15th century extended from the gates of Moscow to the Black and Adriatic Seas is now a semisovereign state, squeezed on that same indefensible plain between its two ancient enemies, Germany and Russia.

The partitions of the 18th century were the quintessential Polish nightmare: All of its neighbors were enemies and all of them - Russia, Prussia and Austria - ganged up to devour it. Poland continued to exist only in the language of the poets, the music of Chopin, the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church and the blood of patriots spilled in a string of futile uprisings. It is difficult for an American, whose country was just taking shape as Poland was disappearing, to comprehend the psychic scars. Poland is like an individual who once suffered a prolonged bout of mental illness - a disappearance of personality - and whose greatest fear is that it may return. When a top Communist drew parallels to the 18th century in a televised speech during the early stages of the current crisis, the whole nation shuddered, and the phrase was excised from the printed version the following day.

A year after it regained independence in 1918, Poland astounded the world by scoring an upset victory over the Bolshevik Red Army. Portraits of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the cantankerous, walrus-mustachioed dictator who defeated the Russians, still hang over many Polish mantelpieces. The victory, just as the Red Army was poised to take Warsaw, solidified several key tenets in the Polish mentality. One is that, given the unpredictable swings of history, lost causes are not necessarily lost. Another, which harks back to the 10th century, when Polish kings chose to side with Latin Christianity against Byzantium, is that Poland is a lonely outpost of civilized Europe, the front line of defense against the barbaric hordes to the East. Two decades of latter-day independence were wiped out in September 1939, when Nazi storm troopers marched over the border. The Polish resistance went on until the end of the war, and the heroism had a fanatical aspect; the single most graphic image of the war is that of the Polish cavalry charging Panzer tanks. Here, too, there were lessons for the Poles. One was that the West, admirable as it may be, is not really to be relied upon; England and France joined the war, but their troops did not manage to do battle until Poland had sunk into the horrors of the occupation. Another is that history can return with a vengeance; for what was the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact but another partition of Poland?

For most Poles, World War II seemed to have ended in defeat, although they were on the victorious side. Once again, there was a sense of abandonment by the West, which permitted the country to fall into the clutches of the Communist East. Woodrow Wilson, whose 14 points included an independent Poland, is regarded as a hero, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered a villain. Poles are bitter when they travel to West Berlin or West Germany and walk down reconstructed boulevards past shop windows teeming with luxuries. ''And they tell us we won the war,'' they say.

Though ravaged and exhausted, Poles resisted the imposition of Communism in a civil war. Over the past 36 years, Communism still has not sunk deeply into the national fabric, and the problem confronting Polish governments has been that they can command a grudging acceptance only when the economy is expanding. Before 1980, there were three outbursts of discontent, but all were contained. In general, Poles accepted their lot with a peculiar listlessness, a state of suspended animation that is one characteristic Polish response to repression.

Scholars and historians have long noted a strange phenomenon that cuts through Polish history like a swinging pendulum; when oppressed, the entire nation seems to sink into a coma and then, one day, it awakens and rises up as one. Periods of resignation alternate with periods of rebellion, and these can be plotted like points on a fever chart. The heroic, if sometimes belated, insurrection against impossible odds has been a Polish tradition, from 1795, when the third and final partition of Poland took place, to the Warsaw uprising of 1944. It is like a gene that is passed down through generations, dormant, until it bursts upon the world.

On a bitterly cold day in January, a cluster of farmers came together and marched into the tiny village of Inowroclaw in central Poland. It was a demonstration in support of ''Rural Solidarity,'' the peasants' union that the Government was then refusing to recognize, but has since done so. What was important was not the cause, or the place, or the numbers involved. What was important was the way the protesters carried their scythes - fixed vertically on the wooden shafts, like giant bayonets.

This, as any Pole will tell you, was how Polish peasants armed themselves in 1794 under Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the American Revolutionary War hero who had returned to Poland to lead the doomed insurrection against the Russian and Prussian occupiers.

Poland is like that. The daily lives of its people are strewn with symbols and relics from Milosz's ''half-legendary past'' that can rise up at any instant to stir the nation's collective unconsciousness. In Poland, history has a peculiar way of never dying out, of never becoming history.

Every day, thousands of watches are set by the trumpet that blares at noon from the top of St. Mary's Church in Krakow's old market square. The ceremony is carried over national radio, and the steps of the trumpeter, an off-duty fireman, can be heard as he moves about in the bell tower to sound his instrument from the four points of the compass. Each time he breaks off, abruptly, at the same half-note, because it was precisely on that half-note that a Tatar arrow pierced the throat of a watchman sounding an invasion alarm in the 14th century.

A West German diplomat who visited the site of the Battle of Grunwald, where the Poles turned back the Teutonic Knights, came away astounded. The Government was considering expending vast sums for a panoramic representation of the battle, complete with life-sized, hand-carved wooden soldiers stretching off into the hills. ''O.K., it was an important battle, but for God's sakes, it happened in 1410,'' the diplomat said. ''That's almost 600 years ago! Don't these people ever forget anything?''

No, the Poles do not forget. In Warsaw alone, there are no fewer than 361 memorials to commemorate atrocities committed during World War II by the Germans, who are called, out of deference to the sensibilities of Poland's East German allies, Hitlerowcy (Hitler people). These are not forgotten shrines. Almost every day, Poles bedeck them with flowers. And, on important anniversaries, like All Soul's Day, lighted memorial candles in tiny glasses materialize on the streets, sidewalks and walls of the city, so that walking through Warsaw at dusk is like wending one's way through a vast, eerie, graveless cemetery.

Newcomers are often struck by a feeling of being in a time warp, a sensation that World War II has only just ended. The obsession persists not simply because of the suffering the Poles endured, although that certainly plays a part. It is also very effective propaganda for the Government, which ceaselessly churns out books, films and television shows about the Nazi occupation to remind the citizenry that the threat to Poland's existence last came from the Prussian West, and could again, were it not for the nation's security link to the Soviet Union. When Stalin shifted Poland's frontiers westward, thereby gaining the Polish east for Russia, he thought he was guaranteeing Polish-German tension by providing the basis for perennial border conflicts, and binding Warsaw to Moscow with hoops of steel.

But it has not worked out quite Stalin had hoped. The German threat to regain the ''lost territories'' beyond the Oder-Neisse Rivers lost much of its sting with the 1970 treaty of reconciliation between Bonn and Warsaw, and with Willy Brandt's policy of Ostpolitik (politics of the east) which concentrated on Poland. The historic Polish hatred of Germans has been mitigated somewhat by the passage of time, and even some of the horrors of the Nazi occupation have been expiated through the public recounting of sufferings. West Germany, of course, is more acceptable than East Germany; when all is said and done, it is the only route to the promised land -the West.

But the wellspring of anti-German animosity runs deep and could erupt again should, for instance, East German troops invade Poland. ''The fact remains,'' points out Stefan Bratkowski, a liberal Polish Communist journalist, ''that there are Germans who love to march, and that it is traditional for them to march - strangely enough - eastward.'' The attitude also surfaces in discussions about placing United States nuclear missiles on West German soil. One Polish Government official, presenting long and reasoned arguments during a session with a Western journalist, finally banged the table and shouted: ''Damn it, the Germans can't be trusted. They're no good. Don't you understand that?''

But the important point is that the Government and Party have lost the ''German Card'' they once played so successfully. During the strikes on the Baltic coast last summer, a Government-inspired whisper campaign tried to spread the word that German shipyard workers were inside the Lenin Yard and that it was they who were causing all the trouble. The rumor was so patently ludicrous that it died before it could get off the ground. More recently, attempts have been made to link Polish dissidents with West German ''revanchist'' organizations and to hint that West German banks are extending loans to Poland as a part of an elaborate scheme to regain control of territory Germany once held. But not many Poles take any of this too seriously.

Polish attitudes toward the Soviet Union, on the other hand, have worsened over the years, because here the irritation is constant. Even before the labor upheavals of 1980, the undercurrent of resentment was strong. It surfaced in the officially tolerated underground press, in graffiti splashed on the new Soviet Trade Mission in Warsaw and in ironical, bittersweet jokes.

''Father,'' says a young schoolboy, ''sometimes I hear the Soviets are our brothers, and other times our friends. Which is it?'' ''Brothers,'' comes the reply. ''A man can choose his friends.''

An American journalist stationed in Moscow vividly recalls his first brush with Polish anti-Soviet feelings. It was during a train trip from Moscow to Vienna with a fellow journalist. The two got out at the first stop in Poland and, in Russian, ordered two whiskies. The tab came to about $4. ''Damn, that's a lot,'' one of the journalists said in English. The bartender did a doubletake and asked the men what their nationalities were.

''Americans.'' ''So sorry,'' the bartender apologized. ''That'll be 50 cents.'' Poles regard the Russians as ''Asiatic'' and inferior. They go to great lengths to point out differences in their respective political systems: Under Polish Communism, they say, there has never been the same repression, and a modicum of freedom has often been allowed in Poland, because democratic traditions are so strong. (Poland enacted Europe's first written constitution on May 3, 1791.) You must visit Moscow, they tell foreigners, and then you will appreciate what we have managed to do here. The real Iron Curtain, they insist, lies to the East. Poles are Communists because of geography, they contend, not conviction.

Poles have long had an affinity for idealistic causes -over 1,000 of them participated in the Paris Commune of 1871 - and to be stateless in the 19th century was almost inevitably to be attracted to socialism. But all this was sport for the intellectuals and far over the heads of the God-fearing, land-loving peasantry who made up the bulk of the Polish population. And what the intellectuals were talking about was democratic socialism, a West European socialism, not the totalitarian sort soon to be constructed in the Soviet Union. Before World War II, the prewar Polish Communist Party was minute.

