Peter Green

The Third Round in Poland

At first sight, the victorious Polish workers strike against price increases in
June 1976 was a dazzling example of Marxs observation about historical
repetitions: the first time, on the Baltic in 1970, as tragedy; and now a farcical
re-run of Gomulkas attempt to cut living standards by raising prices.* The same
issue, the same working-class response, and the same climb-down by the rgime.
The only difference seemed to be the hectic pace of the spectacle the second time
round, with the Prime Minister reappearing on TV within the space of twenty-four
hours to directly contradict his earlier sober announcement in even more solemn
tones. Otherwise, the reader of the Western press might think, nothing in Poland
has changed. Economics and politics have remained fixed in the same mould as at
the time Gomulka made his hurried exit. This impression can be easily reinforced
by the knowledge that Poland, with a population almost as large as that of East
Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary put together and with the second largest
Communist Party in the Soviet bloc, differs in a number of important respects
from other East European countries. The wave of Stalinist terror that swept
69

the Communist Parties of the Soviet buffer zone at the end of the 1940s
touched the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) less than almost any
otherits leading Titoist, Gomulka, was not even put on trial,
much less executed. Above all, in October 1956 a sweeping mass
movement that brought Gomulka to power in the face of bitter Soviet
hostility resulted in a number of changes that subsequently marked
Poland off from its neighbours: most importantly, an agriculture still
overwhelmingly in the hands of private peasant proprietors; a strongly
entrenched Catholic Church; the only genuinely independent group of
Parliamentary deputies in Eastern Europethe Catholic Znak group in
the Sejm; and an intelligentsia with considerably more freedom of
expression than is the norm in the rest of Eastern Europe. All these
undoubted peculiarities of contemporary Poland can lead the casual
observer to believe not only that little has changed in the domestic
configuration of forces, but also that Polish politics is a law unto itself.
Unusual events can happen in Poland that could never be tolerated in
other East European states, and ipso facto the recent upheavals in the
summer of 1976 have no general significance for East European politics
as a whole.
The aim of this article is not to deny either the connections with 197071
or the important peculiarities of Polish society and politics. But it
attempts to show the way in which the largely misunderstood crisis in the
winter of 197071 produced a political dynamic whose contradictions are
both specific to the 1970s and highly characteristic of the problems
besetting other East European rgimes in the second half of this decade.
Furthermore, the interlocking of these essentially international
contradictions of the bureaucratic rgimes in Eastern Europe with the
peculiarities of Polish society has produced a highly explosive
conjuncture in Poland and one that will increasingly demand the
attention of the revolutionary left throughout Europe.

Poland during the Baltic Crisis of 197071

The events of June 1976 were not a re-run of the strike movement at the
end of 1970. But the political relationship of forces within which the
Gierek leadership has had to operate right up to the present was shaped in
a profound and concrete way by the working-class offensive which began
on the Baltic coast in December 1970. For this movement was a good deal
more than a sudden elemental explosion replacing one face at the top of
the bureaucratic pyramid with another. A number of features of the
workers movement in what we might call, for the sake of brevity, the
Baltic crisis need to be stressed.
The Working-class Offensive

First, there was the extraordinary scope and dynamism of the working*This article is taken from a much longer work on the political crisis in Poland, due to
appear as an NLB book later this year. This extract omits all but passing references to such
crucial elements in the evolving configuration of forces as the Polish peasantry, the intelligentsia, the church and the Soviet leadership. The article as it stands is thus inevitably onesided in its concentration upon the relationship between the Party leadership and the working class. Nevertheless, this relationship remains in my view the central, determining element in the Polish crisis, and thus justifies the selection of material for the space available.
70

class upsurge. On 12 December, a Saturday, the Council of Ministers

announced increases in food prices averaging about 30 per cent. The
following Monday morning, 3,000 workers held a mass meeting at the
Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk on the Baltic.1 When union officials refused to
take any action against the price increases, the workers struck and marched to the local radio station to try to broadcast an appeal to the local
population. Blocked by the militia, the crowd of shipyard workers
marched on the citys Party headquarters shouting Bread and The press
is lying. The police attacked and the crowd attempted to burn down the
building. The next day Gdansk was in the throes of a popular uprising
and the strike movement spread to Gdynia and Elblag, where the masses
also stoned the Party headquarters. The workers of Szczecin also struck,
and on Wednesday the 16th strikes swept through the Katowice area in
Upper Silesia and work also stopped in Poznan. The movement was no
longer confined to the Baltic. On the 17th there was a massacre of workers
in Gdynia and further deaths of workers in Slupsk. At this point a fullscale working-class mobilization in Szczecin took the leadership of the
movement, under the direction of the strike committee at the Adolf
Warski shipyards. By the evening of Thursday the 17th tanks were
entering the main Baltic ports, while the movement of strikes and
demonstrations spread to Wroclaw and Cracow. Every town in the Baltic
region, including Starograd and Malbork, was on strike. On Friday the
18th many of the large factories in Warsaw, including the famous Zeran
car plant that had led the workers movement in 1956, downed tools. The
leaders of the strike committees in Warsaw proclaimed a general strike for
Monday 21 December.2 At this point, over the weekend of 1920
December, the Central Committee met and removed the already sick
Gomulka, declaring Edward Gierek the new leader of the Party.
But this did not end the movement; it was only the beginning. Gierek
announced a whole series of economic concessions in the Sejm on 23
December: a promise not to raise prices further during the next two
years, a new bonus scheme, seven billion zloty worth of allowances for
low-income workers, a crash housing programme, etc.3 These did not
end the movement. The strike committees remained in operation and
organized repeated strikes on the Baltic to press for sweeping political
changes. On 24 January, in the midst of an occupation-strike by the
Szczecin shipyard workers and continuing strikes in other parts of the
city, Party Secretary Gierek and Prime Minister Jaroszewicz arrived to
discuss with a mass meeting of strikers for nine continuous hours.4 By
offering further concessions, Gierek was able to end the Szczecin strikes.
But this did not stop the movement. The strike committees in Szczecin
and Gdansk were transformed into workers committees, which
continued to hold sway as the workers elected leaders in the shipyards.
1
Glos Wybrzeza, 28 December 1970; see the French translation of this local daily paper in
Est et Ouest, 1628 February 1971.
2
The most detailed account of the strike movement is in Paul Barton, Misre et Rvolte de
lOuvrier Polonais, Paris 1971. For an important analysis of the crisis, see Pologne: le Crpuscule
des Bureaucrates, Cahiers Rouges, Nouvelle Srie Internationale No. 3, Paris 1971.
3
Trybuna Ludu (the Party daily), 247 December 1970.
4
See the translation of excerpts from that extraordinary nine-hour meeting in NLR 72,
MarchApril 1972. A full version of the tapes smuggled out of Poland was published in
Rewolta Szczecinska i jej znaczenie, Paris 1971.

71

They maintained their authority also over the working class in the
surrounding areas, holding a large number of mass meetings in factories
throughout the Baltic region, and supervising new trade-union elections
in the shipyards. The rgime had frozen prices, but at the rate fixed by
Gomulka in December and not at the pre-December levels. In addition,
the working class was raising a series of political demands for trade-union
and press independence, as well as a mass of economic and social
grievances. Gierek had declared that it was utterly impossible to return to
the old price levels of 1966 but the movement was not receding. Gierek
tried to defuse the ferment in Gdansk by holding a further meeting with
the workers there, but still the workers organized and pressed their
demands. Strikes were continuing in other parts of the country, notably
at the large tractor factory at Ursus near Warsaw, where Party leaders
tried in vain to persuade a meeting of strikers delegates to return to
work.5
Then on 11 February over 10,000 mainly women workers at seven textile
factories in Lodz struck, and by the next day Polands second largest
industrial city was gripped by a mass strike. Gierek pleaded for trust and
patience but without effect. On the evening of 14 February, Prime
Minister Jaroszewicz arrived in Lodz together with three other Politburo
members to meet the strikers. After a farcical incident whereby
Jaroszewicz discovered that the enthusiastic mass meeting he was
addressing in the citys main theatre was packed with Party functionaries
posing as strikers, the Prime Minister was eventually taken to a meeting
of delegates from the occupation strikes at the Marchlewski works and
remained discussing with the workers throughout the night. The next
morning Jaroszewicz left the factory empty-handed: the Lodz workers
had refused to budge from their basic demands, especially that calling for
a return to 1966 price levels. In the meantime, Gierek had hurriedly met the Soviet leaders and on 15 February Warsaw Radio
announced that, thanks to a Soviet loan of 100 million dollars in hard
currency, the Party leadership had decided to impose a two-year pricefreeze at 1966 levels. The Party had capitulated to the Lodz workers while
the strike was in full swing and after the failure of negotiations. Even then
the Lodz strike did not end until two further days had elapsed.6
And even then, the movement did not end. A regional conference of
workers delegates had met in Szczecin on 15 February; after discussions
lasting twenty-six hours, the conference proposed to create a new tradeunion federation, since the existing one had no real links with the
workers. At the Central Committee Plenum in the middle of April,
Politburo member Edward Babiuch referred to the continuing strikes
and protest movements in the country.7 The new trade-union federation
did not come into being, but the workers committees which had
emerged out of strike committees were still active in April when some of
them were reported to have voluntarily disbanded. Others continued
throughout the year and one report in the autumn of 1972 stated that the
workers committee in Szczecin remained a major influence in the city.8
5

Barton, op. cit. p. 150.

On 17 February, Warsaw Radio announced that the Lodz strike was ending.
7 Trybuna Ludu, 18 April 1971.
8 Neal Ascherson in The Observer, 24 September 1972.
6

72

In short, the so-called Baltic strikes against Gomulka in 1970 took place
mainly in 1971, were not at all confined to the Baltic, and were not
confined to strike forms of organization. Most importantly, from the
point of view of this analysis, they were primarily fought not against Gomulka
at all, but against Gierek.
The second crucial feature of the Baltic upsurge was the following, which
must already be evident from the outline of the movements dynamism:
the thrust of the movement was not simply prices at all. A movement thrown up
purely for economic demands could not have sustained itself in this way.
The global political character of the mass movement was indicated by the
repeated occurrence of violent assaults on Party headquarters, in one city
after another, and by the lists of demands drawn up by the best organized
sections of the movement.9 Great prominence was given to the struggle
for basic democratic political rights: immediate free elections for the socalled workers councils and trade unions; complete independence from
the Party for the trade unions; an end to censorship and press lies;
demands for the trials of those responsible for the killing of more than a
hundred workers in the Baltic ports during December, and demands for
the dismantling of the repressive forcesthese were absolutely central
concerns of the workers in the Baltic upsurge. Such a programme
presents a potentially deadly menace to the bureaucratic rgimes in
Eastern Europe, whoever raises it.
A Watershed in Political Consciousness

Another important sign of the political maturity of the movement was the
fact that it very quickly moved from elemental, spontaneous beginnings
to the creation of stable, authoritative organizations of struggle with
leaderships capable of spreading the movement and articulating its
demands. This leads on to a third, more general feature of the workers
upsurge: it marked an important stage in the historical development of
the Polish working class. The Polish workers movement has a long
revolutionary tradition, with few rivals in other countries. The history of
the Russian revolutionary movement has become the common property
of the international labour movement. What is less well known is the fact
that a full year before Bloody Sunday of January 1905, the working class
in Warsaw was demonstrating against the Russo-Japanese war,
triggering numerous strikes throughout the Polish territories of the
Russian Empire. In early 1905, a successful general strike was organized
in all of Russian Poland, in solidarity with the workers of St
Petersburg. In June 1905, the workers of Lodz held the city during three
days of street fighting.10 In support of the Moscow uprising in December,
the workers of Lodz, Sosnowiec and Radom demonstrated in the teeth of
fierce repression. Again, the revolutionary crisis of autumn 1923 in
9

The programmes of demands available in the West are: the first set of demands of the
Szczecin strike committee, numbering twenty-two, in Barton, op. cit. pp. 1334; the
Gdansk set, also in Barton, pp. 1445; and the second set of Szczecin demands, in NLR 72.
10
Much of the information here is drawn from M. K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of
Poland, Cambridge Mass. 1959the standard bourgeois history of the Polish Party. See also
Isaac Deutschers assessment of Polish Communism between the wars, The Tragedy of the
Polish Communist Party in Tamara Deutscher (ed.), Marxism in Our Time, London 1972.
Deutscher described the organization in this period as a great and heroic party.
73

