TY - JOUR
AU - Zaremba, Marcin
AB - The young protesters in the United States and Western Europe had no idea about the parallel revolutions taking place east of the Elbe. The historian Tony Judt, one of the rebels, would admit later: “What does it tell us of the delusions of May 1968 that I cannot recall a single allusion to the Prague Spring, much less the Polish student uprising, in all of our earnest radical debates? … Looking back, I can’t help feeling we missed the boat … What did we know of the courage it took to withstand weeks of interrogation in Warsaw prisons, followed by jail sentences of one, two, or three years for students who had dared to demand the things we took for granted?”1 But as I look at the Western revolutions, I have the impression that they were not parallel processes but rather a mirror image of what was going on in Poland. On the face of it, the same things were happening: young people rebelled, and the establishment reacted. And yet, in this mirror image everything is different. At first glance, the portrait of Poland’s ’68 generation has a different background. Poland was ruled by the authoritarian regime of First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party Władysław Gomułka, who by that point was an ossified leader oblivious to public aspirations and consumer desires. The political system had undeniably softened, and the rule of law had improved, even though the older generations could still remember the Stalinist Great Fear. The “minor stabilization” of the sixties rejected the Stalinist economic modernization strategy in favor of more balanced growth and abandoned the collectivization of agriculture, deeming it potentially destabilizing to the whole system. Consumer goods became more readily available than in the previous decade, although they remained scarce. Industrialization increased the number of factory workers from 4.7 to 6.3 million, and Poland was transformed from a farming to an industrial-agricultural economy. For many farmers’ sons, moving to the city for a factory job meant social mobility. One of these sons was Lech Wałęsa, who wrote: “The 1960s brought a decade of smooth sailing and modest prosperity for the higher-ranked workers. Some would flatter themselves that they’d taken a step up the social ladder.”2 So far, no commonalities with the West. But they did exist. The cravings driven by universal cultural trends such as the new youth culture and new patterns of consumption had also reached Poland, feeding an appetite especially among the youth, whose expectations surpassed their parents’. This was evident in contemporaneous studies of young people’s aspirations.3 Untouched by the experience of Stalinism, these baby boomers did not sufficiently conform to the political system. Moreover, the members of this generation shared a powerful sense that their life’s goals were being blocked in this country under Gomułka’s leadership. Surveys from 1963 show that young workers were more critical of both their own and their factories’ work than their older colleagues were.4 In 1968 the population was very young: 47.8 percent had been born after the war, and the median age was 27.5. While in the U.S. the baby boom influenced the rise of the New Left, in Poland demographic factors were also decisive in the protests.5 The population’s growing hunger for virtually all consumer goods and services was linked to the coming of age of this generation, who tended to be better-educated and to want more materially and culturally. The painful gap between what people wanted and what they were able to get resulted in a surge in crime, an increase of as much as several hundred percent in 1965–1969. Young Poles, living in a cultural and material desert, certainly did not go out for a glass of wine as often as their peers in Paris or Rome did; nor were they as well dressed. But they did read the same books and listen to the same music. They certainly shared views of the Vietnam War, but not definitions of the Left. In Poland, which until 1956 was under the rule of forcibly united left-wing parties, there was absolutely no room for ideological debate. But a group of leftist intellectuals began to distance themselves from the authoritarian government. The “commando” group, which included University of Warsaw history student Adam Michnik, is a good example.6 Most of these young people came from leftist families, but they were drifting away from the state’s doctrine and political practices. Their ideological gurus were Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, onetime Marxists who in 1964 wrote “An Open Letter to the Party,” thereby marking the beginning of the long goodbye to communism. And this is another similarity-difference. Just as in the West, in Poland the intellectuals were crucial to the March developments, but while Marxism was still sexy in Paris, in Warsaw its attraction had waned. As early as 1964, a group of intellectuals had signed their names to what came to be known as the “Letter of the 34,” in which they lodged a protest against tightened government censorship and demanded the right to criticize and the freedom to access truthful information. The transformation of the thinking of the eminent philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, once a principled Marxist, illustrates well the erosion of faith followed by its rejection. In his October 1966 lecture at the University of Warsaw (organized by Adam Michnik), Kołakowski harshly criticized the Gomułka regime. His punishment was expulsion from the governing party. Thus, the ideological roots of the Polish experience were different from those of the events in Paris and Berkeley. In Poland, a national aspect was also a factor. In January 1968, the Polish insurgency was triggered by a seemingly trivial matter: deeming it anti-Russian, the government suspended a production of Adam Mickiewicz’s nineteenth-century play Forefathers’ Eve at the National Theater in Warsaw. The ensuing protest led to what became known as March ’68. At the demonstration that followed the play’s final performance, at the foot of the statue of Mickiewicz that stands close to the university gates, students shouted, “We want Mickiewicz!” On February 29, a special meeting of the writers’ association in Warsaw made the same demand. That meeting is best remembered for Stefan Kisielewski’s reference to living under a “dictatorship of dimwits.” The poet Antoni Słonimski, the historian Paweł Jasienica, and the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski were equally harsh. The assembly passed a resolution denouncing the government’s cultural policies. In early March, the University of Warsaw reached its boiling point. Flyers publicizing the banning of Forefathers’ Eve and the persecution of the students who had protested after its last show covered bulletin boards and walls. On March 3 came the shocking news that Adam Michnik and his fellow student Henryk Szlajfer had been removed from the university. The “commandos” decided to protest, and on March 8 a rally was held outside