Author: Tomasz Blusiewicz, PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University
The Politics of Détente and the December 1970 Protest on the Polish Baltic Coast:
the Missing Link.
Prepared for presentation at:
Structures and Events - A Dialogue between History and Sociology
7th Annual Seminar of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology
Draft: do not cite without the author's permission
All references and quotations in this paper are correct, but only provisionally edited. I apologize in advance for the
work-in-progress character of this paper.
I. Introduction
A lot has been written about the revolutionary events on the Polish Baltic coast in 1970
and 1980. It was in the port cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, Szczecin and Elbląg that the most violent
unrest - 45 casualties and thousands wounded - of the entire communist period in Poland took
place in December 1970. In consequence, Władysław Gomułka was forced to resign from the
post of the First Secretary and was replaced by Edward Gierek. The December Protests were
followed by several months of strikes that defined a new era in Polish politics. Ten years later,
the first independent trade union east of the Iron Curtain, Solidarność, has been created, again
on the Baltic coast and with all the repercussions that movement produced for the Cold War
world. The spectacular character of both moments - the bloody street battles of December
1970 and the breakthrough strike in the Lenin Shipyard of August 1980 - has naturally attracted
a lot of attention. We know what happened, how it happened, who the actors were, what
postulates were put forward and how the government reacted to the crisis. We also know what
happened in 1989, that the Soviet Union collapsed two years later and the political landscape of
1
Europe had been fundamentally transformed by the end of the millennium. In 2015, we are
equipped both with abundance of evidence and the advantage of hindsight to produce a
comprehensive reconstruction of many aspect of that history.
What else remains to be written about those events? While it is true that Solidarność
boasts a sizeable literature in English and other languages, the December 1970 Protests are still
little known outside of Poland. Furthermore, I think several key causal factors are either missing
or misrepresented in the available geneses of Solidarność and certainly understudied in the
English-speaking world. In this paper, I focus on one source of the December 1970 Protests that
seems to be commonly misunderstood or absent altogether. In short - I argue that it is
necessary to go all the way back to Joseph Stalin's decision to 'compensate' Poland with the
German territories (known in Poland as the Recovered Territories, Ziemie Odzyskane) for the
USSR-annexed eastern borderlands (the Kresy). This decision led to distinct 'conditions of origin'
of 1945, a 'primary structural determinant' without which one cannot begin to understand the
causes of Protests that took place a quarter century later. In this paper, I develop a category
provisionally named Yalta1 as an umbrella term to capture some of the consequences
originating from the fact that Poland's borders have been moved several hundred miles west
after the Second World War. What Yalta meant for the Baltic Coast cities was - to mention just
the most fundamental fact - a virtually complete turnover of their population. In 1970, a vast
majority Gdańsk's residents (up to 95%) and Szczecin (up to 99%) could have lived there for at
most 25 years. Most of the workers who participated in the December protests were between
20 and 40 years of age, meaning that either they or their parents were newcomers to the cities
and new to the shipbuilding industry, which was virtually nonexistent in pre-war Poland. I thus
argue that it is crucial to keep in mind that cities such as Gdańsk (Danzig) and Szczecin (Stettin)
were an integral part of Germany in 1944 to understand why the protests erupted on the Baltic
coast and not elsewhere.
1
This term of course refers to the Big Three Yalta Peace Conference in 1945. In Polish popular memory and common parlance,
this term is deployed to refer to the various consequences of that conference, including Soviet-domination, population
transfers and the westward shift of the borders.
2
In order to show how the 'point of origin' of 1945 and the entire process of PolishGerman population transfers had formed the structural conditions leading up to the outbreak
of the December 1970 Protests, I trace the evolution of the Polish-German relations in the late
1960s. One week before the 1970 Protests erupted - Willy Brandt visited Warsaw and fell on his
knees to honor the memory of the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This act, alongside
the formal recognition of the Oder-Neisse border, marked the dawn of a new era in PolishGerman relations. Without the new course in West German Ostpolitik, Brandt's act would have
been unthinkable. But the connection between the outbreak of the December 1970 Protests
and Brand's gesture is far from obvious. The common wisdom has it that it was the
announcement of the price increases on staple consumer products on December 12 that led to
the outburst of popular discontent. I argue that without the 'Brandt-connection', the causal
nexus preceding the 1970 Protests is incomplete. This nexus can be more fully understood only
by bringing together large 'macro-historical conditions' such as geopolitical tectonics,
demographic evolutions, socioeconomic relations, ebb and flow of international tensions as
well as 'discrete events' such as the announcement of the price increases and Brand's kniefall in
Warsaw. Finally, I bring to light some particular events from the violent days of December 1970
in order to trace how long-term 'structural determinants' facilitated concrete 'revolutionary
action' - several days of street riots and several months of strike activity. This dual approach
helps to understand the 1970 Protests as both conditioned by macro-scale world-historical
shifts, socioeconomic processes as well as sequences of events with their own internal logic and
specific, 'discrete' and 'non-linear' spatio-temporal dynamics. To structure my argument, I
employ the conceptual distinction of 'processes' and 'events' in history, as developed by, for
example, William H. Sewell, in his book Logics of History and in particular in the chapter on the
storming of the Bastille2. Moreover, this paper demonstrates the existence of striking analogies
between events in France in 1989 and in Poland in 1970. In conclusion, I suggest that the kind
of interdisciplinarity based on combining methods of history and social sciences retain its
intellectual utility even in the context of realities as different as Ancien Régime France and
communist Poland.
2
William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, Chapter 8, 2005.
3
II. Marxism and the allure of structural thinking
Postwar Eastern European history is marked by patterns of mass protest against
communist rule occurring with remarkable systematicity and unfolding along similar lines. 1953
in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary and Poland, 1968 in Czechoslovakia and then 1970, 1976 and
1980 in Poland. And finally - the entire round of revolutions sequentially firing off one after
another in 1989. The domino-like pattern of collapsing regimes in 1989 is well-captured by the
slogan carried by the protesters in Prague during the Velvet Revolution: "10 years in Poland, 10
months in Hungary, 10 weeks in East Germany and 10 days in Czechoslovakia."3 When the time
comes, it will take 10 hours in Romania - some observers were quick to add and they were not
far off the mark. The Soviet Union itself soon followed suit. According to a chef analyst of the
Soviet KGB, Nikolai Leonov, "the Soviet Union resembled a chocolate bar: it was creased with
the furrowed lines of future divisions, as if for the convenience of its consumers."4 The strikingly
ordered, simultaneous and analogical way the world of Soviet communism collapsed rendered
it appealing to think that it must have been composed of certain underlying, tectonic building
blocks that made it function and collapse in a strikingly systematic, physics-like way.
Marxist-Leninist social scientists were fond of perceiving societies as composed of
sharply delineated, massive building blocks antagonistically interacting with each other in a
Hegelian action-reaction spiral: workers and capitalists, toilers and intelligentsia, farmers and
landlords, state and society, etc. Soon after the thaw of 1956 some shrewd observers began to
perceive that through the strict adherence to the tenets of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, the
central planners of Soviet-type economies have indeed transformed those societies into
something resembling mid-nineteenth century England as seen by Marx when he wrote Das
Kapital.5 The port cities of the Polish Baltic coast could in fact be compared to Newcastle or
3
As quoted in: Timothy Garton Ash, The Revolution of the Magic Lantern, The New York Review of Books, January 18, 1990.
Quoted in: Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted. The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
86.
5 For example, see the reminiscences of the Warsaw University economics professor Zdzisław Sadowski, in: Zdzisław Sadowski
and Pawel Kozłowski, Przez Ciekawe Czasy : Rozmowy z Pawłem Kozłowskim o Życiu, Ludziach i Zdarzeniach, (Warszawa: Polskie
Towarzystwo Ekonomiczne, 2011), 155.
4
4
other British industrial port cities of the 19th century. Docks and shipyards employing tens of
thousands workers dominated the economic life alongside export-oriented transport services.
Big factories, heavy industry and port-concentrated infrastructure facilitated massive
residential concentrations of workers in small urban clusters nearby the docks.
This paper focuses on geopolitics, international relations and popular memory, but it is
crucial to keep in mind that the ports of Gdańsk/Gdynia and Szczecin were (and still are)
essentially the only two entrepôts for the Polish long-distance foreign trade. Under
communism, these two ports covered a vast majority of exchange with the 'non-socialist
economic zone', i.e. with capitalist countries. Without the two port complexes in operation, the
country was virtually cut from the global flow of goods. This fact of economic geography had an
immense effect on the unique (in the Polish context) socioeconomic profile of both urban areas
as well as on their bargaining power vis-à-vis Warsaw. I return to the importance of this context
in the conclusion.
III. Yalta: How the Polish West was Won
Over the past decade, It has become commonplace for historians to speak about the
first postwar decade in Europe (1945-1956), especially on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain,
in terms of a revolution. While there was no one self-evident 'revolutionary moment' as
dramatic as 1789 or 1917, the scale of social transformations occurring within several years has
been of similar proportions. In the Polish case, the imposition of the Soviet model had been
rendered even more transformative by the fact that the country had been moved several
hundred miles west - as agreed by the Big Three partners of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. While
Poland received 'new' and definite borders on the map already in August 1945, the
consequences of this geopolitical development - such as the massive transfers of people, things
or ideas - took decades to 'complete' and are well visible and felt until today. A look at the
5
geographic patterns of recent Presidential Elections provides a telling confirmation of the
weight of those legacies:
6
Map 1. The results of the 2015 Presidential Elections (the first round).
Map 2. Imperial Legacies and Border Changes.
7
Map 3. A comparison of the Presidential Election results in 2005 and 2010. The red lines marks the pre-WWI
borders between German, Austria-Hungary and Russia.
The former Prussia-Germany controlled areas tend to be consistently more sympathetic
to liberal and left candidates while the former Russia and Austria controlled areas tend to vote
conservative and national. This striking regularity of geographic patterns of the Polish election
results have recently began receiving more attention from scholars and journalists alike.6 For
the purposes of this paper, suffices it to say that the political realm is just one area where the
impact of accumulated geopolitical (or as most scholars prefer to call it today: imperial) legacies
is self-evidently visible. Needless to say, such legacies were certainly more 'fresh' and 'tangible'
in 1970 than they are in 2015.
While many sociologists and political scientists have focused on studying the grand
socioeconomic transformations of communist societies such as urbanization, industrialization
6
Nalepa, Monika and Grigore Pop-Eleches. 2015 “The Missing Link(s): Imperial Legacies and Anti-Communist Attitudes in
Poland 1984-1989.” (conference paper); Jan Cieński, Poland's Past Marks its Present, Politico, 2/6/2015
http://www.politico.eu/article/polands-past-marks-its-present/
8
or emancipation of women, only recently did some historians begin to take a close look at
tumultuous past of the Polish Recovered Territories - the territories Poland took over from
Germany in 1945. This aspect of the post-1945 revolution - removing ca. 9 million Germans and
building a brand new model communist society out of a similar number of Poles by 1956 - is an
immensely complex process that has been neglected both by (English-speaking) historians and
largely forgotten by those who studied the genesis of the 1970 Protests and the birth of
Solidarity in 1980. Even the best studies of Solidarity's origins, such as Roman Laba's Roots of
Solidarity, reference the consequences of Yalta merely in passing.7 This omission is surprising
given that, for example, many of the most prominent leaders of Solidarność such as Anna
Walentynowicz, Bogdan Borusewicz or Andrzej Gwiazda - were either born in the former Polish
eastern borderlands (the Kresy) or were descendents of people who were resettled. The
intellectual, dissident circles of Gdańsk and Szczecin had been to a large extent formed by the
former residents of Wilno (now: Vilnius) - one of the most vibrant cultural centers of prewar
central Europe. Wilno was the hometown of such figures as Czesław Miłosz, the Literature
Nobel Laureate of 1980 or Stefan Jędrychowski - second in command of the postwar Stalinist
economy. It is impossible to start imaging how the opposition movement in the Baltic coast
cities functioned without taking into consideration the experiences of those who had been
expelled from their previous homeland in the Kresy.
Conversely, it should be equally easy to imagine why those people were not particularly
susceptible to the Hegelian bite of Marxist ideology that many Warsaw intellectuals, for
example, went through en masse both before and again after the war.8 Most politically active
Poles who lived in the Kresy on the eve of Second World War soon experienced the full package
of Stalinist social engineering first hand after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact had been implement
and Poland divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This experience included
deportations and long years of unwanted tourism through Siberia's vast expanses and its
7
Roman Laba, Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland's Working-Class Democratization, Princeton Unviersity Press,
1991.
8 See: Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes : A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006).
9
innumerable Gulags. This lesson has been summarized by Andrzej Gwiazda, one of the central
figures of the Gdańsk dissident circles throughout the communist period:
I repaid the totalitarian system for what it made me […]. My childhood experience on the
collective farm about 300 kilometers from where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent time in northern
Kazakhstan cured me of ideologies and made me immune to the communist propaganda bug. […]
I was never hooked, so I did not go through conversions, or withdrawals of people who might
have been persuaded by just causes."9
On the other side of the expellee equation was the fact that they were moved to an entirely
new milieu. Prewar Vilnius and Gdańsk were parts of different worlds - everything from climate,
the economic function to architecture differed significantly. While Poland has received a
narrow corridor linking it with the sea after the First World War and had constructed its own
new port (Gdynia) from scratch, the country's maritime tradition (cadres, expertise, equipment,
etc.) has remained limited. With the exception Gdynia, the shipyards and ports of Gdańsk and
Szczecin had been constructed by German firms, with the Lenin shipyard carrying the name of
its owner - Schichau - before the war. Why the 1970 Protests took place in a predominantly
German-constructed material world should become clear by the end of the paper.
Summing up - it is impossible to even start imagining what Polish communism would be
like without including Yalta - the fundamental geopolitical transformation and the country's
'new place under the sun' after 1945.
IV. Ostpolitik, Détente and the Law of Unintended Consequences
The facts discussed above are hardly revelations. It is surprising, however, that the
context of Yalta is mentioned so scantily to account for the December 1970 Protests. One
possible reason for why historians and (social scientists in particular) do not approach the
consequences of Yalta analytically might be that there might seem not much to be said beyond
9
Quoted in: Michael Szporer, Solidarity: The Great Workers Strike of 1980, 2012, 50.
10
stating the facts: borders changed and people were put on trains, moved from one place to
another and new conditions of reality descended upon stunde null Europe divided into new
contours of nation states - a certain exogenous given, a fact of life. In this sense, there is little
sense in reminding our readers about the contours of nation states on the political map of
Europe after 1945. However, while borders changed and people moved, those who found
themselves in Gdańsk or Szczecin and remained there by 1970 did not appear out of a historical
vacuum. It is thus worth pointing out that many people who were the leaders of the 1970
Protests carried vivid memories of expulsion or resettlement10 in their minds. Even if they were
not personally affected by the events of 1945, many among their parents, families and friends
were. The social memory of resettlement and expulsion is still alive and tangible in Gdańsk or
Szczecin. It was a core part of the social world of reference in 1970, even if could not have been
discussed openly.11 The collective stichwort for this reference was no other than "Yalta" - with a
whole range of meanings from the (perceived) Allied betrayal, undeserved fate after the
Second World War to the lost homeland in the east. From this perspective, the term stunde null
- the zero hour of European history - in some ways hides more than it explains, despite the best
intentions of those who were keen on using it. Many of those who survived the war and found
themselves in Recovered Lands after 1945 dreamed and spoke of a 'new beginning', but what
this terms entailed was rarely more than what it is - a hopeful metaphor. The memory of 'Yalta'
remained strong and played a key role in mobilizing the workers in 1970 and 1980.
The significance of the causal nexus encompassing the long-terms consequences of
Yalta and the 1970 Protests emerges clearly in the way Polish-German relations developed
after 1945 and how directly they influenced the 1970 protests. One of the last formal acts of
the Gomułka regime, one week before the protest began and two weeks before Gomułka's
downfall, was the signing of the Warsaw Treaty with Willy Brandt's government on December
7, 1970. The most important provision of that treaty was the official recognition of the Oder-
10
The degrees to which the population exchange between Poland and Germany after 1945 was voluntary or forced varies and
depends on particular, individual circumstances. However, in so far as people who lived in Eastern Poland before 1939 are
concerned, the term expulsion or forced resettlement accurately captures their fate. In 1970 in Gdańsk, the expellees from the
Kresy made up to 30 % of the total number of inhabitants.
11 Before 1989, most public references to the Kresy (a part of the Soviet Union then) were perceived by the regime as 'hostile to
state interests'. While the topic remained taboo in public, it was a integral part of 'general knowledge' for any conscious citizen.
11
Neisse line by West Germany. From the Polish perspective, this treaty put an end to the
quarter-century long period of uncertainty concerning to the status of the Recovered
Territories. This moment is now portrayed as a milestone on the way toward Polish-German
reconciliation. At the time, it was framed by the regime's propaganda machine as an epochal
victory of Polish diplomacy. However, the influence of the Warsaw Treaty on the mood of the
Baltic Coast had turned out to be quite different than the intended legitimacy boost for the
regime.
To understand how the 1970 Protests are connected to the Warsaw Treaty and to
Polish-German relations, we have to go back to 1945 and to Yalta yet again. What was the
reasoning that made Stalin move Poland west? Among the many considerations that affected
the final shape of Poland's borders, decisive were Stalin's predictions on how geopolitics in
postwar Europe was going to unfold. In 1945, no one could be sure what kind of future awaited
Germany. In Stalin's mind - and the 'future' verified the accuracy of his calculus - the future of
Poland was sealed. The country was to remain firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence and
there was no force other than a full-scale war that could have changed this outcome.
Consequently, transferring as much German territory as possible to Poland secured at least two
outcomes. First, without knowing the future trajectory of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ),
pushing Poland west meant expanding Soviet influence as far into Central Europe as possible.
Secondly, it meant that Poland would face the threat of German revanchism, a threat it would
not be, Stalin anticipated, able to resist without Soviet backing. Consequently, it tied Polish
territorial integrity to the Soviet Union. The intricacies of Cold War power games aside, Poland
was de facto dependent on the Soviet Union to secure its western border between 1945 and
1970.
Stalin was aware that imposing the Soviet model of communism upon Poland would not
be easy. He was once reported remarking that installing communism in Poland could be
comparing to saddling a cow.12 To make the operation easier - Poland had to be made as
dependent on Soviet support as possible. In May 1946, just after Churchill's Iron Curtain speech
12
After: Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, Communism Unwrapped, Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, 2010, 10.