Germany is a familiar part of European working-class history; but less

well known is the Polish general strike in November of that year, during
which the workers of Cracow took over the city, disarmed a battalion of
infantry and defeated a cavalry attack, and voluntarily handed the city
back to the Polish bourgeoisie only through the persuasion of the
leadership of the Polish Socialist Party. The great sit-in strikes in the
United States during the 1930s are another familiar part of working-class
history. What tends to be forgotten is the fact that the tactic of factory
occupations was at first called the Polish strike after its originators, the
Polish textile workers, who used it to great effect in 1931. In 1936 no less
than 85 per cent of the entire work-force in large and medium-sized
Polish industry was on strike at one time or another.
But between the Lodz general strike against the Tsarist autocracy and the
Lodz general strike against Gierek seventy years later, the class conscious
core of the Polish working class has repeatedly identified its socialist
aspirations with political leaders who have led the class into a blind alley.
Before the war, it followed the Polish Socialist Party to a series of defeats,
while the minority supporting the pre-war Communist Party witnessed
its complete destruction by Stalin in 1938 as a nest of Trotskyists. After
the war, at the time of the merger of the new CP and the rump of the PPS, a
sizeable part of the working class supported the new rgime only to find
its hopes trampled on during the Stalinization drive at the beginning of
the 1950s. In 1956, the workers placed their trust in that wing of the
Partysymbolized by Gomulkathat had suffered repression at the
hands of Stalins agents. Now fifteen years of Gomulka had convinced the
core sections of the working class that some alternative had to be found to
placing hopes in one grouping or another of the Party leadership. In this
sense, 197071 marked a real historical turning-point: the first
beginnings of a search for a new line of advance among the class
conscious elements within the Polish working class. It was this new
attitude which armed the leaders of the strike movement against blind
faith in the promises of Gierek, and indeed prepared them to handle the
new leaderships actions as political manoeuvres.
The full significance of this change in consciousness amongst the
advanced layers of the Polish workers can only be understood against the
background of the enormous growth in the numerical strength and social
weight of the working class since the Second World War. In 1938 urban
workers made up less than 10 per cent of the total economically active
population. A rough outline of the social structure of Poland on 31
December 1970 is given in Table 1, and shows the preponderance of
manual workers in the country.
TABLE 1
Polish social structure 1970

Category
Manual workers
White-collar workers
Private Peasants
Others
Total
SOURCE:

1974.
74

% of total population
498
224
251
27
100

% of working population
415
229
329
27
100

Alexander Matejko; Social Change and Stratification in Eastern Europe, New York

The sustained working-class offensive of 197071 has no parallel in the

post-war history of Eastern Europe. Gierek himself acknowledged that it
brought the country to the verge of civil war.11 And equally
unprecedentedly, the Polish working class of 197071 was not defeated.
The sequel to October 1956 had been the defeat of the Lodz transport
workers strike in 1957. The sequel to December 1970 was the victory of
the Lodz workers in February 1971. And in spite of subsequent
repression of strike leaders, the rgime never attempted to confront and
defeat the working class in front of the Polish nation in open struggle.
After Gomulkas attempt to crush the movement by force, the new Party
leadership was forced to resort to desperate manoeuvres in order to
survive and regain the initiative. The entire population of Poland
watched this humiliating spectacle over a period of months, as Gierek and
Jaroszewicz attempted to gain political authority by negotiating with
striking workers in Szczecin, Gdansk and Lodz, workers who had fought
on the streets against the police and the army and who had been branded
as criminal, hooligan elements throughout the Polish press in December.
Both on the Baltic and in Lodz the working-class members of the PUWP
had been drawn into this deadly contest on the side of their fellow
workers, some even playing a prominent role: seven out of the thirtyeight members of the Szczecin strike committee were erstwhile Party
members and the Gdansk strike committee appears to have contained a
slightly larger number.12 The rebuilding of the political rgime and the
entire orientation of the Party leadership had to be worked out anew from
scratch. As the Politburos report to the February Central Committee
meeting stated: events have shown that any disruption of the bond
between the Party and the working class . . . can cause a serious political
upheaval in our country. It added that the Party must always in the
future aim at preventing any conflicts with the working class.
A glimpse of the chaos in some of the local organizations of the PUWP was
given by the district Party Secretary of Malbork, who wrote during the
crisis that there is no unity in the Partys activities. Some of the comrades
lost their heads, they started to attack the Party.13 Rgimes like that in
Poland derive their political legitimacy from a claim to represent par
excellence the interests of the industrial working class, and in line with this
claim the leaders of the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe have to
continually strive to demonstrate proletarian links, not only by excluding
all other socialist political formations from political life, but also by being
able to demonstrate support, however passive, in the form of genuine
working-class membership of the monopolistic Communist Party. The
element of political repression through the militia, the army and the
political police is vital to these bureaucratic rgimes. But it is not enough,
particularly in a crisis of the sort that occurred in 197071 when armed
confrontation proved counter-productive and the rgime could survive
only by means of political manoeuvre and the establishing of political
alliances of some sort with different sectors of society. And if we look at
the social composition of the PUWP on the eve of the Baltic crisis, we find
that, at least according to official figures, no less than 40 per cent of total
11

In a speech to a meeting of newspaper editors published in Prasa Polska, November 1971.

See Barton, op. cit. p. 146.
13
Polityka, 13 February 1971.
12

75

Party membership consisted of manual workers.14 By the end of the 1960s

this meant that 13 per cent of the total number of manual workers in
Poland were Party members: at the time of the Baltic uprising one Polish
worker in every ten was a member of the ruling party. And during the
crisis itself, with the partial exception of upper Silesia, Giereks own
carefully nurtured industrial fiefdom and centre of the coal-mining
industry, with wages well above the national average and with a more
limited strike-wave, the Polish working class had en masse deserted the
Party in an active and unmistakable way.
In such circumstances, study of the Baltic crisis obliges us to recognize
not only the unparalleled force of the working-class offensive, but also
another no less remarkable fact: the way in which the new leadership was
able to survive the crisis intact and even bring a semblance of order into
political life by the Spring of 1971.
TABLE

Party membership 194574

Date
1945 (January)
1945 (April)
1947 (July)
1948 (December)
1949
1954
1959
1960
1965
1970
1974

Total
% Workers % Peasants % White-collar % Others
?
?
?
30,000
80+
300,000
?
?
?
?
850,000
?
?
?
?
1,420,000
?
?
?
?
1,368,000
600
180
173
47
1,296,936
480
138
362
20
1,018,100
400
115
432
53
1,154,700
403
118
?
?
1,775,000
401
117
?
?
2,320,000
403
115
425
57
2,330,000
400
100
?
?

SOURCE:

B. Lazitch, Les Partis Communistes DEurope; Hans Roos, A History of Modern

Poland; Dziewanowski, History of the Polish Communist Party; Jan B. Weydenthal, Party
Development in Contemporary Poland.

Giereks Strategy
During his early period in office, Gierek was subjected to a good deal of
14

The stable figure of 40 per cent for working-class membership during the sixties does not
at all mean that the actual worker members during the decade were relatively stable in composition. During the period from 1959 to 1970, about 450,000 workers were expelled from
the Party; in other words, the 800,000 or so working-class Party members in 1970 were a
rather fluid quantity, much more fluid than other social groups in the Party. This fact
becomes all the more important when we remember the fact that the criteria for workers
recruitment to the Party were considerably lower than the criteria for members of other
social groups. Almost any worker could join at will, and a workers Party card would be
removed only for serious misdemeanours, involving criminal or immoral activities,
drunkenness or grave disciplinary offences. It should also be remembered that official
Party figures for working-class membership are not fully reliable. Various categories of
employee with supervisory functions or privileged positions in the work-place would be
included as workers, and the continuous pressure from central authorities on local Party
secretaries to demonstrate a high proletarian composition, as a sign of local Party
authority, encouraged looseness and exaggeration in membership returns. When it is also
remembered that Party membership could provide real if limited benefits for the workers
involved and their families, the figures for working-class Party membership are in fact a
good deal less impressive than the bald statistic of 40 per cent might suggest. It did not
mean that the Party commanded a high degree of political support within the working class.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the link with the working class is a consideration of
real political importance for such rgimes.

76

criticism from some of his colleagues in other East European capitals,

notably from the embattled Husak rgime across the border in
Czechoslovakia.15 But once the initial decision had been taken to avoid a
head-on confrontation with the working class and any possible need for
Warsaw Pact troops, there had been no other option but to rely on the
capacity of Gierek to contain the working-class movement and divert it
from objectively revolutionary demands by offering massive economic
concessions. The Soviet leadership had backed Gierek all the way on this
course, even though it created a configuration of forces in the country
which severely limited Giereks medium-term strategic options. In the
first place, the working-class movement had not been defeated: indeed,
Gierek had been forced to come to terms with the strike committees and
directly lean on them to derive the necessary political authority for his
leadership. In the second place, Gierek had been required to offer major
economic hostages to the workers: accepting the initial basic claim of the
mass of workers to freeze prices at 1966 levels for two years, he had also
promised an uninterrupted rise in working-class living standards. In fact,
the Party leadership appealed repeatedly to the masses to judge its future
performance on this criterion. Its message to the working class was:
accept consumer goods as a surrogate for proletarian democracy.
Industry and Agriculture

Any sharp and sustained rise in workers living standards would be

something new for the Polish economy. In February 1971, the Politburo
admitted: It must be stated quite clearly that during the years 196670,
Poland had the lowest rate of increase in real wages of all the countries of
Comecon . . . There were some groups of workers which actually suffered
a decline in their real wages.16 Furthermore, the economic situation was
critical. The two key fronts of the economic battle were an industrial
system whose institutional arrangements were producing economic
chaos; and a private agriculture under-capitalized and gravely hampered
by the proliferation of tiny, uneconomic peasant plots.17 On both fronts,
moreover, the new leadership faced long-standing policy debates, both
sides of which offered options which appeared impracticable in the
conditions of 1971.
On the industrial front, the traditional commandist model of planning
had been maintained in Poland throughout the 1960s; by 1970 it had
brought the Polish economy to the brink of disaster. Mountains of
unwanted and unsaleable goods were moving from factory to warehouse
at twice the rate of retail sales by the end of the sixties. In the second half
of 1970, total inventories had reached the gigantic figure of 500,000
million zlotyhalf Polands estimated gross national product for the
year !18 The formula of economic growth through commandist planning
15
A bourgeois press source quoted in Intercontinental Press, 16 October 1972, states:
Persistent reports in Warsaw suggest that the Czechoslovak Communist Party has been
raising more criticisms of developments in Poland, most recently at a meeting of Party
leaders in the Crimea.
16
Trybuna Ludu, 15 February 1971.
17
By 1970, 30 per cent of all peasant farms comprised less than 3 hectares of land, a pattern of
land-tenure wasteful of agricultural resources since such holdings could not sustain modern
mechanized methods of farming.
18
M. Kowalewski, Trybuna Ludu 13 May 1971.

77

in a closed economy had to be abandoned. Yet the workers upsurge

which catapulted Gierek to power had simultaneously shot down the
long-standing alternative of an institutional economic reform which the
Gierek faction had itself been arguing for in the late sixties. Indeed, the
supreme irony was that poor Gomulka, who had equivocated for so long
over the implementation of a thoroughgoing technocratic economic
reform, triggered the movement which brought him down in December
1970 by finally trying to push through just such a reform project. And
Gierek had come into power on a wave of opposition to his own factions
previous economic strategy! He had urgently to seek a third road on the
industrial front.19
The traditional alternatives for agriculture were equally barren: to
attempt any solution to the agricultural crisis by means of a political
campaign to collectivize the small peasant plots would immediately
arouse the fury of the entire peasantry and promote a confrontation with
the Church, without boosting agricultural production at all in the short
run. On the contrary, it would raise the spectre of a peasant strike and a
food crisis in the cities. But to continue along Gomulkas path of
maintaining the present tenure arrangements indefinitely, while using a
heavy state procurement system to try to squeeze growing quantities of
food out of agriculture, would merely perpetuate the existing stagnation.
On both fronts the new leaderships solutions were ingenious. Giereks
advisers were imaginative and bold enough to realize the potential value
of the moves towards international dtente for rejuvenating Polish
industry without making any sharp choice between different domestic
planning mechanisms. In any case, comprehensive domestic schemes like
the Hungarian New Economic Mechanism were suspect in Moscow,
while Brezhnevs drive for Western credits and an expansion of EastWest trade was being hailed as the latest example of the Soviet
leaderships creative application of Marxism-Leninism to modern
conditions. The first plank of Giereks economic strategy was to seize on
this Soviet precedent and emulate the Soviet example with an enthusiasm
unmatched in Eastern Europe. Building on the friendship treaty which
Gomulka, just before his political demise, had concluded with Brandt,
Gierek turned to the capitalist West in search of massive loans. These
were to produce a foreign-credit-led investment boom in the Polish
economy. The credits would be used to import a new set of means of
production for large sectors of Polish industry; the latter would in turn be
able to use the new modern equipment to export to the capitalist world,
pay back the old credits and lay the basis for new ones, thus generating
sustained economic growth. In the meantime, reforms of domestic
institutions would at first be small and then gradual, mainly geared to the
most dynamic and export-oriented sectors of the Polish economy. More
important would be an effort to use the increases in real wages achieved
by Polish workers to step up productivity agreements and increasingly tie
19

It is true that Gierek had objected to some aspects of Gomulkas economic planit had
been piloted by an old factional opponent of hisbut the general economic strategy was
pushed for by Gierek himself throughout the late sixties. See Michael Gamarnikow,
Poland: Political Pluralism in a One-Party State, Problems of Communism, JulyAugust
1967, on the Gierek factions positions in the late sixties.

78

future wage increases to further productivity deals, piece-work,

measured-day-work and bonus schemes. While taking a leaf out of
Brezhnevs book in the field of grand strategy, Gierek planned to operate
at the micro level with the aid of business management hand-books
fashionable in the West in the late 1960s, using generous, once-off wage
increases as a bribe for higher productivity. In this neat way Gierek hoped
to raise living standards without either attacking the workers directly or
offending the Soviet leadership.
In agriculture, the new leaderships strategy was equally imaginative.
Gierek was not frightened to abolish Gomulkas shibboleth of allegedly
Leninist orthodoxycompulsory state purchases for the bulk of the
peasants produce. He was also prepared to offer generous economic
incentives to the private peasantry, in the form of free health care and
higher procurement prices.20 This did not mean, however, that Gierek
intended to allow the present tenure arrangements to continue
indefinitely. But instead of using the traditional method of
collectivization through political coercion, the new leadership invented
an economic incentive to persuade growing numbers of peasants to give
up their uneconomic private plots voluntarily. The rgime offered an
increasingly elderly peasant farm population attractive pensions in return
for the transfer of their private plots to a state land fund. This could be
credibly presented as a generous means of relieving ageing farmers of the
need to labour on into their old age, to keep up a meagre subsistence after
their sons had long since travelled to the cities in search of industrial jobs.
Furthermore, the state Land Fund was to be formally (though to a
negligible extent in practice) entitled to hand its newly acquired land not
only to collective farms but also to the most efficient private farmersa
useful way of turning doubts about the scheme on the part of rich farmers
into possible enthusiasm. In this way Gierek hoped to both increase
production and keep the peasantry contented, while gaining kudos with
Moscow.
Dynamic Economic Growth

In the heady days of 1972 and 1973, when the rgimes new economic
policy was bringing an increasingly religious bent to the imagery of the
Party propagandists, terms like the Polish economic miracle, or the
resurrection of Polish industry became fashionable. And there is no
doubt that between 1971 and 1976, both the Polish economy and workers living standards grew more rapidly than ever before. Between 1971
and 1976, the drive for industrial modernization resulted in a situation
where, by the beginning of last year, 43 per cent of all means of
production in Polish industry were less than five years old.21

20
In March 1971, supplies of fodder to the farmers were increased and procurement prices
raised for meat, lard, and milk. (Trybuna Ludu, 20 March). In April, a programme of
sweeping changes was announced (Trybuna Ludu, 18 April): all compulsory deliveries to the
state were to be abolished; full property titles were granted to over a million farmers whose
property status had not been secure; comprehensive free health services were granted to the
families of private farmers; and a basic change in the system of land taxes was promised.
21
Trybuna Ludu, 23 January 1976.

79

Moreover, the Party leaderships promises to gear economic

development towards improving living standards were in considerable
measure made good, thanks to a big shift of investment resources, as
shown in Table 3.
TABLE 3
Average growth rates of consumer goods production
as % of the growth of producer goods production

19615
673

196670
702

19714
953

SOURCE: Stanislaw Paradysz, Relative Growth of Producer and Consumer Goods, Nowe
Drogi, March 1976.

As Table 4 shows, the stagnant real incomes of the 1960s bear small
resemblance to the rate of growth of Polish real incomes during the first
five years of the 1970s. The official figure for the growth of average real
wages during the entire five year period to the end of 1975 is 40 per cent
(the growth in money wages being 56 per cent).22 Although this figure
exaggerates the gains madeby, for example, not taking into account the
rise in prices on the private markets23there is no question that Polish
living standards rose very rapidly: during the whole decade of the 1960s
the official rise of real wages had been a mere 20 per cent; in half the time
the rate of increase had doubled. How was this achieved? What were the
sources of economic growth?
TABLE 4
Increases in real incomes as % of the figure for the previous year

Bulgaria
Czechoslovakia
East Germany
Hungary
Poland
Rumania

1971
30
55
40
50
103
86

1972
60
62
60
35
119
65

1973
79
62
57
48
142
44

1974
50
43
48
66
114
58

1975
47
44
44
38
120
90

SOURCES: Nowe Drogi, April 1975, pp. 5051; Voprosy Ekonomiki, January 1975, pp. 90100.
TABLE 5
Polish trade in millions of exchange zloty: % increases (1970 100)

IMPORTS
1970
Comecon countries
9,503
EEC countries
2,409
EFTA countries
629
Other developed
capitalist countries
683
Total imports
14,430
EXPORTS
Comecon countries
8,600
EEC countries
666
EFTA countries
2,423
Other developed
capitalist countries
939
Total exports
14,191

1971
10,407
2,821
773

1972
11,519
4,160
1,268

1973
12,902
7,006
2,163

1974
14,717
10,558
3,646

% increase
1549
4383
5797

813
16,151

1,251
19,612

2,428
26,103

3,478
34,823

5092
2413

9,206
736
2,777

10,991
948
3,287

12,418
1,144
4,485

14,638
1,518
6,116

1702
2279
2524

1,109
15,489

1,280
18,133

1,674
21,355

2,379
27,625

2534
1947

22 These were the figures given by Jaroszewicz in his report to the CC Plenum on 20
November 1975, reported by the official Polish press agency.
23 Free market prices have risen considerably: since 1970, pork has risen by more than a
third, beef by about 30 per cent, etc.

80

As mentioned earlier, the main driving force was low-interest Western

credits which enabled Poland to import plant from the capitalist world on
a huge scale. Polands foreign trade turnover shot up during the early
seventies, increasing by 105 per cent in 1971, 193 per cent in 1972 and
257 per cent in 1973.24 Table 5 spells out the story in more detail.
Table 6 underlines the structural change in Polish trade more clearly.
TABLE

Distribution of Polish trade between Comecon and the advanced capitalist countries

Comecon share
Capitalist share
SOURCE:

1971
62
28

1972
59
32

1973
53
40

1974
47
44

Rocznik Statysztyczny 1975.

The economic advantages of such import-investments from the capitalist

world could be very considerable. They brought improved technology
and the possibility of increasing exports. Moreover, such imports could
produce a dramatic shortening of investment cycles. For example, in
Poland a domestically-built food industry project takes, on average,
between twenty-eight and forty-two months to complete, whereas the
building time for imported projects of this type during the last five years
did not exceed eighteen months. Two American-produced refrigerated
warehouses were built in Lublin and Lagisza within a twelve-month
period, while previous Polish projects of this sort had taken between
twenty-four and thirty-two months to complete.25
In pursuit of modernization and growth through import-investments,
the Government made an important institutional reform in the foreign
trade field. A series of industrial enterprises were given the right to bypass the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Maritime Economy and borrow
hard currency direct from Polands Commercial Bank. The money could
be spent abroad at the managements discretion, and could be used to
acquire anything from production lines to complete plants. There was
only one important condition: in due course the enterprise would have to
generate sufficient exportable merchandise or services to repay the initial
loan in hard currency. The aim behind this so-called samosplata principle
was to release the entrepreneurial energies of the enterprises, and it did
indeed become an important mechanism stimulating the credit-led boom.
The very important food-processing industry trebled its overall
investments for the entire period of 19715, as compared with the
previous five-year period. But in comparison with the latter period, its
import investments increased tenfold between 1971 and 1975. The
machine industrys import investments between 1971 and 1975 were six
times larger than they had been in the previous five-year period, and in
1974 no less than 45 per cent of all new investments in the machine
24

Zycie Warszawy, 18 May 1975.

Hungary provides a particularly striking example of the economic advantages to be
gained from participation in the world capitalist market: it bought a new process for
manufacturing artificial fertilizers from the West for 153 million forints; this would have
cost an estimated 120 million forints and taken twelve years to perfect if developed purely
from domestic resources (see Zycie Warszawy, 16 June 1975).

25

81

industry consisted of imported plant. Polish light industry completed

twenty-one major investment projects between 1971 and 1975 and nine of
these were entirely financed through samosplata arrangements.26
As for Western credits to finance these enormous import bills, Gierek was
remarkably successful in negotiating loans worth thousands of millions
of dollars, both through his diplomatic initiatives, especially vis--vis
Germany and France, and also through direct arrangements with
capitalist bankers. It is not easy to quantify the exact aggregate figures for
all capitalist credits to Poland, but what is absolutely clear is the fact that
Poland turned towards Western credits and trade on a scale which was
qualitatively greater than that of any other East European country.
Between 1971 and 1975 the Polish leadership, like a Dostoyevsky
character at a roulette table, was piling all its economic chips on Western
trade.
Consultation
Giereks Politburo hoped that this economic strategy would produce a
rise in living standards adequate to ease the frustrations of the workers
and make them prepared to look on the Party leadership with a tolerant, if
not an enthusiastic eye. The rgime knew that without proof of economic
benefits over the subsequent eighteen months, Giereks leadership could
scarcely hope to survive. But the new team had also learnt enough from
the Baltic crisis to understand that new political ideas for ruling the
country were also necessary. Gomulka had been able to survive for years
on the political capital of his triumph in October 1956. The new men
could count on no such breathing space. They had heard the rising
political demands of the working class at one mass meeting after another
over a period of months. In these conditions, the Party leadership was
urgently required to come forward in front of the masses with a definition
of the new political situation, after the fall of Gomulka and the climb
down over the price increases. What was the new political order under
Gierek to be like and how was it going to differ from the Gomulka era?
Since head-on confrontation with the working class was ruled out by the
new leadership as a short or even medium-term perspective, this question
urgently required an answer. Moreover, equally important, Gierek had to
be sure that the machinery of the state would be able to defend and
enforce whatever definition of the new political order was offered.
During the months from December to April, Gierek was simply
improvising a series of political manoeuvres: winning various forms of
moral and material support from Brezhnev; offering a series of economic
concessions; successfully bidding for sympathy from the peasantry and
the Church; leaning on the passivity of the students and intellectuals; and
carrying off several dramatic debating marathons with mass meetings of
striking workers. But what did these disparate activities signify about the
direction of the new leaderships policy? Above all, what did the mass
meetings mean? A sign of temporary weakness to be followed by a future
crack-down? Or the first step towards a thoroughgoing programme of
26 An extensive discussion of the experience with samosplata arrangements was published in
Politykas monthly supplement Export-Import, No. 8, August 1975.

82

proletarian democracy? These questions, urgently posed within both the

bureaucracy and the working class were not given a clear answer until the
April Plenum of the Central Committee. For the leaderships dilemma
was awesome in its longer-term implications for Polish and possibly East
European politics in the future.
On one side, the direction of working-class demands was unmistakable.
The workers, especially on the Baltic, were demanding measures
whose logic was to replace bureaucratic dictatorship with a new form of
state embodying the principles of proletarian democracy. By meeting the
striking workers, Gierek had effectively thrown a mantle of legitimacy on
those involved in the struggle: they were neither the dupes of imperialism
nor the hooligans Gomulka had claimed them to be, but had a case which
needed to be discussed. In some way, the rgime had to offer a definition
of the new situation that could be demonstrated in practice to be
significantly different from the Gomulkist era. At least to some degree, it
had to offer concessions to the aspirations of the working class. Yet any
serious move towards political democratization was out of the question
for a rgime of the type that Gierek led. Leaving aside any personal
inclinations on the part of the Silesian boss and the people he had brought
with him to Warsaw from Katowiceand Gierek had never shown the
slightest inclination towards democratization in the pasttwo
overwhelmingly dominant obstacles stood in the way: the most
important was that of the Soviet leadership itself, in collaboration with
the other bureaucratic rgimes in Eastern Europe; the second was the
Polish bureaucratic apparatus, made up of tens of thousands of state and
Party functionaries with everything to lose from such a programme.
Gierek tried to resolve this dilemma on two complementary levels: the
national political arena on one side, and the everyday mechanisms of
bureaucratic control on the other. His aim was to re-consolidate the
substance of the bureaucratic rgime, but to provide it with a more
palatable form for resolving national political conflicts. On the national
level, Gierek launched a new slogan: consultations! Subsidiary to this, but
of some importance, was a second watchword: Polands new historic role
as the driving force for dtente in Europe. At a local level, on the other
hand, the essential mechanisms of social, political and repressive control
were to be maintained intact or, to be more accurate, to be restored, with
one proviso: the local authorities were to be brought more tightly under
the control of the Party centre.
From an ideological point of view, the slogan of consultations was
embarrassingly inconsistent. Little sense could be made of a theory which
declared that Poland had been a socialist or popular democracy since the
end of the 1940s, but that now this democratic rgime was going to take
the novel step of actually consulting the population before adopting a
policy! But from a political point of view, the slogan had its merits. Were
Giereks meetings with the workers a sign of weakness or a cynical trick?
Not at all: they were the start of a new policy of consultation! What was the
problem about Gomulka? He had failed to consult the people. From now
on, meetings between the Party leadership and the workerslike those
that had taken place on the Baltic and in Lodzwould become a regular
feature of the situation. Furthermore, in order to make these
83

consultations meaningful, there would be a new openness about the

countrys problems and a more relaxed attitude towards the provision of
accurate information in the mass media.
The slogan of consultation was to be used as the complement to a
restoration of bureaucratic controls on the ground. By offering
consultation between workers and leaders, Gierek planned to make
possible the rebuilding of order in the cities and factories of the country.
At the same time, such a local restoration of order would in turn ensure
that consultation would not get out of hand. Simultaneously, the Party
leadership was going to try to get the maximum domestic political capital
out of its search for credits from capitalist Western Europe and its
international championing of dtente. This was not at all a question of
moving towards a new independence from the Soviet leadership. But it
was an attempt to follow the Soviet orientation in such a way as to appeal
to nationalist sentiments among the Polish masses, who would see the
Party leadership taking small initiatives, travelling to the capitals of the
West and so on.
The New Policy in Practice

Those given to drawing rapid generalizations, not least the bourgeois

journalists assigned to the East European circuit and looking for some
catchy new angle on developments there, were tempted to see something
of permanent historical interest in Giereks new political style: the new
wind blowing in Eastern Europe or, as the unfortunate Richard Davy of
The Times put it less than a month before the events of last June, Poland
Gets the Best of Both Worlds.27 Future events will show that, from a
historical point of view, Gierekism was a transient improvization, the
product of a flexible leadership faced by the balance of forces that the
working class had created in 1971. But the adoption of these more
sophisticated methods by the rgime was nonetheless, as we shall see, of
considerable political importance in shaping the form of political
developments up to the June crisis. And for the first three years of
Giereks rule, the consultationist style seemed very effective.
The most important practical effect of consultationism was the fact that
the bureaucracy was prepared to allow the masses, within certain narrow
limits, to express opinions and even protest against aspects of policy. The
limits were, of course, that nothing in any way resembling an organized
political group was allowed, and nothing resembling a general protest
against the rgime as a whole would be tolerated. Even to make a written
protest or hold a work stoppage was risky; but in contrast to other East
European countries, in Poland such protests no longer meant the virtual
certainty of a rapid confrontation with the militia or the political police.
This was the most important aspect of the innovation which Gierek
called consultation.
The more formal aspects of consultationism were almost entirely
cosmetic. Mass meetings between Party and Government leaders and the
workers continued on a fairly frequent but irregular basis: for example,
27

The Times, 15 June 1976.

84

Gierek held some thirteen such meetings with Baltic shipyard workers
between March 1971 and November 1975, in addition to about a dozen
meetings with the Party apparatus in the ports during the same period.28
These mass meetings were carefully stage-managed to ensure nothing
unpleasant or unexpected happened in front of the TV cameras and
microphonesthe meetings were often broadcast in edited formbut
precisely because the idea was to show an authentic dialogue with the
working class, criticisms from the workers had to be allowed. Another
step on the part of the rgime was to link the Party organizations in about
160 of the largest factories directly to the Central Committee Secretariat,
giving them the right to by-pass the local and regional authorities. This
was, in fact, to assist the drive for modernization and higher productivity,
by allowing the central leadership to by-pass local bureaucratic inertia or
sabotage of central policies; but it was also presented in the guise of a new
measure to strengthen the link between the leadership and the working
class. As another cosmetic measure, a few genuine manual workers in
productive employment were seated on the Central Committee,
conference delegates were much more heavily weighted towards workers
than had been the case in the 1960s, and so on. Yet another aspect of the
new style was a more sophisticated use of the media: the rgime made
serious efforts to increase the amount and the reliability of information in
the media.29 For example, some work stoppages would be mentioned,
though often with the rider that they had been caused by bad weather or
some other act of God. Ministers would be brought on to TV to answer
viewers questions, and the government became more ready to
acknowledge publicly irritating social and economic problems.
Giereks direct negotiations with the workers on strike in 1971 were a
price which the Party leadership thought well worth paying in exchange
for ensuring that the basic institutions of political power on which Gierek
reliedthe political police, the militia, the army and the Party machine
were preserved during the workers offensive. Despite demands for trials
of police chiefs and leading party officials, Gierek was able to maintain
the basic institutions intact. Nevertheless, one institution above all others
had been very badly mauled; the trade-union machine. During the course
of the crisis, the Party leaders could afford to allow the trade-union
apparatus locally to go to the winds: by the summer of 1971, over 50 per
cent of local trade-union officials throughout the country had been
thrown out of office by pressure from the workers.30 In many areas, the
local mechanisms for disciplining the workers in the factories had broken
down. But no new independent unions had been formed and the Party
leadership, after removing the old discredited national leadership of the
trade unions, prepared for a long haul to re-establish local control. This
was to be done partly by expelling obviously unreliable worker members
of the Partyin 1971 alone about 150,000 worker members were
28
During the same period, Gierek paid about ten visits to Lodz. But the great bulk of the
publicized meetings were with Party members, rather than with the broad mass of industrial
workers.
29
Gierek has established an especially close relationship with the countrys leading
journalists, setting up a system of regular, personal, off-the-record briefings for about 200 of
them. The system is described in Polityka, 21 February 1976.
30
Rouge, Paris, 27 January 1973.

85

expelled;31 partly by co-opting those of the workers leaders who could

be attracted by the prospect of substantial economic and social privileges
as functionaries; and partly by a slow, but increasingly ruthless,
destruction of the most determined vanguard elements in the factories.
The successful climax of this campaign to restore control from above in
the trade unions came with the Seventh Trade-Union Congress in
November 1972. This first national trade-union conference since the fall
of Gomulka was markedly different from its predecessor in a number of
ways. There was a five-fold increase in the number of delegates who had
been directly elected in the large factories32in one plant the workers
actually went on strike against an attempt by local bureaucrats to rig the
selection of the factorys delegation.33 Within the congress itself, there
was a significant leftist oppositional element opposing the Party on a
number of issues. Baluka, the chairman of the Szczecin strike committee,
was a delegate to the congress; and one of the delegates from the Zeran
factory in Warsawwhich had spearheaded the workers movement
back in 1956felt confident enough to declare: 70 per cent of our union
officials are a virtual army of paper shufflers and titular delegates for trips
abroad; they go to Bulgaria to look for furs, to Czechoslovakia for shoes
and to the USSR for cars.34 A battle took place during the Congress over
the proposed, new Labour Code, a number of clauses of which were
strongly opposed by delegates. When several of the delegates threatened
to walk out if the code was put to the vote, the leadership decided not to
press for its ratification. From the Partys point of view this was a side
issue. The main thing was to demonstrate by means of this Congress that
the trade-union apparatus nationally was firmly back under the rgimes
control. This was effectively proved by the near unanimous vote for the
Partys leadership slate: only Edmund Baluka and a handful of other
delegates opposed the list. Afterwards the tone of the trade-union
functionaries began to change. Once again, their main functions were to
be, in the words of the new Union President, those of activating
production and ideological education.
But at the very time when the Union Congress was demonstrating the
success of the Partys drive to re-consolidate its grip on the institutional
structure of Polish society, the working class was showing a continued
ability to act independently of this structure in trying to settle important
issues. In November 1972, the national price freeze won by the textile
workers in Lodz in February 1971 was approaching its end: the precise
decision had been to continue the price freeze only for two extra years,
not indefinitely. There was growing concern in the working class that the
leadership would scrap the freeze in December. There was also an evident
confidence that mass action could force a satisfactory solution of the
problem.
Just before the Congress started, the shipyard workers of Gdansk and
Szczecin struck. Gierek and Jaroszewicz again caught a plane to the Baltic
31

See Jan B. de Weydenthal, Party Development in Contemporary Poland, College of William

and Mary, Virginia, USA.
32
Neal Ascherson in The Observer, 24 September 1972.
33
James Feron, New York Times, 15 September 1972.
34
Intercontinental Press, 5 March 1973.
86

to discuss with the workers, examine the problem and, more to the
point, end the strike. No sooner were the Party leader and Prime Minister
back in Warsaw, with the Congress underway, when the women textile
workers of Lodz struck. They were then followed by the miners at four
Katowice mines. The Polish working class was on the move again. In
every area where the strikes took place, the workers demanded a
continuation of the price freeze beyond the two-year limit. The Lodz
women workers coupled this with a claim for an immediate 15 per cent
wage rise; the Katowice miners demanded 25 per cent. Most menacing of
all were the voices on the Baltic coast, for the shipyard workers were
again demanding trade-union independence from the Party and free
elections of both factory delegates and union leaders.35 Not for the last
time, TV programmes were interrupted by the features of Prime Minister
Jaroszewicz, who categorically promised that the price freeze would
continue through 1973.36 In Silesia order was restored through the
distribution of food-purchasing coupons. But here the rgime added a
new ingredient, showing its growing confidence in its own strength:
thirty of the Katowice miners were arrested.
The simultaneous occurrence of this strike movement and the tradeunion congress nicely illustrated the most salient features of the political
relation of forces in the middle period of Giereks rule to date. In day-today relations with the workers, the rgime was master of the situation.
But this mastery was on a certain basis and within certain limits. The basis
was that workers could express their grievances on particular issues even
by striking, without such acts automatically leading to a head-on
confrontation with the rgimes military apparatus. The national limits of
Giereks mastery were those set by the relationship of forces established
in 1971: a freeze on prices, economic development and a readiness to talk
to and even listen to the most well organized sectors of the working class.
It should also be remembered that the apparent political stabilization
achieved by late 1972 also involved a still quiescent student and
intellectual community, a reasonably contented Church and a peasantry
which, especially in the case of its richer elements, had been doing quite
well out of the new Party leadership. None of these features were
necessarily immutable.
Reorganization of the Party

Perhaps the most remarkable of Giereks achievements during the first

half of the seventies was his thoroughgoing reorganization of the Party
and state machinery and his simultaneous imposition of his own
undisputed mastery of the Party apparatus. In a series of bold strokes, he
destroyed the old factional groupings of the Gomulka period, eliminated
potential rivals and destroyed the regional centres of resistance to central
authority which he had himself used to great effect during the sixties.
35 Rouge,

1 June 1973, contains a full account of this crisis.

fact, the official price freeze was to remain in operation up to the time of writing. In
January 1974 the prices of petrol, taxi fares and alcoholic drinks were officially increased
quite steeply. At the same time, the rgime raised wages and maintained the price freeze on
food. Of course, prices on the free markets rose steeply, and the rgime tried various
devious ways of increasing prices by putting a new label on the old product and then
charging higher prices, etc. But the official freeze remained a real benefit for the population.
36 In

87

In December 1970, Giereks path to the top post had been smoothed by
the support of the Moczarites; there was indeed some speculation in the
Western press that the Silesian boss might be simply a stop-gap figure, to
be replaced by Moczar himself in the near future. Instead, Gierek
decisively defeated Moczar at the April 1971 CC Plenum, after the latter
had apparently made an abortive bid for supreme power.37 At the Sixth
Party Congress of December 1971, Gierek consolidated his position as
General Secretary and evidently rewarded the man who had helped him
defeat Moczar, Franciszek Szlachcic, by promoting him from the
Ministry of the Interior to the number two position in the Party
hierarchy. At the start of 1974, when Soviet pressure was resulting in a
series of measures to tighten up the rgimes ideological controls,
Szlachcic was himself suddenly demoted, and at the Seventh Party
Congress of 1975 was stripped of his last vestiges of power.38 Szlachcic
had evidently been canvassing support for a more independent posture
vis--vis the Soviet leadership; with his removal the last serious potential
challenger to Gierek had been removed. By the start of 1976, Gierek had
little to fear from his own Politburo and Secretariat.39
Under Gomulka, the Party centre had to reckon with the power of
seventeen regional Party Secretaries, whose local patronage could
facilitate the accumulation of considerable resources for resisting or
distorting central directives. During his fifteen years as Silesian Party
Secretary, Gierek had been able to acquire such regional power that his
area earned the nick-name of the Polish Katanga. After shoring up his
position in the Party leadership, Gierek prepared for a crushing assault on
these regional power-centres. A brains-trust Committee on Economic
and State Management, set up in February 1971, had been preparing a
plan for reorganizing state administration. This had been due for
publication and discussion at the Seventh Party Congress of December
1975. Instead, Gierek decided to take the regional apparatuses by storm,
and unveiled the plan at the 12 May CC Plenum in 1975 with instructions
that the new system was to operate from 1 June, a mere three weeks later!
At one stroke, the seventeen regions (voivodships) were to be replaced by
forty-nine much smaller voivodship units. This balkanization of the
37

The Moczar faction, named after its leader the former head of the Security Police
General Moczar, emerged at the start of the sixties when it became clear that Gomulkas
drive against the democratizing currents of 1956 was not going to extend to a mass purge of
erstwhile liberals in the bureaucracy itself. The faction, often called the Partisans since it
controlled the war veterans association, possessed a strong base in the Security Police and
acquired a growing following among lower and middle-level Party functionaries. It used
anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic themes in its drive against the liberals many of whom
were Jewish. But the faction also leant on a strong nationalist propaganda which, though
undoubtedly appealing to sectors of the apparatus, put Moscow on its guard. For an interesting assessment of Moczars role in the Baltic crisis, see J. Steven, The Hundred Days of
Gierek, in International Marxist Review, No. 1, June 1971.
38 On the turn in early 1974, see below.
39 Szlachcics meteoric career had begun in Silesia as a local police chief and Gierek proteg
at the start of the sixties. He was made deputy Minister of the Interior under Moczar in 1962,
almost certainly as a means of trying to check the latters activities. In February 1971 he became Minister of the Interior, and in December 1971 at the Sixth Party Congress he made
the remarkable jump of becoming not only a full CC member, but a full member of the
Politburo and the CC Secretariat. From that time until the start of 1974, he held
responsibility as CC Secretary for internal security and for foreign policy. So confident did
Szlachcic become that he felt able to tell a student meeting how he saw Polish relations with
the USSR: like a good cup of teastrong, but not too sweet!
88

provincial state and Party apparatuses was combined with abolition of all
the district units, which had hitherto been intermediary between the
voivodships and the parishes. By eliminating the districts, the Party
leadership was both shortening the chain of command and removing an
important layer of patronage previously held by the voivodship
secretaries. Within a week of the May CC Plenum, Trybuna Ludu had
announced that the Party first secretaries of Gdansk, Lublin, Cracow,
Byalystok and Rzeszow voivodships had been recalled and placed at the
disposal of the Central Committee. Undoubtedly, there was a long-term
politico-economic rationale for these changes, in the context of the social
and economic transformation of Poland since the sixties. But the speed
and ruthlessness of their execution indicated that the leadership was
equally concerned to destroy the regional power-bases which could
seriously weaken the central authorities, particularly in a time of crisis.
Another dimension of the leaderships drive to renovate the Party
machine after 1971 has been a sweeping replacement of personnel in the
Central Committee and an apparent attempt to strengthen the workingclass component within the aktiv. (The aktiv is that layer of the Party
membership on which the apparatus relies to implement Party policy.
Formerly volunteers, the aktiv members are in practice overwhelmingly
state functionaries, enterprise directors, educational directors and other
types of social manager.) At the Sixth and Seventh Party Congresses, the
great bulk of the old members of the Central Committee were removed in
favour of men who owed their rise to Gierek and his team. By the beginning of 1976, over 80 per cent of the 251 people making up the full and
deputy members of the Central Committee had joined that body for the
first time during Giereks period of office.
Information on the role of working-class membership within the aktiv is
less easy to quantify. The numerically largest group among full CC
members elected at the Seventh Party Congress were thirty-one people
designated as industrial workers; over 40 per cent of Conference
delegates too were credited with being actual industrial workers.40 In
addition to these quantitative indices, which give a very inflated
impression of the importance of worker members within the aktiv, the
linking of Party committees in the sixty largest industrial plants directly
with the CC secretariat and Giereks repeated meetings with the industrial
aktiv in factories throughout the country show a serious effort on
Giereks part to strengthen his links with that particular constituency.
At the Seventh Party Congress, Brezhnev particularly praised the Polish
leaders for their work of renovation, noting that the Party was now
cohesive and confident of its strength. To all appearances, Gierek had
found a new combination of policies for stabilizing bureaucratic rule in
Eastern Europe in the post-1968 era. Instead of trying to experiment with
radical reforms of the planning mechanism, he had sought an opening to
the capitalist West. And instead of jeopardizing the Partys monopoly by
dismantling political controls, he had combined a drive to further
concentrate power in the hands of the Party leadership with a greater
40

An analysis of the new Central Committee is made by Zygmunt Szeliga in Polityka, 20

December 1975.
89

readiness to allow an airing of grievances on the part of the broad and

amorphous mass of the population.

New Contradictions
The Seventh Party Congress in December 1975 was organized as a
triumphant celebration of the first five years of Giereks leadership: the
economic growth, the unprecedented rise in living standards, the unity of
the Partyall these achievements were paraded before the top brass of
Eastern Europe and the Polish people. But informed observers could
already see that the strategy for recovery outlined in 1971 was being
undermined by new economic and political contradictions.
Growing Indebtedness to the Capitalist World

The Government had always expected Polish trade with the capitalist
countries to move initially into deficit. But it had expected that by the
mid-seventies the trend would start moving in the opposite direction.
This did not happen, as table 7 shows. Of the gross deficit between
January and September 1975, 20,000 million zloty was the result of trade
with advanced capitalist countries.
TABLE 7
Polands balance of payments deficit in millions of zloty

1971
1972
1973
1974
1975 (Jan. to Sept.)
Total
SOURCE:

662
1,479
4,748
7,198
9,935
24,022

Polityka, 20 September 1975.

In addition to this trade deficit, Poland had an estimated $7,000 million

debt in long-term loans from the capitalist world by the end of 1975 and
many of these loans were falling due for repayment.41 Thus 13 per cent of
exports to the world capitalist market during 1974 had not in fact been
balancing the years import bill: they had been paying off Western loans.
By 1975, no less than 25 per cent of Polish exports to the capitalist world
were being used for debt repayments. Worse still, inflation in the
capitalist world meant that Polands steadily rising hard-currency bill
from Western imports did not at all imply a commensurate rise in the
physical volume of investment goods purchased in the West. In his
speech to the Seventh Party Congress in December 1975, the Prime
Minister had this to say about the impact of Western inflation since the
beginning of 1973: Our expenses on capitalist markets in that period
increased in relation to the price level of 1972 by close to $2,000 million.42
This is another way of saying that in three years the value of Polands
credits from the West dropped by $2,000 milliona staggering blow.
But it was not only Western inflation which blew Giereks gamble to the
winds. The capitalist recession simultaneously took its toll, both directly
41 See

estimate of the Journal of Commerce, 13 April 1976, for the position at the end of 1975.
Ludu, 10 December 1975.

42 Trybuna

90

and through the restrictive measures taken by individual capitalist

countries. It is difficult to quantify the impact of this aspect of the world
capitalist crisis on the Polish balance of payments. But trade with Italy
illustrates this impact clearly enough. For some years, one of the few
Polish success stories in its trade with Common Market countries was its
dealings with Italy. But in 1974 the Italian government banned the import
of Polish livestock and beef and tightened up on other Polish goods. As a
result of these restrictions, Polish trade plunged into deficit.43
TABLE 8
Polands trade Balance with Italy in millions of zloty

1960
1965
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
SOURCE:

Total trade
2083
4213
7462
9144
11524
15323
21598
23897

Balance
353
277
1602
2602
2106
1695
1228
3963

Biuletyn Statystyczny, January 1976.

A further, though indirect, consequence of the capitalist crisis was the

sudden leap in the price of Soviet oil sales to Poland at the beginning of
1975. The Soviet leadership forced a break with Comecons past price
policy and arranged for yearly Comecon price adjustments to match
world prices, instead of the five-yearly price reviews which had operated
since 1958. This enabled the USSR to increase its oil prices to Poland at a
stroke by 130 per cent as of January 1975 and by a further 8 per cent at the
beginning of 1976. This was a severe blow to the Polish economy, which
drew the vast bulk of its oil from Soviet sources. The blow was all
the worse for being entirely unforeseen. All in all, by mid-1975 Giereks
gamble on credits from, and trade with, the capitalist world as the driving
force of sustained economic growth was coming badly unstuck. The
Polish economy had become heavily committed to the capitalist West and
it was finding itself increasingly unable to meet its commitments.
Failure of the Productivity Drive

The Polish leadership had taken its hopes for Western capitalism for
reality: it had not taken seriously enough the possibility of a severe
capitalist crisis combining hyper-inflation with serious industrial
recession. But the capitalist crisis cannot be held entirely responsible for
the sharp rise of Polands indebtedness. After all, it had at least one
mitigating effect: inflation in the West should have made Polish exports
more competitive. Yet in spite of a real quantitative rise in the monetary
value of Polish exports to the advanced capitalist countries, no export
breakthrough took place. The reason was that the undoubted
modernization of Polish industry since 1971 had still not eradicated longterm structural problems. In particular, the hoped-for change in the
structure of Polish exports to the West had not occurred. The main
43

In 1975, the percentage of food in Polish exports to Italy dropped from over 50 per cent to
136 per cent.
91

branches involved changed little during the first five years of the
seventiesagricultural produce, coal and shipbuilding remained the
chief items, along with other raw materials. The hoped-for breakthrough
by the machine industry on the basis of improved, imported plant did not
take place.
One clue to the reasons for this is contained in Table 9, whose figures
become even more significant when we learn that, apart from the building
materials industry, two sectors are mainly responsible for the increase in
rejects: the machine industry and heavy engineeringtwo key industries
from the point of view of providing the country with a strong export
profile for tackling Western markets. In fact, the percentage of Polish
exports to the West which consisted of machinery remained at the very
low level of 13 per cent in 1975. There are some signs that the buying of
Western technology has boosted Polish sales of machinery to other
Comecon countries, but that does not solve the central problem.
TABLE 9
Total industrial rejects in millions of zloty
1970
7,003
1971
7,755
1972
8,595
1973
9,433
1974
11,221
1975 (First 6 months)
6,120
SOURCE:

Zycie Gospodarcze, 12 October 1975.

Examination of the problems in Polands coal industry will indicate some

of the central obstacles on the road to a thoroughly competitive industrial
structure. The Polish mining industrys expansion has each year been
facing a more acute labour shortage. This is a besetting problem now
throughout Polish industry, and is growing more acute each year. The
problem can be tackled either by increasing the average productivity of
the existing labour force in mining, or by attracting new workers to the
industry. Let us examine each of these options. Labour productivity can
be increased either by the introduction of new technology, by speed-up,
or by lengthening the working day. The introduction of new technology
simply poses the problem of imports from the West, instead of solving
it. A lengthening of the working day has been completely impossible for
political reasons: in the last five years it has on the contrary been
politically necessary for the rgime to shorten the working day (by
providing a number of Saturdays off ). Only speed-up remained.
Throughout Polish industry, the rgime has made great efforts to expand
relative surplus product through speed-up, above all by using new
methods of wage payment: productivity deals bringing in measured day
work, bonus schemes and piece-rates. It is very difficult to assess the
overall effects of this drive, which began in earnest after the Seventh
Congress of Trade Unions. In the shipyards of the Baltic the initial
productivity scheme met with powerful strikes in 1974 and had to be
modified. There have been many other reports of strikes against new
bonus schemes. But the overall balance-sheet of this drive is almost
impossible to make in the absence of comprehensive information. Two
92

things, however, are clear. In the first place, a significant number of socalled productivity deals in the exporting sector of industry were almost
entirely bogus: what looked like increases in productivity were in fact
cases of exporting enterprises making use of Western inflation to raise
their own export prices, and therefore their revenue and wage fund,
without any real increase in productivitythat is, in relative surplus
product. It was only towards the end of 1974 that the government began
to realize what was going on and to take measures aimed at closing the
loophole. Secondly, where productivity deals were inaugurated, these
were heavily counter-balanced by a decline in work discipline. The
planning authorities calculated that in 1975 no less than 10 per cent of
total working time was being wasted through such problems as
absenteeism. And that enormous figure brings us back to politics.
One of the direct causes of absenteeism was a concession granted by the
rgime in the face of the Baltic upsurge: workers were given sickness
benefits at the level of 100 per cent of pay. It should come as no surprise
that workers used this concession to ease their work load. And why not?
The privileges of a bloated bureaucracy remained as glaring as they had
been before 1971, while the bureaucrats were as unproductive as ever.
The trade unions were returning to their old role of agents for squeezing
greater productivity out of the workers, so control of the management of
factories remained firmly in the hands of the privileged and unproductive
battalions of officials. There was no workers control of production and
no proletarian democracy. Why break your back for the privilege of
being consulted, as the rgime claimed, by the parasitic bureaucracy? The
Polish working class was making sure that it extracted at least part of the
price that should be paid for the continued existence of a privileged
bureaucratic caste. No miraculous rise in the average productivity of
labour was to be forthcoming in these socio-political circumstances.
Therefore, in the mining industry as in other potentially dynamic export
centres of the Polish economy, the main way of increasing output was by
attracting new workers through the payment of higher than average
wages. In Silesia in 1974, for example, the miners gained two substantial
pay increases within the space of nine months. The first was publicly
announced and amounted to 12 per cent. The second, in the autumn, was
for 30 per cent and was not publicly announced by the rgime at any time,
for fear that other workers would demand equivalent increases.44 The
same story applied to the ship-building industry, where workers wages
grew to levels far above the national average, partly for political reasons
and partly because of the potential importance of the ship-building
industry as an earner of hard currency.
The losing Battle to supply Consumer Markets

The crucial political objective behind the Polish governments import-led

boom had been to gain popular consent by satisfying the long-suppressed
consumption needs of the Polish masses. But Polands indebtedness to
44

The 12 per cent rise was mentioned in Polityka, 25 February 1974. The 30 per cent
increases occurred during October 1974, but were alluded to by Gierek only a year later, at a
miners meeting.
93

the capitalist world was, at least from the start of 1975, threatening to turn
these priorities upside down. The pressure was on to risk a showdown
with the Polish masses, by attacking their living standards in order to pay
back debts to Western bankers.
But this was only one side of the rgimes dilemma by 1975. The other
side of the menacing politico-economic equation was the development of
a sharp imbalance between the level of purchasing power in the domestic
economy and the supply of consumer goods, particularly food. The Party
leadership had asked Polish workers to judge its record above all by its
ability to raise living standards. True enough, wages had shot up, on the
whole. Indeed, by the end of 1977 they had risen twice as high as had been
planned at the Sixth Party Congress of December 197140 per cent
instead of the scheduled 18 per cent. We have mentioned some of the
reasons for this: wage increases in exporting enterprises taking advantage
of higher prices on the capitalist market; sharp increases in key sectors
like mining to attract extra labour; and also, very importantly, the
combativity of the working class, expressed in the large number of strikes
for higher pay and improved bonus schemes. Two other processes should
be mentioned. In the first place, the labour force in the industrial sector
increased to a much greater extent than planned, swelling the wage bill in
the state sector of the economy. Secondly, it seems clear that there were
often wage rises as a result of the modernization of plant and consequent
increases in the productivity of labour, although statistical evidence of
this is not available to the present writer. Finally, the incomes of the
private peasantry rose substantially through a series of increases in state
procurement prices, and through the governments extension of social
services to the peasantry. The result of all these processes was a sharp rise
in demand for basic consumer goods.
The bureaucracy was engaged in an ever more desperate struggle to
satisfy this new purchasing power, through a rapid expansion of
consumer goods. By the beginning of 1975, this battle was clearly being
lost. Consumer markets were swinging into a sharp disequilibrium. The
Party weekly Polityka reported that at the end of 1974 the following
production shortages had appeared: 30,000 TV sets, 35,000 radios, 50,000
refrigerators, along with large but unspecified shortages of washing and
sewing machines, textiles and building materials.45 But this was far from
the most serious aspect of the question. The really catastrophic crisis was
developing on the food front. The food shortage that opened up at the
beginning of 1975 was not the result of a poor agricultural performance
during the early seventies. From 1971 to the end of 1973, agricultural
production had in fact expanded faster than planned, and output in 1974
still exceeded the figures of the previous year, although it was slightly
below revised plan targets. Even in 1975, when Polish agriculture had a
bad year, meat production continued to rise above the 1974 figure by no
less than 101 per cent.46 Overall, the 25 per cent increase in Polish
agricultural output within five years was a fairly remarkable achievement
by East European, not to speak of Soviet, standards. But it was utterly
inadequate to meet consumer demand.
45
46

Polityka, 6 March 1975.

Trybuna Ludu, 21 January 1976.

94

The rgime, perhaps through looking at the statistics from the armchairs
of its own spacious and well-stocked apartments, had made another
miscalculation here. It had assumed that the rise in workers wages
would bring a significant change in the structure of working-class family
budgets. At the beginning of the seventies, the average Polish household
spent no less than 50 per cent of its income on food. The planners
assumed that increases in wages would tend to be spent on items other
than food, and that food consumption would soon level off. However,
this has not occurred: food, especially meat, consumption has gone up at
least as fast as the rise in wages. Gierek spelt out the facts to the cc
Plenum in September 1975: During the current five-year plan, per capita
meat consumption will have increased by over 17 kg, or double the rate
envisaged by the Sixth Congress.47 Furthermore, there was another
reason for the growing meat crisis in early 1975, a reason which the Party
leadership did its best to hide from the attention of the Polish masses.
This concerned manoeuvres on the agricultural front.
The Agricultural Dilemma

Agriculture had been doing reasonably well. But given the level of
consumer demand, not well enough. The relative short-fall in grain
production meant that five years after the target date set by Gomulka in
the sixties for Poland to become self-sufficient in grain, imports were
steadily rising, as Table 10 demonstrates. In the last two years, furthermore, a growing share of this import bill has had to be paid in hard
currency to the North American grain market. For in 1975 the Soviet
Union defaulted on its commitments to supply grain to Poland, forcing
the government to bid for American shipments. For two months, the US
administration placed an embargo on grain exports to Poland, and the
necessary supplies were eventually delivered only on condition that
Poland agreed to buy large quantities of American grain with hard
currency on a regular basis during the following five-year period.48 In
other words, the trade deficit with the capitalist world was coming to
reflect more than the import of Western industrial plant: it was being
used to assist the battle on the consumption front. Furthermore, any
sharp rise in meat production would require a growth in the supply of
fodder to the peasants and such fodder also had to be imported.
TABLE 10
Polish grain imports (tons)

1971
1972
1973
1974

2,793,000
2,943,000
3,084,000
3,658,000

To get the increased production which had been achieved, the

Government was paying an increasingly heavy price. State procurement
47
Quoted in a Radio Free Europe transcript of a Radio Warsaw broadcast, 5 September
1975.
48
True, there were reports that the USSR subsidized the first shipment of US grain in hard
currency, but these subsidies do not appear to have covered the five-year contract as a
whole. The contract involved buying 25 million tons of grain from the US annually. At
current prices, the total cost of this would be 300 million dollars over five years.

95

prices for farm produce had been raised in 1971 and again on a number of
occasions thereafter. The Party leadership recognized that one of the
reasons for the poor supply situation after the 1974 harvest had been the
governments failure to further increase procurement prices. Yet while
the government was having to pay out ever larger sums to the peasants
for food, it was having to continue sales of that food at the fixed 1966
prices. An ever-growing slice of state revenue had to be diverted from
investment needs in order to fill the resulting financial gap. By 1976, this
state subsidy of prices had reached the truly staggering figure of 12 per
cent of Polands gross domestic product.49 This was an intolerable strain
on state revenue. Yet attempts to tackle the problem at the procurementprice end would be completely self-defeating: the peasants would simply
go on strike. A foretaste of such a possibility had been given when private
farmers, dissatisfied with 1974 pig-procurement prices, cut back the
number of pigs bred for 1975 by one million, forcing the government to
raise pig procurement prices by 11 per cent in the autumn of the latter year
in order to right the situation.50
A long-term solution to such problems would, of course, be to rid Polish
agriculture of its small private plots in one way or another, amalgamating
them into large mechanized state or private farms. But as Table 11 shows,
the successes of the post-1971 policy of using economic incentives to buy
out smallholders were much too modest to produce any basic change in
the pattern of land tenure in the following five years. Moreover, even the
small reduction in private ownership that had taken place had roused the
anger of the Church.
TABLE 11
Proportion of agricultural land held by state, co-operative and private farms (%)

1970
1975
SOURCE:

State farm
166
210

Co-operative farm
13
17

Private farm
834
790

Maly Rocznik Statystyczny 1976, p. 138.

But the agricultural dimension of the scissors crisis between Western

bankers and Polish consumers hit the Party leadership in yet another way.
It had been hoped that industrial exports would replace Polands
traditional staple exports to the advanced capitalist world during the early
seventies. With the failure of this to happen, Polands indebtedness
placed an added exporting responsibility on the traditional sectors. No
sector was more traditional than Polish meatin the sixties it had made
up almost a third of Polish exports to its biggest trading partner in
Western Europe at that time (Great Britain). In 1974 and early 1975, the
Party leadership was quietly taking measures to drastically reduce meat
imports and divert meat destined for the hard-pressed domestic market
on to the export road.

49 Economist,

11 December 1976.
measure did not, however, satisfy the peasantry, who were facing rising prices of
fodder for livestock. The result has been a continuing crisis in the pig-breeding sector up to
the present time.
50 This

96

The Scissors Close

In the Spring of 1975, all these various facets of the growing

contradictions between the Party leaderships need to meet its obligations
to the capitalist states and banks in the West, and its need to fulfil its
promises to the Polish consumer, came together to produce a sharp crisis.
In March 1975, meat began to disappear from Polish shops. The Party
leadership was made aware of growing anger on the part of the masses. As
usual, Gierek pushed his Prime Minister on to the TV screen to offer some
explanations and appeal for patience. Jaroszewicz also signed an article in
Polityka to guide the argument. The following week, the Party weekly felt
bound to publish this acid response in a letter from a housewife:
Although we have managed to get used to misinformation in the press
for the last thirty years, what you (the Prime Minister) have written goes
beyond all limits. Do you consider your readers to be a collection of
innocents, if not idiots?51 Attempting to benefit from its knowledge of
the shipyard workers, gained in 197071, the Party leadership threw the
Armys reserves, not of men but of meat, on to the markets of the Baltic
ports and the Silesian mining areas. The only result was that the dreaded
women textile workers of Lodz struck and demonstrated against the meat
shortages. In Warsaw, shop windows were smashed and anti-Gierek wall
cartoons appeared. And in another town south of the capital, a significant
struggle developed. Following the example of Lodz, the women workers
at one of the towns largest factories, the Radoskor shoe factory, struck
against the food shortages. The local Party bosses tried to hit back by
arresting 150 of the women on strike. But the Party bosses had overreached themselves and were soon forced into headlong retreat: for the
munitions workers at the towns biggest factory, the Walter Metal
Works, voted to strike unless all 150 women were immediately released.
That was enough: the women were out in no time.52 At the time, this
incident did not acquire much prominence and the name of the town was
soon forgotten. But it is well known today: Radom.53
51 Polityka,

5 April 1975.
Spiegel, 31 March 1975.
53 One aspect of the meat crisis remains a mystery. Jaroszewicz claimed that in order to end
the meat crisis the Government was forced to cut back on meat exports. But the December
1975 trade figures from the official statistical office suggest a story that runs directly counter
to Jaroszewiczs remarks. If we remember that the size of Polish exports of meat in
December 1974 was 12,000 tons, and if we assume a similar figure for December 1975, we
find that there is no significant difference between the meat export figures for the years 1974
and 1975. And if we look at the figures for meat imports, we find a dramatic drop in the
amount of meat coming into the country in 1974. This must have drained the countrys meat
reserves, thus contributing directly to the meat crisis of Spring 1975. Furthermore, we
would expect a substantial drop in the export figures for 1975 as a result of the Italian ban on
Polish meat in 1974. All this suggests that Jaroszewicz was trying to conceal the fact that the
government had been taking meat out of the mouths of Polish workers to make a quick and
desperately needed killing on the capitalist market.
52 Der

Polands external trade in meat and meat products (tons)

Year
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975 (to November)

Imports
149,940
54,592
51,883
5,803

Exports
45,306
45,578
65,376
99,376
82,530
97

The meat crisis passed. But it had been a rich experience for the rgime.
As is generally the case in the non-capitalist societies of Eastern Europe,
the masses hold the government responsible for every economic
fluctuationnobody could have any doubt as to who holds every
economic control. Secondly, in Poland, as we have seen, Giereks
accession to power was not greeted by any enthusiasm on the part of the
masses: he was accepted on the strength of his oft-repeated promise to
provide a continuously rising standard of living. Take consumer goods in
lieu of proletarian democracythat had been Giereks offer. And when
he failed to deliver the goods, even for a week or two, the response of the
masses was immediate and sharp. What is more, the previous
improvements in living standards did not blunt popular anger over
breakdowns; quite the opposite, it produced an even stronger
determination to resist any return to the sufferings of the past. In such
circumstances, a meat famine is an intolerable insult and humiliation.
The meat crisis of March 1975 passed, but the multiple contradictions
which had produced it continued to intensify, acquiring an increasingly
uncontrollable and independent dynamic which made any resolution of
the problems increasingly daunting. Yet until June 1976 the measures
which the rgime attempted to take amounted to little more than
gimmicks.54 Gierek could not indefinitely pursue simultaneous and
increasingly hectic love affairs with Western finance capital and Polish
housewives. Eventually, he would be forced to choose who was to be
disappointed. And it was not likely to be the bankers.
Towards the June Explosion
In the months preceding the announcement of price rises on 24 June 1976,
the leaders of the PUWP acted like men in a trance. The multiple danger
signs were impossible to ignore, yet the entire political approach that
Gierek and his team had adopted since December 1971 pushed them away
from thinking these problems through to resolute political conclusions for
action. Already by the end of 1975, a decision had been taken to increase
prices substantially the following yearGierek indicated as much in his
speech to the Seventh Party Congress. A sudden clamp-down on imports
from the West would have produced terrible dislocations throughout the
Polish economy, while a really major rescue operation by the capitalist
world, even if politically possible, would have had serious repercussions
on Polish-Soviet relations. Sharp domestic austerity measures were the
only viable option. Consumer demand had to be cut, the huge fiscal drain
of price subsidies had to be ended and measures had to be taken to
produce a major structural change in Polish agriculture. These ideas were
incorporated in the price proposals outlined by Prime Minister
Jaroszewicz on 24 June in a speech to the Sejm. Food prices were to rise
by an average of 60 per cent to bring consumer demand into line with
agricultural supplies. Simultaneously, increases in procurement prices
were to be linked to sharp increases in the prices of state supplies of raw
54

These included changing labels and raising the prices, mentioned above, and also
measures to increase consumer saving such as putting a silver coin into every wage packet in
the hope that the recipients would put the souvenir under the mattress instead of spending
it.

98

materials to the peasantry; this would have the effect of economically

decimating the peasant smallholders, who would be unable to meet the
new raw material costs. In this way, land tenure could be rationalized
through a growth of large-scale state or private farms, while an increased
pool of labourers without class consciousness would be available for
industry. This much the Polish leadership worked out.
But they were utterly incapable of translating these ideas into realistic
political tactics. They decided to bring the price increases into force at one
blow, instead of staggering them as the Hungarian leadership did during
19756. They warned the population in advance that increases were
coming, without indicating their size and without creating a suitable
atmosphere of national crisis. And they promised consultations, but did
not consult.
At the same time, the leadership pushed through a number of Sovietinspired institutional changes. Amid protests, the Youth organizations
were merged into one single Komsomol-type body in the spring of
1976.55 The leader of the Znak group of deputies in the Sejm since the
fifties was banned from the electoral lists for the spring elections.56 In the
face of Church calls for a greater role for non-Party Poles in the affairs of
state, the respected independent who was Chairman of the Front for
National Unity was unceremoniously replaced by a Party leader just
before the elections, and anti-religious propaganda was stepped up.57 Yet,
in the absence of any strong repression of the intelligentsia, all these
moves became politically incomprehensible: they simply infuriated the
intellectuals and the Church, without in the slightest weakening either.
The leadership was engaging in futile gestures to soothe the Soviet
leadership. In doing so it was preparing the worst possible relationship of
forces for itself in June. For the first time since taking office, Gierek was
losing his nerve.
The most explosive of all these Soviet ideas for institutional integration
of Poland into the standard East European mould involved amending the
Polish Constitution. It was felt necessary to include clauses which bound
the Polish state to eternal friendship with the Soviet Union, and which
legalized the monopolistic political position of the Communist Party.
Such clauses had already been introduced in Bulgaria, Hungary and East
Germany in the early seventies, while Rumania and Czechoslovakia had
long had them. The Party guideline document for the Seventh Party Congress indicated that the time had come for Poland to follow suit.
This produced an extraordinary wave of protest throughout the country.
The intelligentsia put its new confidence to the test by giving a lead;
the episcopate, partly for general ideological reasons and partly from tactical considerations linked to the need to strengthen its bargaining posi55
The merger was announced in the youth movement daily, Sztandar Mlodych, 29 April
1976.
56
Le Monde, 23 February 1976.
57
The non-Party Professor Janusz Groszkowski, Chairman of the Academy of Sciences,
had been elected head of the FNU in June 1971, as a conciliatory gesture by the new Gierek
leadership. He was replaced in February 1976 by Head of State Henryk Jablonski. The FNU
is a Front embracing the PUWP, the UPP and the Democratic Party, for the purpose of
presenting a united list in elections.

99

tion on other questions, strongly backed the protests; and tens of thousands of Poles from all walks of life took up their right to consultation by
inundating the Sejm and the national press with petitions, open letters
and appeals. In all, an estimated 40,000 people took part in the protest
campaign. All the various contradictions in the political dimension of
Giereks strategy thus came together and exploded in the struggle over
amendments to the constitution at the end of 1975. The constitutional
issue was the political counter-point to the market-supply crisis which
had erupted the previous spring.

June 1976 and its Aftermath

The Party leaderships tactical plan for implementing the price increases
involved retaining the most threadbare forms of consultation: they hoped
to both avoid any real discussion and claim that the consultationist
promise of Gierek had been maintained. To this end, the rgime
attempted to time the announcement in such a way as to catch the masses
off their guard to the maximum extent. Students were away on holiday,
many others were on vacation, and there was no advance notice of an item
on price increases on the Sejm agenda of Thursday 24 June. Following
the Prime Ministers announcement of the plan on the Thursday
afternoon, there was to be a period of half an hour set aside for
consultations in the factories before work on Friday morning. The
measures would then come into force on the following Monday morning.
The leadership evidently hoped that the local Party machines had
sufficient political skill to manipulate a meeting of workers for half an
hour first thing in the morning. But they were proved wrong.
It is still not possible to piece together a comprehensive picture of the
events that took place throughout the country on Friday 25 June, three
days before the twentieth anniversary of the Poznan uprising of 1956.58
But the main outline of the protest movement in the major centres has
emerged.
1. Consultation, Radom style. Events here began with the workers of the
Walter Metal Works flooding out of the gates on Friday morning to
mobilize workers in other factories for a demonstration. They brought
out the women at the Radoskor Shoe factory, the Radom telephone
factory, the tobacco plant, the meat plant, the Rolling Stock Repair
Works, and others. Here is an eye-witness account of what followed,
described by a Radoskor worker.59 At about 10 oclock in the morning
we went out to the meat plant. A procession lined up at Zeromskiego
Street. Trolleys of meat were driven outside the meat plant to show what
a lot of it there was. No one stole any of it. The trolleys went back inside
as full as they had come out. At about 11 the procession went down
Zeromskiego Street, singing the Internationale and the National Anthem.
58
The most comprehensive coverage of the workers protest movement is contained in the
issues of Rouge, the daily paper of the Ligue Communiste Rvolutionnaire in Paris. See the issues
of this paper during the months of July to September. In addition, the following account is
based on documents issued by the Warsaw-based Committee for the Defence of the
Workers, made available by Polish exiles in London.
59
This account was published in Information Bulletin, No. 1, September 1976, produced in
Warsaw by supporters of the Committee for the Defence of the Workers.

100

There were shouts of: No to the price rises. Most of the marchers were
young people. The procession was very orderly and peaceful. Everybody
whistled when they passed the Voivodship Office, but no one broke any
windows. Then we came up to the Voivodship Committee of the Polish
United Workers Party. The building was taken over by workers. Three
people, including a girl, pulled down the red flag and wiped their shoes
with it. A white-and-red banner (the Polish national flag) was pulled up
in its place. At that point, people began singing the National Anthem . . .
Negotiations were going on at this time: the demands were to get in
touch with the Central Committee and get the price increases withdrawn.
An answer was expected in two hours time. At about 2 p.m. the second
shift joined the demonstrators. People were given lifts in cars and tractortrailers. Between 2 and 3 p.m. the workers blocked all road traffic outside
the Voivodship Committee building, putting cars and buses sideways
across the street. When,|after| two hours,|no one came out to talk to the
demonstrators, they began to demolish the building. Windows were
broken, desks, carpets and TV sets were thrown out. A large amount of
tinned meat, sausages and pork was brought out of the canteen. People
shouted: Look at how these bastards live! It was then that people
began plundering nearby shops. They also set fire to the Committee
building. At about 5 p.m. the police came, armed with water canons and
gas-throwers. They went in a compact mass from Slowackiego Street in
the direction of the Voivodship Committee. The demonstrators set fire to
the cars that served as a barricade, dispersed to the sides and began to
attack the police from the rear. After the demonstration at the Voivodship Committee was dispersed, people began gathering at the Voivodship
Office. At about 5 p.m. two dead people, covered in blood, were driven
on electric trolleys through the streets of Zeromskiego and Struga. The
people clenched their fists and stood fast. According to one report,
seventeen workers were killed in the ensuing battles and 30 million zloty
worth of goods were removed from the shops by the demonstrators.60
Street fighting continued three hours after the Prime Minister had
announced on TV that the price increases were withdrawn, and the
government became so worried that six plane-loads of troops were dispatched to the town during the night. In the subsequent repression 2,000
people were arrested.61 Some were placed in a make-shift barbed-wire
camp on the edge of the town while others were placed in a hurriedly
arranged prison at Bialystok, 300 miles east of Radom on the Soviet
border. Peace, of a kind, was restored.
2. Consultation, Ursus style. This town, a few miles outside Warsaw, is built
around a huge tractor plant employing 15,000 workers. On the Friday
morning these workers decided to elect a fifteen-man committee to
discuss the price rises with the factory management. It appears, in fact,
that the workers line of response was to gain sufficient wage increases to
thoroughly offset the effects of the price rise.62 But the factory authorities
responded by refusing to talk and instead sacking the fifteen committee
60

The figure of seventeen deaths was given by Die Welt; other reports give a figure of
twelve. The authorities claim that both totals are false, but government sources of
information have been discredited by the exposure of their attempts to cover up police
brutality during the events entirely.
61 Communiqu No. 1, Committee for the Defence of the Workers, 29 September 1976.
62 Economist, 10 July 1976.
101

members on the spot. At this, the workers drove their tractors to the
nearby main Warsaw-Paris railway line and blocked it. When the militia
started pushing the tractors off the line, the workers responded by ripping
up the railway tracks, building defensive barriers and cutting electric
power, thereby holding hostage the international express train to Paris.
They refused to release the train till the price rises were cancelled. At this
stage, the police remained in the background. After the Prime Ministers
TV announcement cancelling the price rises that evening, some workers
went home triumphant while others celebrated with bonfires around the
factory and along the railway line. Then the police attacked with tear gas
and even grenades, beating up anyone in sight and arresting hundreds. By
the following morning 600 workers had been arrested, and the factory
management suspended no less than 1,000 workers from work for three
months.
3. Consultation, Plock style. At this major oil-refining centre some distance
north of Warsaw, workers at the refinery started discussing the price rises
in the early morning. After drawing up a series of demands, they
presented them to the Director as a basis for discussion. The response was
to tell them to get back to work, so the workers poured out of the factory
and marched, about 1,500 strong, singing the Internationale and carrying
makeshift Red Flags, towards the Party headquarters. Meanwhile,
workers at the towns agricultural machinery factory, ignorant of what
was happening at the oil refinery, marched out to the local army barracks.
They also sang the Internationale and shouted Army with the nation,
Army with the people. Hearing about the other demonstration, they
then joined forces outside the Party headquarters. The demands drawn
up earlier at the refinery were presented to the Secretary of the local Party
committee, who then promised to pass them on to Warsaw. When the
news of the Prime Ministers broadcast reached them, the workers
dispersed home. This was just after 8 p.m. Then at about 10 p.m. a curious
incident occurred. About 200 youths went through the town breaking
windows and looting some shops. The police did not stop them or make
arrests. Who were they? Where did they come from? There were
rumours of police provocation. The next day about 100 workers were
arrested; another 150 refinery workers were sacked, along with thirty
from the agricultural machinery factory.
4. Information from other areas is fragmentary, but strikes occurred
throughout the country. The shipyard workers on the Baltic stopped
work throughout the day, but no public demonstrations were reported.
This pattern was repeated at the famous Zeran car plant on the East bank
of the Vistula at Warsaw. At this factory the 15,000 workers, who
produce the Polski Fiat, refused to work for two days and remained in the
factory holding discussions. Subsequently, fifty-six workers were called
individually into the managements offices for unspecified consultations,
only to find themselves under arrest and on their way to prison. The large
Karol Swiercewski cutlery factory employing 5,000 workers struck, as
did the Tewa transistor factory. The ELTA transformer plant in Lodz drew
up a list of demands and handed it in to the Director, forcing him to go
forthwith to Warsaw with them by threatening an immediate strike. The
only important area of the country from which no reports of work
stoppages were reported was Silesia, where the highly paid miners appear
to have continued working.
102

The Party Leaderships Response

There can be no doubt that the strike movement shook the Party
leadership to the core. The events in Radom and Ursus were only the
most explosive points in an extraordinarily broad movement across the
country, and the rgime must have been well aware that continued
intransigence on the price issue would have produced the kind of strong
organizations of working-class strike struggle which presented such a
mortal threat in 197071. Gierek therefore responded by reversing the
responses which Gomulka had attempted. Instead of first applying
repression and then being forced into making concessions, the leadership
immediately granted the workers major demandfor a continuation of
the freeze on prices. It then attempted to counter-attack by violently
suppressing the most combative sections of the working class, while
attempting to mobilize a show of support for itself through the
organization of mass rallies in all the major cities.
The mass meetings involved little more than Party functionaries and
members. For example, Die Zeit reported that the Warsaw meeting was
only about one third as large as the Party leadership claimed, and all those
present were carefully screened: they had to wear special identification
tags which were easily recognizable by TV viewers. On 30 June a meeting
of over 800 workers, party members and non-party people was reported
to have taken place at Ursus. This is a significant figure, considering that
out of a total work-force at the factory of 15,000, some 2,500 are Party
members. In other words, the local Party bosses were not able to mobilize
even half the Party membership at the plant. The content of the
resolutions of these meetings was not uniform. Some were in the classic
Yezhov mould, calling for exemplary punishment of those guilty of
incidents, as Trybuna Ludu reported on 28 June. But one resolution from
Biala Podlaska confined itself to a rather patronizing and back-handed
compliment to the Party leadership, saying its decision to withdraw the
price increases was appreciated and was viewed with due respect, as an
expression of good political judgement.
The repressive drive took the form of widespread politically motivated
dismissals of those most involved in militant activity in the factories both
before and during the June strikes;63 in addition, there were many
hundreds of arrests involving great brutality on the part of the police and
prison authorities. Finally, there were a series of trials, some public and
some not, resulting in harsh prison terms for demonstrators in Ursus and
63

It is still impossible to quantify accurately the number of political dismissals from work.
The Committee for the Defence of the Workers has verified about 2,000, but other estimates
put the total in tens of thousands. An indication of the scope of the victimization is the fact
that the Ministry for the engineering industry sent out a general circular to plant
managements on how to proceed with the dismissals, in a memorandum dated 17 July 1976.
The order indicated a number of new criteria for dismissals: The wilful stoppage of work
without valid reason, the shirking of ones duties, and the disturbance of order and peace in
the institution are a basis for termination of contract without notice, i.e. dismissal from
work with immediate effect. This memo is contained in Information Bulletin, No. 1, cited
above. In Poland, the right to strike is neither guaranteed by law nor forbidden. However,
participation in acts which disrupt the national economy is a legal offence and this
stipulation has been used to victimize workers.
103

Radom.64 The Party leadership hoped that in this way it could re-establish
its authority and throw the working class on to the defensive, without
provoking a full-scale confrontation. This counter-attack continued
through July, August and September. But by October it was petering out
in the face of a mounting wave of political opposition which was raising
the political crisis to a higher plane.
The working class was not isolated from the dissident cultural
intelligentsia and the students as it had been in 197071. Within three
days of the strike movement, open letters and appeals for an end to
repression were being produced by various prominent intellectuals. In
June, the forces which had appeared in the meat crisis of Spring 1975 and
the leaders of the wave of protests against Soviet-inspired constitutional
amendments at the beginning of 1976 fused into one front against the
Party leadership. After a series of disparate intellectual protests, a
Committee for Defence of the Workers was formed in Warsaw in
September to organize support for the victims of the post-June
repression, to expose the nature of this repression, and to demand the
release of all those in prison or sacked from their jobs. Hundreds of
student and other activists involved themselves in the work of the
committee, distributing its communiqus as an alternative source of
information to the censored press and collecting and distributing money
for the victimized workers. At the same time, the Church demanded that
the imprisoned workers be released and gave tacit support to the
activities of the Committee.
The authorities were forced to retreat in the face of this movement,
releasing many of the jailed workers from Radom and Ursus (though not
all), offering institutional concessions to the Church, and claiming that
the stories of police brutality were anti-Communist inventions. All the
imaginative resources of the police were brought to bear on the problem
of how to intimidate and harass the members of the Committee: some
were beaten up, others were subjected to death threats and a stream of
anonymous abuse. But throughout November and December the
initiative was passing from the rgime to the Committee, which was
campaigning for a full Sejm inquiry into police brutality during and after
the June events. A growing number of public figures, many of whom had
no previous record of protest of any kind, signed demands for an official
enquiry into police brutality. In December these protests extended into
the Academy of Sciences and the Party leadership was being thrown onto
the defensive: its attempts to re-establish its authority by means of
repression were becoming a new source of instability. Even in Radom,
where the repression has been most severe, many of the workers tortured
by the police have had the confidence to organize protests against their
brutal treatment.65
64

The sentences passed on those brought to trial for participation in the disturbances
ranged from three up to ten years. The Polish police evidently used the same methods
against those arrested as those used by the prison authorities in Britain against arrested Irish
Republicans: they forced them to run through lines of truncheon-swinging policemen
known in Poland as a health path. One prisoners account of his treatment in Radom was
published in Information Bulletin, No. 1, cited above.
65
Sixty-five Radom workers, arrested after the demonstration, joined together to protest
against police brutality and demand a full enquiry. On the build-up of the campaign in
104

The Developing Political Struggle

By Christmas, the Polish economic crisis had deepened, with new food
shortages, mounting debts, growing capitalist pressure for repayments
and the introduction of sugar and coal rationing. The summers attempt
to tackle the economic crisis had produced only a full-scale political crisis
and a pledge by the authorities not to carry through the price rises in the
foreseeable future. Inside the government, voices were being raised in
favour of a return to economic autarky in spite of the general economic
dislocation that a sudden end to imports from the capitalist world would
bring.66 A Soviet loan in December could offer only a very short-term
breathing space. On the political level, the June events had produced
bitter hostility to the rgime within the working class, without in any way
weakening the capacity of the masses to engage in political struggle for
their rights. Instead, a growing political opposition movement is being
formed, currently finding its organizational focus in the Committee for
Defence of the Workers. In the leadership of this movement are a number
of political oppositionists with a fund of experience and political
credibility stretching back to 1968 and even to 1956.67
Five years earlier, during the Baltic crisis, the working class had struggled
alone against a Party leadership that could count on the passivity of the
students and intellectuals, the support of the Church, the neutrality of the
peasants and the vigorous solidarity of Moscow. Now it is the rgime
which is isolated, able to count only on the Soviet leadership which must
be increasingly sceptical of Giereks value as its lieutenant in Poland.
There is evidence of sharp tensions inside the Party apparatus, and
Western press reports suggest an incipient process of political
differentiation amongst the Party leaders. So far, Giereks hard work over
five years to make himself the master of the bureaucracy has enabled him
successfully to hold the apparatus together. But the open political crisis in
Poland is still at an early stage of development.
From this distance, it is not possible to grasp the shifting configuration of
forces in Poland in all its arithmetical detail. Nevertheless, we can draw
out some general political conclusions from the previous analysis in this
article. In the first place, short of some massive saving operation by the
Soviet leadership or the capitalist states of the West, the Polish economic
crisis will deepen, forcing the rgime to attack the living standards of the
working class. At the same time, no socialist could justify such an attack
since it will serve only to maintain in existence the basic cause of the
November and December, see the detailed account of Helen Jamieson in Red Weekly, 20
January 1977. E. Smolar, of the Polish journal Aneks, very kindly provided me with some of
the material from the opposition in Poland used in this article. A number of statements and
appeals by Polish oppositionists, including the Committee for Defence of the Workers, are
published in the first issue of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, London, MarchApril 1977.
66 See the December 1976 issue of the Polityka Export-Import supplement, which contains
a polemic against unspecified circles calling for a return to economic autarky.
67 The membership of the Committee comes mainly from two strands within the dissident
intelligentsia, neither of which are necessarily homogeneous politically. First, former
members of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) like Edward Lipinski, Ludwig Cohn, Antoni
Pajdak and Aniela Steinsbergowa. Secondly, leading figures from the student movement of
the sixties, like Jacek Kuron, Antoni Macierewicz, Piotr Naimski and Wojciech
Ziembinski. In addition, some leading figures in Polish cultural life are on the Committee.
105

present economic impasse: the stranglehold on economic development

produced by the concentration of political power in the hands of the Party
and state bureaucracy. In an economy whose basic regulative principle
involves political bargaining over every aspect of productive activity, the
exclusion of the direct producers from the political process is a formula
for economic stagnation and waste. The only realistic perspective for
economic re-stabilization must, therefore, be based on the conquest of
political power by the Polish working class and the establishment of
thoroughgoing socialist democracy.
Such a perspective involves a protracted political struggle on the part of
the working class which clashes with the basic interests of both the Polish
and the Soviet State and Party bureaucracies. Historical experience in
Eastern Europe has repeatedly demonstrated that even moves towards
liberalization which fall far short of genuine democratization provoke
extremely sharp resistance on the part of the Soviet leadership, for the
very obvious reason that unlike the capitalist classes of the West its social
position depends entirely upon its ability to monopolize all aspects of
political life. Furthermore, strategies based upon utilizing the established
institutional framework of political power to achieve democratization
have been proved bankrupt, for they enable the local leaderships or the
Soviet leadership to recoup politically, through their preservation of the
repressive apparatus and the political apparatus of the Party, and thereby
regain the political initiative and isolate the opposition.
At the same time, any independent mass mobilization by the working
class has a devastating impact upon the authority of these rgimes,
forcing them to retreat and producing sharp tensions within the
bureaucracy. This was the result of the strike movement in Poland last
June. Since that time the movement around the Committee for
Defence of the Workers has provided an effective means of linking the
intellectual opposition with the working class, creating the possibility of
a developing alliance between the two social groups and providing a first
open platform for rallying forces around political demands on the Party
leadership. The Warsaw Committee has taken up and sought to utilize the
contradictions of Giereks consultationist posture, putting to the test
promises to allow expressions of disagreement with Government policy
and demanding an enquiry into actions by the rgime which contradict its
carefully fostered image of harmonious relations with the working class.
This policy of independent mobilization of the masses for political
demands that hit the rgime at its weakest point creates the worst possible
relation of forces for the Party leadership: vigorous repression of the
Committee may produce an explosive reaction from the working class,
while acceptance of the Committees demands for a full public enquiry
into police brutality can disorganize the repressive forces and stimulate
further democratic demands. For this reason, the rgime is currently
attempting to drive a wedge between the working class and the
intellectual opposition, in order to prepare the way for suppressing the
Committee and tackling the working class at a later stage.
In so far as the growing mass movement is able to force concessions from
the Party leadership, a growing split will take place within the Polish
bureaucracy and between it and the Soviet leadership. Any struggle for
106

socialist democracy in Eastern Europe must confront the problem of

armed Soviet intervention to crush the local workers movement.
Historical experience indicates some of the crucial factors determining
the capacity of the Soviet leadership to intervene. Twice in the last thirty
years, the Soviet leadership has been deterred from military attack and
twice it has felt able to impose its will against insurgent national
resistance.68 In the case of both Yugoslavia in 19489 and Poland in 1956,
the existence of national leaderships with strong popular support and a
capacity and preparedness to organize full-scale national resistance
forced the leaders of the CPSU to draw back from military attack. In the
Yugoslav case, the international relationship of forces was particularly
favourable for military intervention; but the Tito leadership, emerging
from a popular revolution whose main form had been a uniquely
successful partisan struggle against an invading army, was ready and
willing to inflict terrible costs on a new invader. In the Polish case, the
simultaneous revolutionary process in Hungary and the popular
authority and undoubted determination of Gomulka produced a lastminute hesitation by the Kremlin and a temporary compromise. In
Hungary, on the other hand, the existence of the weak and divided Nagy
government could not conceal a real political vacuum, while the
compromise with Gomulka and a simultaneous agreement with Tito had
freed the Soviet leaderships hand for crushing an isolated Hungarian
working class. In Czechoslovakia in 1968, Moscow calculated correctly
that the Dubcek leadership lacked the political independence to mobilize
the population openly against the invasionthe events in the month
before August had graphically illustrated this political weakness within
the Czechoslovak Party leadership. Yet even with this advantage and
with the relative stability of bureaucratic control in the surrounding
states, the Soviet leadership faced considerable difficulties in
transforming a military victory into political restabilization.
Today in Poland, the possibility of Soviet military intervention is a
topic of serious discussion. The subjugation of Poland is a very much
more formidable operation than putting down relatively small states like
Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the Polish working class has
an unparalleled record of independent political mobilization against
oppression over the last twenty-five years. There are signs of growing
political instability also in neighbouring East Germany and
Czechoslovakia, while an attack would irreparably damage the Soviet
bureaucracys traditional base of support in the labour movements of
Western Europe. The kind of indecision within the Soviet leadership
which accompanied both the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian invasions
would undoubtedly reappear, in conditions where Moscows current
aging leadership team cannot in any case be expected to retain its positions for very much longer.
In this situation, the only way to ensure the medium-term development of
the movement for democratization in Poland must lie through the
strengthening of those factors which can enforce an unacceptably high
political price on Soviet intervention. This involves the strengthening of
68

The Berlin uprising of 1953 is a special case, for there the established Ulbricht leadership
actively sought Soviet military assistance.
107

the independent mobilization and organization of the Polish workers, the

development of links with the anti-bureaucratic movements in
surrounding East European states and the development of a strong
movement of solidarity on the part of the labour movements of Western
Europe, involving the Communist Parties in material and political
support for the Polish opposition.
For the first time for many decades, the development of the workers
movements in the two halves of Europe can be understood today
increasingly only within the framework of one single international
perspective. The fate of the Polish workers struggle during the next
few years is likely to become as much a direct political factor in the class
struggle in Britain as the outcome of the political crises in Spain or
Portugal. Yet an enormous gulf still lies between this increasingly unified
objective historical process and the subjective political links between the
movements of the working-class vanguards in the two halves of Europe.
It is urgently necessary for socialists in Britain to make the problems of
the Polish workers their own.

108