the university library. A student read the draft of a resolution protesting the violations of Poland’s constitution, the dismissal of Michnik and Szlajfer, and the termination of the production of Forefathers’ Eve. Militia and bused-in party activists dispersed the demonstrators, violating the university’s autonomy. Someone wrote to a friend: “It’s all straight out of Dante. They smashed faces with their fists, massacred girls with police batons. They randomly hit defenseless, innocent passersby. Girls went running through strangers’ apartments, people were trying to hide, to protect themselves. It was truly a ‘Bloody Sunday.’”7 Thus, the initial force of nationalism with an anti-Russian backdrop that had driven youth to revolt was supplanted by demands for the truth (their motto was “The newspapers are lying”), criticism of government violations of university autonomy, protests against militia violence, and demonstrations of solidarity with the Warsaw students. The ensuing dissension quickly spilled across the whole country, leading to strikes, demonstrations, rallies, flyers, and slogans painted on walls in university cities such as Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, and Gdańsk, but also in places that had no universities. Most of the protesters were students, but not all. Lech Wałęsa wrote about one of the largest demonstrations, which took place in Gdańsk and involved a large number of workers from the city’s shipyard: “Apparently, some protestors had armed themselves with coiled steel springs, which when pulled back and released, served as projectiles. When the militia charged, without shields or other protection, they met unexpected resistance, running head-on into the released steel springs. Totally defeated, they suddenly realized that the riot hadn’t been stirred up by intellectuals, but by workers who had taken the side of the students. One militiaman, covered with blood, shouted: ‘Sweet Jesus, what kind of shit have we got ourselves into!’”8 The numbers of detainees nationwide bear out the general trend: March ’68 was a generational movement, cemented by a generation’s solidarity. Fearing that the rebellion might spread outside this generation and, worse, sweep through the working class, the government embarked on a mass propaganda campaign. The Jews became both its release valve and its main theme. With many Poles of Jewish extraction holding white-collar jobs and managerial positions, it proved easy to juxtapose them to the industrial workers, many of whom already resented not only the Jews but also the intelligentsia. The antisemitic Kulturkampf portrayed the nascent generational revolt as fundamentally a racial problem. The youth rebellion was exploited to give the government a new, Jew-free face. Countless articles appeared attacking people of Jewish origin as “Zionists,” “firebrands,” and “the revisionist intelligentsia.” Workers’ rallies were staged in factories. Gomułka took the lead in this spectacle. His March 19 speech focused on “Jewish nationalists” as the instigators of the whole chain of events. Many prominent professors were removed from universities, and virtually all institutions carried out antisemitic purges. A mere month later, the government could gloat: it had pacified the young people, and the workers had not budged. Flower power and the thrill of breaking through society’s traditional restrictions did not come to Poland in 1968. On this side of the looking glass, enthusiasm and hope were smothered. And Jews left Poland by the thousands. But for the Polish government, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The urban intelligentsia’s reaction to the March campaign—which evoked the worst associations with Kristallnacht—was one of horror. The rulers had dug a chasm between themselves and the intelligentsia. While the rebellion did not start out as anti-systemic, it ended up that way. It eventually shattered any illusions about socialism that thousands of young people may have had. The lesson they were taught in March about strikes and demonstrations, militia brutality and jail terms, left them emotionally scarred, inoculated against ideological poisons. It turned them into non-conformists with a common language. It created a distinct generational community with March ’68 as its formative experience. This shared March experience translated into political and aesthetic choices and contributed to the creation of a network of strong ties. The dissident Workers’ Defense Committee was created in 1976 by people of several generations with different experiences, and a large group of March ’68 veterans was among them. For many in the Polish intelligentsia, the Solidarity revolution was a continuation of March ’68, and the Solidarity strikes of 1980 were a culmination of the student strikes of 1968. To this day, people of the March generation continue to play an important role as public intellectuals. —Translated by Maya Latynski Marcin Zaremba earned degrees in History and Sociology from the University of Warsaw. A member of the History Department at UW, he is interested in the social history of Communist Poland, and is currently conducting research on subjects such as “The Great Disappointment,” “The Origin of the Solidarity Revolution,” and “The Decade of Gierek.” His book The Great Fear, 1944–1947: The People’s Response to the Crisis (Warsaw, 2001) has won many awards in Poland. He is the author of more than forty articles in periodicals and collections of papers. He is a permanent correspondent for the weekly magazine Polityka. Notes 1Tony Judt, “Revolutionaries,” New York Review of Books, February 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/10/revolutionaries/. 2Lech Wałęsa, A Way of Hope: An Autobiography (New York, 1987), 46. 3Wiesława Chmielowska, “Niektóre problemy rynku młodzieżowego w świetle badań,” Roczniki Instytutu Handlu Wewnętrznego, no. 3 (1969): 51–59; Alicja Kusińska, “Opinie konsumentów o dostosowaniu szczegółowej struktury podaży artykułów odzieżowych do potrzeb,” Roczniki Instytutu Handlu Wewnętrznego, no. 2 (1970): 34. 4Włodzimierz Wesołowski, Robotnicy o swojej pracy i swoich zakładach (Warsaw, 1963). 5Jack A. Goldstone and Doug McAdam, “Contention in Demographic and Life-Course Context,” in Ronald R. Aminzade et al., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2001), 195–221, here 209. 6They were known as “commandos” because of their practice of showing up at various meetings and breaking them up by asking uncomfortable questions. 7Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, sign. 747/7, Notatka służbowa, March 10, 1968, 7. 8Wałęsa, A Way of Hope, 53. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - 1968 in Poland: The Rebellion on the Other Side of the Looking Glass
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/123.3.769
DA - 2018-05-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/1968-in-poland-the-rebellion-on-the-other-side-of-the-looking-glass-fO6687qGu0
SP - 1
EP - 772
VL - Advance Article
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -