Rare Link for the East

It can be said that the fruitful links between workers and intellectuals -something rare in the East bloc -began that month with the visit of Mr. Mazowiecki and a slight, bearded medieval historian, Bronislaw Geremek, to the striking Gdansk workers to hand over the appeal.

Both men stayed on in Gdansk and remained active as Soliidarity advisers even through martial law, when Mr. Mazowiecki was interned for a year. In 1981, on the advice of the Catholic Primate at the time, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, Mr. Walesa appointed Mr. Mazowiecki editor of Tygodnik Solidarnosc, the new Solidarity weekly.

As the Polish economy continued to deteriorate and as political change was regarded increasingly as the only means to reverse the collapse, Mr. Mazowiecki helped negotiate the end of the 1988 strikes and the round-table accords, which ended in April with Solidarity's legalization and the scheduling of the freest national elections in Poland since the 1940's.

Edited Catholic Weekly

Tadeusz Mazowiecki was born April 18, 1927, in Plock in central Poland. After studying law at Warsaw University, he entered journalism, becoming editor in chief of Wroclawski Tygodnik Katolicki, the Wroclaw Catholic Weekly, in southwest Poland. The job marked the start of Mr. Mazowiecki's decades of lay Catholic leadership culminating in his pivotal role within Solidarity.

With Solidarity's return to legal status, Mr. Mazowiecki resumed his post as editor of a revived Tygodnik Solidarnosc.

A reporter who works for him, asked about his hobbies, replied, ''Poles have no time for hobbies, but if he has anything like a hobby, it must be politics.''

With little experience in business, Mr. Mazowiecki will face a serious test in doing something about the moribund economy. But the single most pointed criticism that Mr. Mazowiecki faces in the rarified political atmosphere of Solidarity circles is grounded not in economics but in his links to the church.