Naturally, much of the resentment against the present situation is a product of the ''special relationship'' itself. Left to their own devices, under a totally free system, Poland might very well have gravitated toward a close relationship with its giant neighbor to the East. But such relationships cannot be forced with compulsory school courses in Russian, empty slogans of friendship, political interference and Soviet troops stationed on Polish soil. And, again, history plays a role -or, rather, the distortion of history. For, while Poles are free to examine German crimes during World War II, they are not free to write or read about Soviet crimes: the secret Nazi-Soviet pact, the massacre of more than 10,000 Polish soldiers by Stalin's agents at Katyn, the fact that the Red Army stood by and allowed the Germans to exterminate the Polish ''home army'' during the Warsaw uprising. These are prohibited subjects, even though they are known to every Pole. Like a wound deprived of air, sores such as these fester. ''Our marriage to the Soviet Union was a forced one to begin with,'' says a Polish chemistry student, ''but it's even worse because it's based on lies.''

The flipside is an unabashed adoration for things Western, American in particular. Luxury hotels pipe out rock 'n' roll, ''Kojak'' plays on television and ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' packs them in at movie theaters. The dollar is the strongest currency on the Polish black market. Strollers in Warsaw's Old Town see students in blue jeans sitting around strumming out strangely accented versions of American folk songs. Poles unreservedly love the United States, where many of them have relatives. An American found his Polish friends rooting for Ronald Reagan during last year's Presidential campaign because he would ''get tough with the Russians.'' And because it was taken as a sign of ineptitude on the part of the military, there was genuine commiseration after the abortive raid to free the hostages in Iran.

''Ah, if only I could go to New York,'' said a taxi driver, who claimed his cousin came back after five years with a new car and never has to work again. The driver was convinced there is not much crime in New York. Why? ''We hear so much about it here, and everyone knows,'' he said, ''that's just lies and propaganda.''

A foreigner living here is sometimes struck by the notion that Poland has been subjected to a new, more insidious kind of partition, a cold-war partition: Its body is in the East, but its mind - and heart - are in the West.

Viewed in the context of the Pole's history and mentality, the events that began in August 1980 clearly involve something more than the birth and growth of an independent labor movement. The speed with which Solidarity has grown, the universal support it commands and the battles it has engaged in and won have astounded even its own strategists. ''We were working toward this for a long time,'' said Miroslaw Chojecki, a seasoned opposition activist, ''and yet I have to say that we were surprised. We never expected it could be so big so fast. Workers today are much more militant than we ever dreamed. They are more militant than we are.''

Not long ago, Adam Michnik, one of Poland's leading dissidents, was talking to a roomful of workers at the Ursus tractor factory during a strike. The subject was police violence against union members at a local council meeting in Bydgoszcz. Michnik assumed a pedagogical stance. More was involved than police brutality, he said, because the entire incident might never have happened if the local council were truly representative. Instantly, a hand shot up in the back and a worker suggested: ''All right, let's dissolve the national parliament and hold free elections, with Communists running like everyone else.'' Michnik's face dropped. Not so fast, he said, we must remember where we are and who our neighbors are. ''We're not on the moon,'' he had to remind the workers.

The fact that the militancy of the workers outstrips that of their leaders, not to mention that of many dissidents who have spent years behind bars, is one of the most striking features of the movement. Where were they all these years, what were they thinking? How did this spirit of rebellion spring up overnight? The answers are not fully satisfying. The workers were there, of course, stooped in that slough of ''moronic apathy ... drunken torpor and parochial mumblings'' that Milosz writes about. They sublimated their energies in material pursuits and in cheating the system. They were profoundly alienated from the forces that governed them and even from their own labor. Young people had nothing to which they could attach their idealism. The gene was in its dormant phase. It was a time of realism.

The situation was turned around by a number of events. One was increasing contact with the West, which aroused in many Poles a memory of their own vestigial freedoms. Another was the deteriorating economy, which made materialism impracticable. A third was the election of Pope John Paul II and his triumphant visit to his homeland in 1979, which added the dimension of spirituality.

These factors help explain events but do not fully account for them. After all, it is not as if all the workers of Poland suddenly took an objective measure of their misery and arrived at a common consensus that things had to be changed. The impulse to revolt was there - lying dormant -all along and needed only to be released. This is why the movement is so militant and seems so unstoppable. The leaders are not really leading it; they are being pushed along. They are not implanting new attitudes, but articulating attitudes already felt. In short, what is going on in Poland can be explained only by saying that a revolution is taking place - one of those moments in history when a majority of a society is seized with the inspiration to overrun the existing order - and that so far the revolution has been bloodless because its backing is so incredibly strong and disciplined.

No one knows what might push Poland over the brink into violence. In recent weeks there have been new signs of restlessness, such as increasing support for a hunger strike by five Solidarity union members demanding the release of political prisoners. If such events were to evolve into a national strike, that could precipitate an invasion by the Soviet Union under the pretext of restoring order. But it is both difficult and dangerous to predict what Moscow might do.

The hidden force has been Polish nationalism, which only now is coming to the fore. The movement has gone through several phases. At first, the purpose was to give a voice to the workers and to right the wrongs inflicted upon them. Then it turned into a mass movement to correct injustices throughout Polish society. Now it is assuming the dimensions of a movement for national liberation.

The overtones of nationalism were strong in the Solidarity movement from the very beginning. In Lech Walesa's first major rally in Warsaw, in a soccer field at the Ursus tractor factory, he was engaging in question-and-answer banter with the crowd when a man suddenly yelled out: ''When are you going to avenge Katyn?'' The man had perceived instantly what it would take Western correspondents six months to figure out: that Solidarity is like one of the 19th century Polish confederations that united disparate elements of society around a single objective -throwing off foreign occupation.

Four months later, there was another rally at Ursus, this time during a strike. The auditorium was crowded and a man stood up to read a poem. ''When your house is on fire,'' it ended, ''it is better to die than to live on your knees.'' Instantly, notebooks appeared. The man had to read the poem again, and yet again, so that each and every line could be copied. Within 24 hours, the poem had spread through the capital like a piece of delicious gossip.

At first, the nationalism was directed against the Communist Party and Government, as surrogates for the Soviets. Mocking T-shirts appeared, proclaiming the wearers to be Element Antysocialistyczny (Anti-Socialist Element). A dissident stood up before a raging crowd in Otwock that wanted to attack a police station. He was able to gain its attention only by saying, ''It is well known that I am an imperialist agent working for the C.I.A. Now, will you listen to me!'' The crowd did, and dispersed as requested, but it returned the next day to burn the police station to the ground.

As the crisis of 1980 deepened and Warsaw Pact troops began circling menacingly around, and then inside the country, the mood shifted -after all, Government, union and church, everyone was in this together - and the nationalism found its proper target. Soviet soldiers were insulted on the streets of Legnitz, the principal military base in the south. Soviet monuments were defaced. Bitter jokes sprang up: A Polish soldier is alone in a field with only one bullet in his rifle when he is rushed by an East German and a Soviet. Whom does he kill first? Answer: The East German. Why? ''Business before pleasure.''

The signs of renewed nationalism are most easily seen, predictably, in the revision -or restoration - of history. Events that were once commemorated - like May 3, the anniversary of the Polish Constitution of 1791 - are once again being semi-officially celebrated with rallies and speeches. Polish patriots who were non-Communists are again public heroes, like Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, whose ashes have been demanded back from England, where he was buried after his airplane crashed while he was on a mission connected with the Katyn massacre. On posters plastered all over Warsaw, the prewar Polish crown resumed its place over the old royal Polish eagle, which the Communists had adopted as a national symbol. A newspaper in Cracow is printing a series called ''Blank Spaces in Polish History.''

It is not a foolish obsession, this re-examination. It is an exhilarating process and, sooner or later, exhuming skeletons in the closet will lead to Katyn.

Poles are not rediscovering their identity - they knew who they were all the time - they are stating it, and this is a profoundly political act. They are confronting their history in order to correct it, and to change it. The thrust is forward-looking. For the first time in decades, Poles have a sense of future. This is especially true among the young, who are breaking free from the bonds of history. Having cast off the apathy that afflicted them and their elders for so long, young Poles are now searching for a higher goal and purpose for their lives. As they do so, they are channeling their energy into the Solidarity movement.

That is why Poles will now tell their foreign friends that they are ready to die for their country, and that if the Soviets intervene, well, let them come. Among the posters on buildings is one that displays a map of Poland, surrounded by scaffolding, under the legend: ''Closed for repairs. Warning: Strangers keep out.''

''When the crisis first began,'' says Krzysztof Toeplitz, a respected columnist, ''I thought it was my responsibility to warn my countrymen: 'Don't go too fast. Don't try for too much.' Danger lies ahead. But now I realize that that is not what they want to hear, not because it is not true, not even because they don't realize it, but because they really do not care. They feel that, after so long, after so much repression of the truth and of their true feelings, what they are doing now, and the freedom they feel now, is worth it all, even if it is eventually crushed.'' Toeplitz muses for a moment on the nature of the Polish character, and pronounces it ''different'' from others.

''You know, every 50 years or so we rise up in a kind of mass suicide,'' he says. ''There's no other word for it. It's a doomed, romantic gesture, and we pay dearly for it. But even though battles are lost and the repression is more severe, it is what allows the Polish spirit to survive. Not survive, to flourish. It is what keeps Poland Poland.''

By John Darnton

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski's sudden installation as the new Communist leader of Poland was seen here as an attempt to stiffen the party's stand toward the Solidarity union. But it was not regarded as a signal that the policy of dialogue would be abandoned altogether.

General Jaruzelski, like Stanislaw Kania, the man he replaced, is regarded as a moderate. That means that he may not necessarily approve of Solidarity but that he believes in the necessity of striving for a political accommodation with the union, not in a military victory.

That much is clear from General Jaruzelski's record. He withdrew his support from Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1970 when the party leader wanted to use troops to quell riots on the Baltic coast, resulting in Mr. Gomulka's downfall. And in 1976, when rioting broke out again, he was reported to have turned down a Politburo request to intervene militarily with the pledge, ''Polish troops will never be used to fire upon Polish workers.''

Kania's Compromises a Factor

At the same time, Mr. Kania was ousted because of a growing consensus in the upper levels of the party that too much compromise had brought the party not peace but ridicule and, because of a public perception of weakness, further trouble.

That much became apparent from the tenor of the debate that preceded Mr. Kania's fall and from the resolution adopted by the committee. It called upon the union to disassociate itself from ''enemies of socialism'' and to halt all strike actions immediately. It called for newspapers to return to Marxist principles, for stricter party control over the news media and for automatic expulsion of party members who deviate from the party line.

The hope appeared to be that General Jaruzelski would not scuttle the policy of ''odnowa,'' or ''renewal,'' but would bolster the party's waning respect with an aura of military discipline and decisiveness, enough to stop what some party leaders feel is an unending retreat before the the increasingly political demands of Solidarity.

It was widely felt that, above all, it was the recent Solidarity convention in Gdansk and the message of support for nascent free trade unions in other Communist countries that caused consternation among party members. ''The feeling was that the line had to be drawn somewhere,'' said one well-connected Polish journalist. ''Party members felt they had already given away so much, they had no place to step back to. And here was Solidarity, always asking for more.''

Ironically, it was the largely new Central Committee, elected in July by secret ballot and new democratic procedures within the party, that pushed for a stance with more backbone. The committee includes a majority of former workers and activists who deeply felt the party's slippage in public life, unlike the insulated party bureaucrats.

Mr. Kania, whose whole political style was to seek compromises both in Politburo votes and in union negotiations, had a further liability - he had become an anathema to the Soviet Union. So vituperative did Moscow's attitude become that it seemed that the Soviet Union regarded the Polish leader as someone guilty of deliberate deceptions instead of as someone caught in an untenable political position. Jaruzelski Remains in Favor

General Jaruzelski, by contrast, somehow managed to retain a degree of acceptance by Moscow and the Soviet Union, even though he and Mr. Kania were clearly like-minded partners. Like all Polish officers, General Jaruzelski was trained in the Soviet Union.

Some observers went so far tonight as to speculate that Mr. Kania sacrificed himself politically so that the reins would be turned over to General Jaruzelski instead of to someone whose views are more hard-line. But it is more likely that the meeting went into a third day because Mr. Kania was fighting for his position and that in the end the Central Committee decided to pick a new leader more for a change in style

The removal of Mr. Kania from his role as a moderator between liberal leftist and conservative rightist members of the Politburo will change the play of forces on the ruling body, probably to the detriment of the less hard-line. Stefan Olszowski, a ranking hardliner whose power has markedly grown in recent months, will occupy an extremely prominent position.

Mr. Olszowski has often been mentioned as a likely candidate for First Secretary. Solidarity leaders probably had him in mind tonight when they privately called the choice of General Jaruzelski ''a compromise.''

By John Darnton

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader, invoked emergency constitutional powers this morning to declare a ''state of war'' and impose what appeared to be a military Government on Poland.

General Jaruzelski, the Prime Minister and Communist Party leader, made the announcement at 6 A.M. (midnight, New York time) in an emotional, 23-minute speech over the Warsaw radio.

Speaking just after troops had taken up positions and sealed off sections of the capital, he said the Government would be under the direction of an Army Council of National Salvation. Army to Run Ministries

''We have to protect law and order, that's the only way to get out of the crisis,'' he declared. He said army commissars would be appointed to take over Government ministries.

(Tass, the Soviet press agency, said in a dispatch from Warsaw that General Jaruzelski ''announced the introduction of martial law in the country and the setting up of a Military Council of National Salvation.'' Page 13.)

His speech followed a night in which Solidarity activists were apparently rounded up and detained all across the country. The union's national leadership under Lech Walesa had been meeting in the northern port city of Gdansk. With all communications between Warsaw and the rest of the country cut off, there was no word on what had happened to them. Riot Police Surround Office

The union's Warsaw office was surrounded by riot policemen shortly after midnight and journalists later saw occupants being escorted to police vans.

(United States officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, said there were no indications of large-scale Soviet military moves around Poland.

(Mark Weinberg, a White House spokesman, said President Reagan was aware of the events in Poland and was being kept informed. A State Department spokesman said the department had established a special task force to monitor the situation.)

General Jaruzelski said in his speech that ''extremists'' from Solidarity had been taken into custody. He gave no further details. Hours before the speech, there were reports of unusual movements of military and police units around the country. There were also reports that at least one union leader, Krszytof Sliwinski, head of Solidarity's foreign section, had been arrested at his home in Warsaw.

In an attempt to balance off the move against the union and avert what is bound to be a strong reaction, he also announced that the authorities were detaining some ''people who are personally responsible for leading the country into crisis''

He specifically mentioned Edward Gierek, the party leader ousted in September 1980; Piotr Jaruszewicz, his longtime Prime Minister; Zladislaw Grudzien, a former party leader from Katowice, and Jerzy Lukasziewicz, a former Politburo member in charge of party propaganda. A New Role for Army

Never before has the army occupied such a role in the life of a Communist country in Eastern Europe. General Jaruzelski justified the change today to the Polish people by arguing that the situation had become too dangerous to be allowed to deteriorate any further.

''Our country is on the verge of an abyss,'' he said. ''Our economy is a tragedy. The state structures no longer function. Everyone is on strike. They call for a confrontation with the Reds.''

He said the Government had been ''patient'' and had offered to bring the unionists into a ''front of national agreement.'' But at its current meeting in Gdansk and at a meeting last week in Radom, in which militant statements were aired, the union had ''shown its real face,'' he asserted. 'We Had to Do Something'

The course of events had to change in Poland, the General said, or else it would lead to chaos and civil war. ''We couldn't allow democracy to cause tragedy,'' he said. ''We had to do something before they dragged our country into civil war. We are thinking about the future of our country.''

Promising a new and more authoritarian rule, the general said that the military council, the duties of which otherwise remained undefined, would fight against hoodlums and law-breakers.

Appealing to patriotism, he added ''Polish soldiers always served the country well. He was always on the front lines. Our soldiers have clean hands.''

The dramatic moves Saturday night and this morning culminated what some Western diplomats had called a coup in slow motion. The army's power, as the institution of last resort, had been growing since General Jaruzelski was appointed Prime Minister. 'A Temporary Measure'

Army rule, he promised, would be ''a temporary measure'' and not a substitute for civil government. ''We are just a drop in the stream of Polish history,'' he asserted.

In his address he made a special point of speaking to Poland's Communist allies, promising no break in friendly relations and asking for ''understanding'' for the difficult conditions here.

He asked Polish workers to give up temporarily their right to strike, which was won at the Gdansk shipyard in the summer of 1980, and he appealed to Polish farmers not to ''let the country starve to death.''

He ended the speech with the opening words of the national anthem, ''Poland has not yet perished as long as we live,'' and the music of the anthem dramatically arose in the background. Stage Set for Crackdown

The Government has been paving the way gradually for its crackdown. For weeks, official press outlets have been emphasizing labor unrest, crime and conditions of ''anarchy'' in the country.

The Polish Constitution allows for a suspension of normal laws during a time of ''state of war,'' which is not very well defined and has generally been interpreted as a state of emergency. During a ''state of war'' the Government is empowered to make summary arrests, try offenders before military tribunals and take other steps to ensure law and order. In effect it is martial law.

On Saturday, the union's national leadership decided at a meeting in Gdansk to conduct a nationwide referendum on establishing a government outside the jurisdiction of the Polish Communist Party and defining Poland's military relationship with the Soviet Union.

The union's leaders also approved a resolution calling for an automatic general strike if the Government passed a law granting itself emergency powers. Union Leaders to Be Interned

General Jaruzelski, who was named Prime Minister last February and became the Communist Party leader in October, opened his address with the playing of the national anthem.

''There is one thing that I want, peace,'' he said. ''We have to come out of the crisis by ourselves by our hands. History would never forgive us if we failed.''

Union sources said the police had detained the son of the political dissident, Jacek Kuron. While placing him under arrest, the sources said, the police informed him that his father, who was attending the union's leadership meeting in Gdansk, was also in police custody and being taken to Warsaw.

Shortly before the police and troops arrived at the union's Warsaw headquarters, the national leadership in Gdansk also voted to endorse the Warsaw chapter's Dec. 6 call for a nationwide day of protest on Thursday over ''the use of force and the threat to use force.''

The union vote on the protest defied the Government's demand earlier Saturday that the Warsaw branch cancel its plans for the demonstration in the capital and other cities Thursday.

The Warsaw chapter called for the protest after the storming of a strikebound fire cadets' academy by the police on Dec. 2. At that time, about 300 students occupying the building were removed without injuries.

A statement issued by Jerzy Urban, the Government press spokesman, said such a demonstration ''may have unpredictable consequences in the present tense situation in the country.''

It ended with the warning that ''law enforcement agencies will oppose with determination any actions aimed against people's power, in the name of peace for citizens and public order.'' The reference to ''people's power'' meant the Communist Government. Telephone Lines Cut

Telephones and telex lines in Warsaw were cut as the police descended on the Warsaw union offices. At least 11 trucks carrying riot policemen were seen on both ends of the block on Mokotowska Street, where the union headquarters is situated in an old school building.

(The London international telephone exchange reported that all telephone and telex links between Poland and the rest of Europe were cut off Saturday at 1 P.M. EST, The Associated Press reported. Telephone communications between the United States and Poland were closed at 7:15 P.M. EST, according to Wayne DuBois, a spokesman for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.)

At 1 A.M. (7 P.M., New York time), a correspondent saw people coming out the building and entering a windowless police van. The van then pulled away. Other Police Raids Reported

Solidarity sources said similar police raids took place in other cities, among them Rzeszow, Lublin and Radom. The proposed referendum, scheduled for Feb. 15, was to be conducted by Solidarity, presumably among nonunion people as well as union members, if General Jaruzelski's Government did not agree to a series of union demands by the end of the year.

The vote on the proposal, by far the most controversial that the union had ever considered, was conducted by the union's full 107-member national commission. Unusual Troop Activity

The reports of unusual troop activity around the country came from six locations earlier Saturday. In Poznan, Leszno and Gostyn, union members reported that tanks with Soviet markings were moving eastward. They said there were formations of between 40 and 60 tanks on the roads.

Warsaw region staff members also displayed a telex message from a union official, Marek Zylinski, in Olsztyn, about 60 miles southeast of Gdansk, listing unusual movements in three nearby locations - Muszaki, Barto Szyce and Szczytno. Some of the movements were toward Gdansk, others toward Warsaw.

At least one such movement, a large concentration of troops with tanks and heavy weapons, was said to be Polish. The telex said the troops were asked where they were going, but said they did not know. New Phase in 'Struggle' Urged

The Solidarity leaders, assembled inside the Lenin Shipyard where the union was born in historic negotiations with the Government 16 months ago, were in a mood to display their militancy, sparked in part by a sense that the Government was pressing for a showdown.

The meeting hall rang with calls for new tactics, amendments to proposed referendums and speeches on the need to switch ''the struggle'' into a new phase. 'Whiff of Terror' Seen by Press

The Gdansk meeting has aroused critical reaction in the state-controlled press. Trybuna Ludu, the main organ of the Communist Party, officially known as the Polish United Workers' Party, said that the opening day Friday provided no grounds for optimism.

''So far, a whiff of terror has come from the meeting hall,'' the paper asserted. Among the demands Solidarity says must be met are such matters as access to the mass media, the creation of a special ''social council'' to oversee the economy, and free and democratic elections to local councils in the provinces.

According to a draft proposal the referendum would declare that ''society cannot any longer tolerate the existing situation in the country,'' and would raise four questions:

- Are you for a vote of confidence in General Jaruzelski?

- Are you for establishing a temporary government and free elections?

- Are you for providing military guarantees to the Soviet Union in Poland?

- Can the Polish United Workers' Party be the instrument of such guarantees in the name of the whole society? A Tactic for Pressure on Regime

Political observers pointed out that the mere threat to hold such a referendum could be seen as a pressure tactic against the Government.

Following is a letter received yesterday from John Darnton, Warsaw bureau chief of The New York Times, addressed to Robert B. Semple Jr., the paper's foreign editor. Normal communications from Warsaw have been shut by the authorities since Sunday. Dec. 16, 1981

Dear Bob,

At least twice in the past 24 hours the official Polish press agency has used the word ''normalization'' to apply to events here. For Poles and other East Europeans this is a dreaded code word.

''Normalization'' is what happened to Czechoslovakia after a Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the ''Prague Spring'' of 1968. In the peculiar jargon of Communist officials, in which words can mean their opposite, it is the restoration of orthodox authority. To people it is the almost unbearably painful process of watching the dismantlement, piece by piece, of freedom and liberties painstakingly won.

A major part in that process is fear, and fear, it is clear, has become of the new military Poland. (As written.) It is strange; perhaps the one defining trait of the Polish ''renewal'' of the past 16 months was the absence of fear. A Calculated Campaign of Intimidation

With a massive show of manpower and equipment and a calculated campaign of intimidation, the military authorities here are trying to break the spirit of resistance of the workers' movement.

Yesterday evening, a caravan of 273 police cars, trucks, water cannons and other hardware moved slowly through the city at rush hour. Thousands of onlookers were forced back on the sidewalks, dark figures waiting on dirty snow banks and trees in the cold. It seemed a parade of brute force.

This morning at an early hour three secret policemen barged into the small apartment of a Polish journalist. They insisted that he sign a document asserting that he would no longer ''act in a manner to oppose socialism in Poland.'' He resisted and was bundled away. His wife pleaded with the policemen as they dragged him down the stairs. One of them responded, ''Don't worry, we'll be back tomorrow for you to sign it.''

The fear campaign is working in some respects. Already people open their doors just a crack, to inspect who is there. They play the radio loudly while talking, or set the water running - old devices from the Stalinist 1950's to foil the eavesdropper.

For someone who has lived here for almost three years, it is as if a door that was gradually opened has been suddenly shut. 'You're Being Observed'

''I can't see you now,'' whispers a Polish friend, as he answers his door and steps into the hallway, closing it behind him. ''Didn't you hear? I was detained. I just got out. I'm sure you're being observed.''

''We can't talk here,'' says another Polish friend standing in a stairwell, with a glance at a man nearby, who said he was a taxi driver waiting for a customer. He may, or may not, have been listening.

It takes a long time for fear to go away, weeks, or months even, in which people slowly learn that they can speak out or, emboldened by others, write more forcefully and honestly in the newspapers. But fear can come back as quickly as a door slamming. Overwhelming Show of Force

The full extent of the strike protest to the imposition of martial law cannot be determined with all communications down all over the country. But in areas where foreign journalists have been able to reach, factories in the Warsaw region, what broke the backbone of the protest was fear. The authorities mounted an overwhelming show of force - surrounding factories with tanks and armored cars and simply waiting for darkness and curfew to unsettle the demonstrators inside.

Workers who gave up said afterwards that they felt isolated, with no idea of what was going on in other parts of the country. They were worn down, sometimes hungry, and began thinking of their children. Women among them began weeping. When the troops and policemen burst in, they were offered a chance to leave, unharmed, if they would separate themselves from their leaders.

''We really had no other choice,'' said one worker at the Huta Warszawa steel mill. ''They had live ammunition and their guns were raised. They seemed as scared as we were.''

In other regions, resistance is still going on and some workers are apparently determined to repel an armed attack. But what the outcome will be cannot even be guessed.

'Will Have to Eat Their Words'

''Poles always called the Czechs cowards for not resisting in '68,'' said one foreign visitor here who travels frequently throughout Eastern Europe. ''Now they will have to eat their words. The Czechs were invaded by five armies, the Poles did it all by themselves.''

A major factor in the ease with which military rule has been established so far is the Polish love and respect for the army. The army, like the flag and church, is a symbol of nationalism.

''All this time we were all looking at the army and saying that because it is mostly made up of conscripts it might not be loyal to the government,'' said one European diplomat. ''What we didn't see was the other side of the coin. Because the army contains so many sons and brothers, people were reluctant to move against it.''

The most telling scene in the capital over the past three days, perhaps, occurred yesterday morning when busloads of soldiers moved into the Polish Academy of Sciences to break up a strike by some of the country's most eminent thinkers. The crowd was sullen and angry as the troops led away men in rumpled suits and spectacles and loaded them into a bus. But no one even threw a snowball. Minutes afterward, a truckload of soldiers goes past and, surprisingly, some of them waved to the crowd, for all the world like liberating soldiers, not agents of repression.

The military decree that was promulgated the morning after the army moved in was Draconian, and it was prominently displayed on posters and the two newspapers allowed to publish. Penalties range from two years to death, for seemingly minor infractions. It simply overwhelmed people.

Soldiers posted at intersections throughout the city turned cars away and let others through, rerouting traffic without any logical rhyme or reason. It was effective psychological harassment.

'The Time for True Courage'

One Polish journalist, sitting at a cafe and talking to a foreign colleague with a nervous glance over his shoulder from time to time, displayed the demoralization and depression that most Poles seem to be feeling. It was, he said, the intellectuals who would feel the backlash. All his journalist friends, he said, were now out of work. One by one, he predicted, new newspapers would open up and one by one his friends would be offered jobs, if they were judged reliable. ''Now comes the time for true courage,'' he said, ''I wonder how many will measure up. It's either that or going to the work center for a job as a street cleaner.''

''We are back to 1951 and '52,'' he continued, referring to the Stalinist years. ''It would take us 20 years to rebuild what we had here.''

Solidarity, he suggested, has talked a great line, but at no time over the past 16 months did the union really prepare a plan to counter a massive display of force. It was not envisaged that things could turn around so quickly, he said. Nor was it even thought that fear could come back so quickly.

Yours sincerely,

John Darnton

By John Darnton

Poland's new military leaders issued a decree of martial law today, drastically restricting civil rights and suspending the operations of the Solidarity union. The union's activists reacted with an appeal for an immediate general strike to protest.

A proclamation broadcast by the newly formed Martial Council for National Redemption, now the top authority in the country, also banned all kinds of public gatherings and demonstrations and ordered the internment of citizens whose loyalty to the state was under ''justified suspicion.''

The military rule was announced in a dramatic broadcast at dawn by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Prime Minister and Communist Party leader, who said a strict regime was necessary to save Poland from catastrophe and civil war. Hours before, Solidarity leaders meeting in Gdansk had proposed holding a national referendum on forming a non-Communist government.

No Reports of Violence

Following a provision in the constitution, General Jaruzelski, declared a ''state of war,'' equivalent to a state of emergency in other countries.

There were no immediate reports of any violence, but opposition to the military move seemed in the offing. Union activists, in dozens of leaflets being circulated in the streets, called for an immediate general strike.

Many Solidarity activists were in detention following coordinated police raids across the country after midnight last night. So were several former leaders of Poland's Communist Party.

Among the detained were some of the top leaders and advisers of the Solidarity union who had assembled in Gdansk to work out strategy in the latest confrontation with the Government. Walesa Flown to Warsaw

Lech Walesa, Solidarity's chairman, who became an international figure by his role in the workers' uprising of last summer, was meeting with Government officials at a site outside Warsaw today, Jerzy Urban, a Government spokesman, said at a news conference.

Mr. Walesa was flown to Warsaw in a Government plane at 4 A.M. to begin talks with Stanislaw Ciosek, the Minister of Trade Union Affairs, according to the Interpress information agency. Mr. Urban said that Mr. Walesa had not been detained at any point.

Mr. Urban also stressed that Solidarity had been suspended, not banned altogether. He said the Soviet Union was aware that Poland was about to mount a military operation, stating, ''It's hard to imagine that Poland's allies were not informed of such an action.''

General Jaruszelski also announced that several former officials had been ''interned'' because they were ''responsible personally for pushing the country into crisis'' by their policies in the 1970's and had been guilty of ''abusing their posts for personal profit.'' He specifically mentioned Edward Gierek, the party chief who was ousted in September 1980, Piotr Jaroszewicz, his longtime Prime Minister, Zladislaw Grudzien, a former party leader from Katowice, and Jerzy Lukasziewicz, a former Politburo member in charge of party propaganda. Corruption Alienated Public

The abuse of power and corruption were among the reasons for the loss of public confidence in the party and Government. The announcement of the internment was seen as an attempt to gain some support for the military takeover.

The Government moves came hours after the Solidarity leaders meeting in Gdansk had proposed a nationwide referendum on setting up a non-Communist Government and defining Poland's military relationship with the Soviet Union.

The union leaders, assembled at the Lenin Shipyard where their independent labor movement was born 16 months ago, said that, unless the Government met a series of demands, the union would conduct its own national referendum asking four questions:

Are you for a vote of confidence in General Jaruzelski? Are you for the establishment of a temporary government and free elections? Are you for providing military guarantees to the Soviet Union in Poland? Can the Polish Communist Party be the instrument of such guarantees in the name of the whole society? Reason for Threat Is Unknown

Political sources pointed out yesterday that the mere threat by Solidarity to hold such a referendum on its own could be unacceptable to the Government. Why it made the threat is unknown, but in recent weeks there have been signs that Mr. Walesa's control over the union membership has been weakened. There had been more frequent challenges to his leadership from more militant factions within the union.

Within hours after the meeting in Gdansk, Polish troops surrounded the union's headquarters in Warsaw. Mr. Urban, the Government spokesman, said the events of the last 24 hours had prompted scattered transport strikes around the country but that the bus and trolley workers had returned to their jobs everywhere except in Cracow.

The situation around the country, where most internal and external communications have been severed, remained unclear. The capital was calm and the downtown area was nearly deserted by late this afternoon, as thousands of motorists left, passing through military checkpoints and past armored cars parked at strategic intersections. Soldiers patrolling the streets and bridges in pairs had bayonets fixed on their rifles. Poster Calls for a Strike

A hand-scrawled red and white poster reading ''Strajk Generalny,'' or ''General Strike,'' with today's date, hung on the front door of the five-story former school building that houses the Solidarity chapter in Warsaw. The headquarters was stormed early this morning by policemen who seized 32 people inside, according to a Solidarity worker.

The police returned later today, again in force, wearing plastic riot helmets and carrying riot sticks, to raid the headquarters again. This time they took files, documents, cash and equipment, while an angry crowd of several hundred looked on, jeering and yelling ''Gestapo!'' The police at one point used a fire hose to disperse the crowd, which quickly gathered again as soon as the policemen had departed.

The measures announced in the proclamation from the new Martial Council were sweeping. They were read out over television by the usual announcers newly dressed for the occasion in military uniforms. The measures grew in number as the day wore on. By nightfall, there were 61 separate points.

All Strikes and Protests Banned

All strikes, demonstrations, protests, meetings and public gatherings other than those for religious services were banned. A curfew from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. was imposed. The country's airspace was closed to international and domestic commercial flights, the borders were virtually sealed and Poles were told not to travel to border regions.

Western diplomats and foreign correspondents were informed that they could not travel outside Warsaw. The sale of gasoline to private motorists was prohibited. Dissemination of any publications without prior approval of the authorities was made a punishable offense.

Censorship of mail and other communications was legalized. The proclamation also granted the authorities the right to make preventive detention arrests of anyone whose behavior aroused ''suspicions that being free, they will conduct activity threatening the security of the state.''

Poles were ordered to carry their identification cards at all times.

Regional Broadcasts Suspended

In a move to control the vital centers of mass communication, all regional radio and television broadcasts were suspended, so that only programs originating from Warsaw could be aired. Over half a dozen public service sectors, ranging from transport to post offices and electric power stations, were placed directly under the military, apparently rendering the employees subject to a military-type command structure. Orders from superiors are equivalent to ''military orders during a war,'' the radio said.

A tape of General Jaruzelski's broadcast was played over television throughout the day. He sat stiffly, staring into the camera without his customary dark glasses, next to emblems of patriotism, a shield depicting the Polish eagle and the flag. He declared that what had been done was for the good of the nation.

Poland had reached ''the limits of mental endurance,'' he said. Catastrophe was ''not days, but hours'' away. History would judge the momentous steps being undertaken to save the country from disintegration at the hands of extremists and ''adventurists.'' Not to have acted would have been ''a crime,'' he declared.

The general insisted that the military's assumption of power was not a military coup or installation of a military dictatorship. The constitutional organs of state will continue to function, he said, and the Martial Council ''will be dissolved once the rule of law is reestablished.''

'Mortal Danger' to Nation Cited

The military council's proclamation, plastered along with movie posters on walls and concrete pillars lining downtown shopping arcades, insisted that the move had been undertaken to save the country from ''mortal danger.''

''Forces hostile to socialism'' have brought the society to the brink of civil war and ''anarchy, lawlessness and chaos,'' it said. A reactionary coup was openly being prepared, it asserted.

Bystanders who stopped beside dirty snowbanks to read such statements were sometimes handed leaflets by union men. ''The attack on our union is aimed at its liquidation,'' said one, signed by the Solidarity chapter at the Ursus tractor factory. ''Do not let them smash our Solidarity.'’

Public reaction, except among the crowd drawn to the union headquarters, was difficult to gauge. Many people seemed to fear that the move by the Government was a prelude to bloodshed. Monday, when the factories open, will be critical, many said. 'There's Real Trouble Ahead'

''It won't stop here,'' said a grandmother pulling a young child on a sled. ''Solidarity won't accept it and so there's real trouble ahead. For the first time, I'm afraid.''

The union had laid plans for a huge demonstration at Victory Square in downtown Warsaw on Thursday. It was to be part of a ''national day of protest'' that the Warsaw chapter had called out of anger over what it denounced as the Government's confrontational policies. The protest was officially endorsed by the entire union leadership.

Travelers from Gdansk said that several union leaders had been taken by the police from their hotel rooms after the session in the Lenin Shipyard ended shortly after midnight. The only inkling that something was wrong was a statement by Mr. Walesa that communications were down. The arrests started about two hours later. Troops Stationed on Roofs

Troops were stationed on the roofs of buildings surrounding the Hotel Monopol as union members were taken away in a bus. A Government official said that altogether 17 people had been taken into custody in Gdansk.

The travelers said they had passed a column of about 55 modern T-72 tanks crossing the road at Paslek, about 40 miles south of Gdansk. The tanks were fully equipped for battle, with spare gasoline tanks at the backs.

John Darnton, who has been chief of The New York Times bureau in Warsaw since September 1979, reports in the following article on the problems underlying the crisis in Poland.

WARSAW - Behind the workers' revolt that began with strikes in the summer of 1980 and grew to a revolution on the shoulders of the Solidarity union, the operation of which was suspended when martial law was declared, lies a story of failure. It is the failure of Communism, in the eyes of the workers, to deliver on its promise of a better life.

The revolt sprang from an unspoken consensus among Poles that despite more than three decades of sacrifice and toil, conditions of everyday life were scarcely improving and that the Communist system had failed most dramatically in precisely those areas, in the realm of social welfare, where its ideology called for greater exertion and improvement.

Appalling dirt and safety conditions in factories, cramped and unavailable apartments, substandard and sloppy health care, lines in front of meat shops - food shortages in general despite a stringent rationing system - these were the distinguishing traits of what the Government referred to as ''people's Poland.'' They were glossed over, ignored or denied by successive governments that pressed instead for higher production statistics in heavy industry.

They certainly did not keep pace with expectations and, compared with the West, which more and more Poles were visiting when restrictions were loosened as the cold war period came to a close, Poland was falling behind.

'My Life Doesn't Count'

''All my adult life I've been told that my life doesn't count, that I'm sacrificing myself for my children,'' said one well-known Polish journalist, speaking privately. ''Well, now I'm 48. My son is 19. His life is no better than mine and he's being told he must sacrifice himself for his children. What's life all about, anyway?''

Satisfying the basic needs of the population was given low priority when it came to allocating investment in the national budget, but it was given lip service in public propaganda and highlighted in the speeches from the podiums on May Day celebrations. The gap between words and deeds became insupportable.

In 1978, the combined investment outlays for housing, education, health care, social welfare and culture amounted to less than half the amount given to heavy industry.

''For years and years, everyone asked: how much coal is being mined, how much steel is being produced? But no one looked at what it all meant for the life of the worker!'' exclaimed one of the strikers' negotiators at Gdansk last year.

A Reminder of Marxism

''It makes us think about the Marxist criticism of capitalism,'' said another, ''and what it's like when the owners exploit the workers.''

The outlook behind such remarks has become increasingly clear as Poland's crisis developed over the ensuing 16 months, lurching from flashpoint to flashpoint and never approaching resolution.

The party's dogma that Poland was a workers' state, controlled by workers and for workers, in which the quality of life was gradually improving, was judged a sham.

A new generation, not devastated by war, not crippled by the terrors of Stalinism, has emerged. For it, the standard explanations for the difficulties of life - the excuse of damage and trauma from World War II, the minor wrinkles on otherwise perfect five-year plans - are no longer acceptable. More and more people have to come to judge Communism by its own achievements.

Depth of Social Ills Revealed

As newspapers began to test new limits of freedom, Poles were learning more and more things that were wrong with their society. They learned the extent of alcoholism, of crime, and even of drug addiction.

The party organ, Trybuna Ludu, admitted that one in every six Poles and 40 per cent of the country's children were living below the poverty line. They included pensioners, invalids, members of large families, single women bringing up children alone and young working couples squeezed by rent payments -all the disadvantaged that the system, theoretically, is geared to shelter.

''At the end of the decade which proclaimed the subordination of economic policy to social policy, we are facing a situation which is in painful discord with the principles of social justice,'' the newspaper admitted. In other words, somewhere along the line the Communist ideals of justice and equality fell by the wayside.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the emergence of a small group, a party and moneyed elite that monopolized the privileges and against whom the workers turned with wrath and a sense of class revenge. The 'Red Bourgeoisie'

A similar ''red bourgeoisie'' has grown up in other Communist countries in the Soviet bloc, beginning with the Soviet Union. The phenomenon has been documented and analyzed in numerous films and books, most notably by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident and author of ''The New Class.''

But in Poland, it was a relatively new development. Under Wladyslaw Gomulka, the predecessor of the now-disgraced Edward Gierek, diplomats and high party functionaries were expected to emulate his frugal, ascetic style. ''When Gomulka came to your embassy, you brought out your worst china,'' said one retired diplomat.

But when Mr. Gierek took over in 1970, all that changed. Within three years, local party leaders had learned that they could divert public funds almost with impunity, hold lavish banquets, and construct expensive villas.

Mr. Gomulka did not believe in borrowing. Mr. Gierek borrowed and spent liberally, and by the time he was forced from office by strikes in 1980, Poland was $24 billion in debt to the West.

The existence of a small, privileged group grated upon Polish sensibilities.

'We Poles Are Strange'

''You know, we Poles are strange,'' said a former adviser to Mr. Gomulka who requested anonymity.''Despite our tradition of aristocracy we believe in equality. We demand a certain cleanliness from our public officials. We are not accustomed to seeing people enrich themselves in office.''

Years before Solidarity came into being, the existence of special shops, where scarce commodities were sold only to party officials, was an explosive issue. In one town in the industrial area of Silesia, a group of meat-hungry workers invaded such a shop, divested it of ham, wrecked it, and left money behind to pay for what they had taken.

From the very beginning, the workers' revolt had a whiff of something like class antagonism to it. When the Government negotiator, Mieczyslaw Jagielski, the Deputy Prime Minister and the archetype of the smooth bureaucrat, arrived at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to begin talks with the strikers, he nervously eyed a phalanx of workers in soiled clothes who locked arms. ''Look straight into the eyes of a worker!'' shouted one of them.

Continuing anger at the privileged elite is one reason why the strikes have not subsided for long periods and why the Polish crisis never seems to end. People still believe that ''they'' are in charge of the Government and that the Government continues to serve ''them.''

An Uncompleted Revolution

Underlying such sentiments is the sense that an undefined ''transfer of power'' has not occurred, that the ''revolution'' as such is not complete and will not be complete until workers have achieved a structural hold on the edifice of power.

The impetus that the hunger for material gain provided in the workers' revolt has generally been overlooked amid attention paid to the more dramatic drives for political freedom and for throwing off Soviet domination.

But it was there from the very beginning and, as the economic situation continues to worsen and as Poles look with trepidation upon the coming winter, it is coming to the forefront again.

A survey published in Polityka, the major party weekly, only two months after Solidarity was created revealed that most Poles regarded the new union in exceedingly practical terms. It would mean, many thought, more food on the shelves, better health services, less waiting time for an apartment.

In fact, the exact opposite has happened. The crisis in the economy that had been growing since the mid-1970's suddenly deepened with a perilous shortage of foreign exchange that closed off vital imports and shut down factories. Newly won wage increases flooded the money-saturated economy.

As a result the Government is able to provide only scaled-down services in everything from transportation to energy supply. Goods are even more scarce, lines are even longer and institutions providing welfare services are in crisis. Sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the Government blames Solidarity for the shortages and problems, but most people do not seem to believe this.

Interviews with dozens of union activists, party members, Government officials and average Poles indicate that the material grievances that helped give raise to the revolt are still very much there

A Sword Against Privilege

About 7 miles south of Warsaw, in a little village called Dabrowka Wilanowska, there is a Polish millionaire. He owns several greenhouses, which raise flowers to sell in downtown Warsaw, a fox farm, a mink farm and more than one house. Everybody in the area, it seems, works for him in one capacity or another.

Last year, some four months after the Solidarity Union was born, the millionaire suffered a severe stroke. The people who work his land, his greenhouses and his fur farms talked it over and came to a singular conclusion: ''He's afraid,'' said one. ''He's afraid because Solidarity's going to take all his money away. ''

Part of the Solidarity union's legend and part of its attraction for many Poles is as an instrument of revenge, an egalitarian sword to cut down the rich and privileged class. This is the ultimate paradox - a revolution under a system that supposedly removed all reasons for revolution.

There are two routes to wealth and privilege in Poland today. One is through the party, which usually rewards staying power. A second is through the ''private initiative'' sector, a catch-all that includes everything from smuggling furs and gold and currency black-marketeering to raising vegetables in greenhouses. Entrepreneurial Spirit Survives

This category differentiates Poland from neighboring Communist countries. The entrepreneurial spirit survives more here - in some ways, even prospers - in the same way that private agriculture endures. It was never totally stamped out by the ''revolution'' that came with Communist power after World War II and during the Gierek years it thrived and became rapacious as never before.

This ''second elite'' is purely a moneyed elite and it includes families of peasant origin who sell on the private market, private shopkeepers, middlemen of all kinds, and people with contacts in the West. There is a sense of shadiness and rule-bending in most of their operations.

The money elite is allowed largely because the Government recognizes that certain services are required to fill in gaps in the state-run economy. The inefficiency of the regulation-burdened system breeds its own exceptions.

One of the major accomplishments of Solidarity has been to openly question the rules themselves. This has, as the authorities originally feared, led to questioning the system itself. Solidarity's demands for new economic laws are aimed partially at eliminating this shady elite, but, at the same time, legitimizing greater private enterprise. For example, one new law adopted as part of the economic changes made in response to Solidarity, allows as many as 50 employees in a private business. And the Government is now involved in preliminary talks with Mieczyslaw Wilczek, head of the Association of Factory Owners, about opening a large number of small private animal-fodder factories, similar to the plant that made Mr. Wilczek himself a millionaire. Contradictions in Solidarity

Solidarity incorporates several ideological strains, some of them contradictory. Many its members evidence outrage at the inequalities that have grown up want to eliminate them. Others favor and expansion of private enterprise that, ultimately, would lead to further inequalities. The only proposition that both groups agree on is that privilege based on party position, not merit, is not tolerable.

Corruption and favoritism in the distribution of apartments is a major factor in the overall housing crisis. Published statistics indicate that only 30 per cent of the apartments built by housing cooperatives last year actually went to members of the cooperatives themselves. The remainder were given over to institutions or distributed by local administrators.

The average value of villas for top party officials in the mid-1970's, according to several architects who were interviewed and requested anonymity, was about $500,000. Some of the villas were adorned with oriental gardens, small waterfalls, swimming pools, saunas, and even their own small power stations. Art works - paintings, tapestries and china - were on display, borrowed from public museums. Occasionally, when an old palace was restored, the copper roof would disappear and end up in a private villa.

Some officials moved on from house to house, buying and selling and getting richer as they went. Technically, no Polish citizen is allowed to own more than one residence, but ownership could always be registered in the name of a spouse or child. From time to time properties especially coveted would fall into the hands of the state, and then ''private auctions'' - with only one bidder - were arranged.

Legal Basis for Special Treatment

The inequalities in housing extend to virtually all other aspects of life. A governmental decree dated Sept. 5, 1972 generally is regarded as having laid a legal basis for special treatment for those who rule. The decree sets down five categories of wages for top officials, from A to E, ranging from the Prime Minister down to general directors in various ministries.

Those in the higher categories receive salaries for longer periods in the event of dismissal, and are granted pensions equivalent to 95 per cent of their salaries, among other advantages. Pensions are payable not just to the immediate family, but also to grandchildren, brothers and sisters, and parents.

The advantage of high offices lies not in the salaries - which are not immensely higher than average - but in various special privileges. These open doors for everything from the use of limousines to access to dollars, which can buy imported goods at the special ''dollar shops.'' According to an unwritten law, officials in the A to E groups pay no taxes. Nor do members of their families.

He knows that his children will have similar perks. They are assured of admittance to the universities and likely to win unadvertised scholarships for study overseas. Their grades will be higher than their classmates, though not necessarily their examination marks.

Class-Ridden Health System

Nothing epitomizes health care in Poland quite as much as a new multi-million-dollar hospital in the Anin suburb of Warsaw. When it opened several years ago it had only 60 beds, color television in every room, a swimming pool and nurses whose salaries were double the national average.

The only catch was that to be admitted, you had to be a top member of the Communist Party or Government. If you were anyone else, you went into ordinary hospital that was likely to be crowded, understaffed, dank and filthy.

To try to dampen a growing sense of public anger over special privilege, the Anin clinic was thrown open to general use a month before the strikes that led to the creation of Solidarity in the summer of 1980. Now an institute of cardiology, it is something of a monument to pre-1981 health policies that laid emphasis on specialization and good treatment for the few, to the detriment of the many.

Poland's standard of health care has been on the decline for years. It is one of the most conspicuous failures of successive Communist regimes that plowed money into the manufacture of industrial products for export instead of programs for social welfare. 'Priority Went to Industry'

''In theory hospitals were priority,'' said Dr. Stanislaw Mlekodaj, Deputy Minister of Health and Social Welfare. ''But in reality the priority went to industry.''

Solidarity's demands for improvement and a new social consciousness have had some effect. The proportion of national income devoted to health, which ranged between 3 and 4 per cent for years, has been raised to 7 per cent, according to the Ministry of Health. All across the country workers are demanding that clinics and other facilities for Interior Ministry employees or other groups be handed over to the people and converted to small hospitals or outpatient centers.

But the changes have been offset by Poland's economic collapse, so that the health care system, neglected for years and now beset by shortages of essential supplies for lack of hard currency, is in deep crisis.

In at least one hospital, according to a solidarity publication, 14 babies have died so far this year for lack of basic hygiene. In a mental hospital two years ago, some 60 patients burned to death because they left without supervision for the night, crowded into a dormitory room that was bolted shut.

Lack of Hospital Space

The first problem is simply lack of hospital space. A member of parliament revealed in a speech recently that only one quarter of Poland's hospitals and 40 per cent of its health care centers were built under Communism.

The number of hospital beds per head is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago, so that it is now among the lowest in Europe. The physical plant is aging fast. The doctors' group estimates that more than two-thirds of all health service buildings are obsolete, with an average age of over 60 years, and that as many as one fifth of all the buildings are totally unfit and should not be used at all.

The shortage has led to the placing of patients in beds in halls and corridors, which is common practice in most hospitals. Wards that were built for six or eight hold twice that number, and so the overflow is placed wherever it will fit. After four or five days in a corridor, a patient may be transferred to a ward if a bed there opens up. Average Stay Is Long

There is a vicious circle. Diagnostic procedures in Polish hospitals are so slow and the risk of secondary infection so great that the average hospital stay is much longer than in the West.

The decline in medical services has reached the point of danger, some doctors feel. ''There's an increasing deficit of hospital beds, polytechnic clinics, nursing homes and now even of medicines,'' said Dr. Marian Gietko, a Warsaw pediatrician who is also an activist in Solidarity. ''We're running low on antibiotics. There's a great shortage of surgical equipment, soaps, disinfectants. All of this lack of hygiene, when the hospitals are overcrowded, brings real danger of virulent infection.''

Bribes to doctors are commonplace, to ensure admittance to a good hospital, to get a good room, to be assured of medical attention. And not only to doctors. Nurses must be given cash to bring blankets and sometimes to bring prescribed medication. Orderlies must be bribed to have a change of bed linen.

The practice is accepted, if not condoned, even by Ministry of Health officials who seem to regard it in the same light as ''black practice'' - the acceptance of private patients by doctors on the side. The rationale is that doctors are far from being well paid. Their average salary is only slightly above the national average, and a miner or factory manager makes much more.

The relatively high proportion of women doctors is sometimes cited to argue that women have achieved a higher status in Eastern Europe. But many women doctors argue the reverse - that it is a sign of the low regard in which the profession is held.

Even those statistics that the first Communist governments were so proud of are perhaps turning around. There are indications that the average life expectancy of Poles, after years of increasing, has begun to decline. And the rate of decrease in infant mortality has begun to slow alarmingly. Epidemic disease such as typhus, once practically eradicated, are reappearing. There are signs of an increase in tuberculosis.

A Losing Battle in Housing

The Communist Government is losing the struggle to provide decent and plentiful shelter for its 36 million citizens. Only a few years ago the average waiting time for an apartment was between five and eight years. Now it is over 15 years and in many areas, including parts of warsaw, as long as 25 years.

By 1985, according to recent testimony before the Parliament, the average waiting period will be over 20 years nationally - in other words, the span of an entire generation.

''Do you realize what that means?'' said a 24-year-old student named Krzysztof. ''My parents didn't put me down for a flat when I was a baby. That means that unless I marry right -someone who has a flat or is about to get one - I won't have a place of my own until I'm 50. '' Workers' Homes in Warsaw

What Poles endure in the way of shelter can be shocking to a Westerner. Tadeusz Mucha, a worker at the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw, lives with his wife and daughter in a tiny outbuilding behind a bandshell in a park. In spring, it floods and they wear boots inside. His seven-year-old daughter has rheumatism. The family was promised an apartment three years ago.

Stanislaw Sobotka, another Ursus worker, has lived in a shack for 13 years with his wife and two children. There are holes in the walls, covered with paper, which is useless in keeping out the winter cold. His children are constantly ill. He, too, was promised an apartment in 1978.

The desperate housing situation was a major factor behind the social upheaval that culminated in the formation of the independent Solidarity union last year.

It was no accident that 1 of the original 21 demands of the strikers who created Solidarity was that the waiting time for an apartment be shortened. Charges of corruption in housing by local officials, who divert construction materials, build luxurious villas, or allocate apartments for bribes and favors, have triggered strikes in many regions.

'Like Slicing Sausage'

''The irony,'' said a Western specialist who has studied housing here, ''is that housing is the one sector where socialist organization should have all the advantages. The land belongs to the state and is costless. There is no profit to the builders. Everything is prefabricated. They should be churning out apartments here like slicing sausage.

''Instead, if you examine the relative cost of construction, you find it costs twice as much to build an apartment here as in Paris or London. What should theoretically be a better system is a nightmare of strangling regulations, waste, inefficiency and mismanagement.''

Poland's population has not grown explosively, but the number of families continually outstrips the number of housing units. And the difference is growing. It was 1.29 million in 1970, 1.62 million in 1978 and is estimated at 2 million now.

Housing construction is down to the level of 10 years ago. Estimates are that only 130,000 to 140,000 new apartments will be built this year. If construction continues at the present rate - and chances are it will decline even further - there will be 3.2 million families waiting for apartments by 1985.

The actual deficit is much greater, however, since much of the housing stock is decrepit. Some 1.3-million occupied buildings are unfit for habitation. Add to that poor planning - there is a surplus of one-room apartments, for example - and the real shortage of three-and four-room apartments is thought to be about 3.5-million right now.

The following dispatch is based on information reaching The New York Times from Poland. Normal communications with The Times's Warsaw bureau chief, John Darnton, have been barred by the authorities there since Dec. 14.

It is clear that the workers' resistance to martial law and to suppression of their newly won civil and union rights has been more widespread and persistent than the military authorities anticipated.

According to unofficial but knowledgeable sources, many more than 5,000 people - the figure acknowledged by the authorities - have been arrested or interned since the imposition of martial law Dec. 13.

Conditions vary, but many are being held under conditions of little food, clothing or heating in temperatures as low as 10 degrees, these sources say. The information comes from members of a large, semi-underground volunteer effort aimed at bringing relief to those in the prisons and detention camps, where they say 10,000, and perhaps as many as 20,000 people, are being held.

Children Placed in Nurseries

In Warsaw, children whose parents were both arrested were taken by state officials and placed in state-run nurseries. Western diplomats here speculate that the Government believed that its show of strength would ''pacify'' the country within three days. The plan, most believe, was simply to overwhelm the population, round up politically suspicious intellectuals and break up any strikes instantly.

The resistance, like the movement that led to the union, has come from the workers themselves. It is concentrated in two critical centers, on the Baltic coast and in the industrial heartland of Silesia to the south. But it is occurring in other places as well.

(The Warsaw radio, monitored outside Poland, reported that security forces had broken a strike at a Silesian steel mill and that a strike by more than 1,000 coal miners in the same region of southern Poland was continuing for a 10th day. Page A9.)

What is astounding is the scope of the police dragnet, which appears to have pulled in anyone in an influential position who supported the Solidarity union in the past 16 months.

They include, in addition to Solidarity leaders and activists, thousands of intellectuals, journalists, artists and writers. The efficiency of the roundup is a clear indication that the security powers of the Interior Ministry remained very much intact during Poland's short liberalization, accumulating and gathering information on the actions of people in and out of the public eye.

Part of the authorities' strategy was apparently to confuse the opposition by flooding the shops with goods, promising that changes would be continued and causing resistance to dissipate in a climate of confusion and fear.

That has not happened. Instead, more than eight or nine days after martial law was imposed, the authorities still did not dare open up telephone lines or allow people to travel, lest the full story of what is going on around the country be spread.

A priest who arrived in the capital from Katowice Sunday said that more than 200 people had been killed in clashes between workers and security forces in Silesia. He could not offer details - where, when or how - but insisted that his information was reliable. The Roman Catholic Church's warnings about bloodshed and the danger of civil war indicate that it takes such reports seriously.

Warsaw Sticks to Figures

Jerzy Urban, the Government spokesman, repeatedly asserted at a press conference Monday evening that only seven such fatalities had occurred, the seven miners shot by policemen at the Wujek mine last week. Not many Poles seem willing to accept this assertion, remembering no doubt that the Government lied about the casualties in the food riots on the coast in 1970. The true death toll then, which ran in the scores, has never been accurately established.

The Government admits only that two coal mines in Silesia are being occupied by miners underground: as of Monday, the Piast mine with 1,742 miners underground, and the Ziemowot mine, with 1,154. Other reports say that as many as 20 mines - a full third of all the mines in Silesia - are undergoing some sort of strike.

It is a far cry from 1970, when Silesia rested peacefully while Gdansk burned and railroad cars filled with coal went up to the coast and came back with this bitter slogan painted on them: ''Silesians Are Not Poles.'' Now, Poland's two vital regions - its mines and its ports - are linked by a bond of anger and revulsion toward those in power in Warsaw.

In Gdansk, according to word-of-mouth reports from travelers, the oil refinery is occupied by workers and ringed by tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. The workers have threatened to blow it up if they are attacked. The Lenin shipyard, birthplace of Solidarity, is still partly occupied, as is the Gydnia shipyard, where workers have barricaded themselves inside a building containing volatile acetylene tanks.

Radom Totally Cut Off

In Katowice, thousands of workers were reportedly still holed up as of Monday inside a huge steel mill. Other reports tell of strikes still going on in Lublyn, Wroclaw and other major cities. Radom, the scene of rioting in 1976, has been totally cut off and what is going on there is not known.

''We are now receiving reports of hand-to-hand fighting even in small villages,'' said one political activist in a position to hear about developments in other regions.

The communications blackout has fed hundreds of rumors - that two liberal Politburo members have been arrested, that Lech Walesa is undergoing a nervous breakdown, that Tadeusz Masowiecki, a Solidarity adviser who is close to Pope John Paul, has had a heart attack. None of these, in so far as can be determined, are true, but they add to the overall atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension.

In assiduously maintaining that only seven strikers have been killed, and then only when security forces fired ''in self-defense,'' the authorities are trying to propagate the notion that Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the party leader and Prime Minister who once said that ''Polish soldiers will not be used to fire upon Polish workers,'' is clinging to a policy of breaking strikes with persuasion and coercion but not brute force. If this notion is dispelled, the ruling military council will have lost all hope of gaining any semblance of popular support.

Bloodshed Seems Unavoidable

But the situation is too explosive. Workers in some areas are simply unwilling to give up. Sooner or later, bloodshed on a large scale would seem unavoidable, because the gambit of showing force has already led to the use of force.

This prospect, that further resistance will lead to more violence, is one greatly feared by a number of journalists and intellectuals who have been in the middle all along, cheering some advances by Solidarity but chastising the union for going too far too fast. They believe that more resistance is futile and will simply encourage revenge-minded hardliners in the party and military, leading to a deepening spiral of repression.

These people see as the only hope the eventual ''Kadarization'' of Poland, a reference to the leadership of Janos Kadar of Hungary, who assumed power after the 1956 uprising was quelled and gradually introduced a modicum of economic and political freedom. One prominent journalist, referring to Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski and Kazimierz Barcikowski, a Politburo member, said: ''As long as Jeruzelski, Rakowski and Barcikowski, are in power, I see this as a possibility. It won't be a return to Stalinism, but it will be a grim, gray, boring country.''

Another prominent journalist disagreed. There is not likely to be a ''Hungarization'' of Poland he said, because the key to Hungary's advances was growing economic parity, primarily through trade with the West. Now there is a recession in the West and Poland's economy is in a shambles.

'Things Will Calm Down'

''Jaruzelski's ambition is to be a Kadar,'' he said. ''His hope is the nation will start working, will forget about liberty and care about bread instead.'' But the situation is not moving in that direction, he observed.

''Eventually, things will calm down somewhat, there will be some restoration of law and order. But there will be an underground stage, like during the war. It won't be a sophisticated network, but it will exist. They can't keep police on duty like this forever. There will be inscriptions on the walls. Work will be one big sabotage. Nothing will move in the country.''

The chances are good, the journalist said, that Poland will eventually become a repressive state like Czechoslovakia. A third Pole felt that all such attempts to design the future were futile and insisted that what counted now was not to lie down and let the Government steamroll the people. To resist oppression, he said, was a ''defining feature of the Polish national character.''

Looking out the window at the peaceful snowbound landscape, in which three soldiers with fur caps pulled over their ears warmed themselves around a coal-burning stove, he said: ''If we don't resist, massively and continually, we will lose something perhaps even more important than freedom. We will lose that important part of ourselves that has existed throughout our history, our ability to say 'No, we will not accept this, we will lose our soul as a nation.' ''

Severe Sentences Meted Out

How those arrested are treated varies considerably, sources say, depending upon who is taken into custody and where and how. In public pronouncements, the military authorities are attempting to draw a distinction between interment, in which people are held without charges being brought against them, and arrest under the new martial law provision. In the latter case, severe sentences are being meted out.

Many of the intellectuals were transferred to a military summer hostel in the village of Drawsko-Jaworze. Conditions there are said to be reasonably supportable, although cold. They are allowed to talk together and exercise for 40 minutes a day.

The number being held at Drawsko is uncertain. As of Monday, five people had been released from there but all came from the same building. They were not sure if other parts of the camp were occupied. The single building contains between 60 and 70 detainees.

Many more are being held in a prison at Bialoleka, on the outskirts of Warsaw, where conditions are said to be rigorous. There are reportedly at least 500 people there, and they include people regarded with the utmost suspicion by the authorities - younger people, Solidarity activists and members of KOR, the now defunct dissident organization, and the Independent Students Association.

Many Women Rounded Up

Many women who have been rounded up were taken to the Olszynka Grochowska prison in a Warsaw suburb. ''The authorities are moving very slowly in allowing us to give relief parcels,'' said a member of the assistance movement. ''We have 500 packages ready to go but only 50 have reached anyone. They reject many by simply saying that a person is not inside.''

The group, which is working under the auspices of the church, has also collected cartons upon cartons of medicine, cigarettes and food, including coffee, meat and sugar, which are rationed and in short supply. ''Thousands of people come in all day long,'' said one worker. ''They bring in everything. Everyone wants to help.''

For every 10 people who come in with food, one comes in with a list of more people missing from their homes. An apparently large group of prisoners is being held at the Central Police Headquarters of Mostowski, in downtown Warsaw. Over the weekend an undetermined number began a hunger strike to protest the conditions, described in smuggled messages as deplorable.

Vast Detention Camp

In addition to standard prisons, there are reliable reports from Western military attaches that a vast detention camp has been set up in the Kampinos Forest, 20 miles northwest of Warsaw. There are other reports of a large detention camp set up near Pisz, in the Mazurian Lake region.

The leaders on Solidarity's national commission who were rounded up in Gadnsk early on the morning of Dec. 13 are reportedly being held in a compound of the special riot police on Kartuska Street in Gadnsk. There are some 60 union leaders there. Several days ago semiofficial sources said the detainees were being held in a single, large hall and being summoned one by one for interrogation. They were being asked to sign political recantations and refusing, the sources said.

A complete list of those detained or arrested is impossible to combine. But many partial lists are circulating around Warsaw and may include some of Poland's best-known scholars, scientists and writers.

Among them are Wladyslaw Bartosvewski, secretary of the Pen Club; Andrdej Boguslawski, dean of the Department of Neotheology at Warsaw University; Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor of History at Warsaw University; Andrvej Kijowski, a writer and director; Jarzy Lojak, who headed Solidarity's information agency; Tadausz Mazowiecki, a Catholic intellectual who was editor in chief of the Solidarity newspaper; Halina Mikolajska, an actress and political activist; Jan Strzelecki, Professor of Pathology at the Academy of Science; Jacek Bierezin, a poet; Wiktor Woroszylski, a poet; Roman Zymand, Professor of History of Polish Literature at the Academy of Science; Jan Litynsky, a dissident; Riszard Bugaj, who headed the Solidarity Research Center; Bronislaw Geremek, a historian who was an adviser to Solidarity and Jacek Kuron, a leader of KOR.

They are said to include Stefan Amsterdanski, Professor of Philosophy; Adam Zagajewski, a poet; Anna Kowalska, a novelist, and Jan Kulas, head of Rural Solidarity.

Among those arrested in the past few days have been people charged by the authorities with inciting others to strike or with engaging in industrial sabotage. They included two workers at a match factory in Koszalin who, according to the Polish press agency PAP, poured glue into machines and removed a transmission belt.