12
in Fulton, a Polish government delegation visited Moscow to be reassured by Stalin that "every
arm stretched out to grab the Polish Western Lands will be cut back by the military might of the
Red Army."13 Polish leaders made no mystery out of the need to rely on Soviet support to keep
the Western Lands and openly admitted that "Soviet guarantees of our borders" were much
more valuable than international treaties.14 The vassal nature of this strategic entanglement
had been frequently reformulated by the Soviet leaders. During a visit to Szczecin in 1960,
Nikita Khrushchev reassured the Poles (worried about the increasingly confrontationalist voices
from West Germany) in the following way: "the allies of the Polish People's Republic will defend
her borders just like their own borders [...] it is worth reminding here - in the westernmost city
of the Republic, that the border posts on the Oder and Neisse will be defended by all of us
alongside the Polish nation."15 As long as the German threat was real - went the Soviet message
- you need to keep quiet and kindly ask for our support.
Domestically, taking over the Recovered Territories was exploited as a nation-unifying cause
to win a degree of support for the new regime. The abandoned German property and land
offered an opportunity to proceed rapidly with the communist policy agenda – nationalization
of industry and collectivization in agriculture, initially euphemized as ‘land reform’. The success
of those hallmark policies was in turn to present a model for the rest of the 'old country', where
such radical changes were initially tactically undesirable.16 Furthermore, the anti-German
sentiment was a convenient card to play. The reintegration of ‘the cradle of the Slavic peoples’
was a project that no patriotic Pole could oppose. The communists - by portraying themselves
as the sole guarantors and executioners of the historic mission - were waging a battle for the
hearts and minds of the Polish society. It was a difficult battle in a country were communism
had negligible grassroots support. It was a country invaded and occupied from the east in 1920,
1939 and 1944, with its elites either buried in the Katyń forest, Kazakh steppe or Syberian taiga
13
AAN, TRZZ (571), Syg. 508, Polityka ZSRR w kwestii polskich granic zachodnich, 1967,Referat Włodzimierza T. Kowalskiego
example, see the transcript of the Politburo meeting from 10 April 1970: KC PZPR 1354, V/90 (mikrofilm 2913), Protokoly
posiedzeń BP KC PZPR za rok 1970, Protokół nr 12, posiedzenie BP w dniu 10 kwietnia 1970, leaf 7.
15 AAN, TRZZ (571), Sygnatura 10, II Walny Zjazd Delegatów TRZZ w Olsztynie w dn. 23 24 01 1960, Referaty, glosy w dyskusji,
listy dyskutantow, leaf 10.
16 See: Radosław Domke, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne Polski w Propagandzie Lat 1945-1948, (Zielona Góra: Oficyna
Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego, 2010), 16-25.
14For
13
and the lucky survivors on their long way back from various parts of the Eurasian landmass with
first-hand knowledge about the less glorious sides of the communist utopia.
The peak of anti-German rhetoric designed around the alleged threat to the OderNeisse line falls between 1960-1966, but in milder forms it continued well until 1970. Marcin
Zaremba, a leading Polish historian, in his book Communism, Nationalism, Legitimacy makes
the argument that Władysław Gomułka correctly identified the anti-German sentiment as the
most reliable societal glue facilitating integrity, stability and mobilization. In Poland, this glue
was much more powerful than the egalitarian ideals of communism. Zaremba wrote: "It will not
be an exaggeration to say that the 1960s were pervaded by a spirit of anti-Germanism, only
slightly covered by the politically correct ideological strife with imperialism, militarism and
revanchism. Anti-Germanism was practically the only officially accepted form of nationalism."17
One of the first moves by Gomułka after he came to power in 1956 was the
establishment of the Association for the Development of the Western Lands (TRZZ). The main
task of that organization was nominally development, but what it usually occupied itself was
beating the drum of ethnic resentment built around the about-to-happen German reconquista
scare. All kinds of weapons from the nationalist mobilization arsenal have been deployed. One
of the most prominent examples was the glorification of the heroic medieval (1410) Grunwald
victory over the Teutonic Knights. Annual reenactments of the battle, with tens of thousands of
'knights' re-fighting the battle on every July 15 since then. The scope and intensity of that
campaign was truly astounding given that Poland was, after all, a communist country
ideologically committed to international solidarity of all toiling peoples. To fact that the East
Germans were portrayed as good Germans and the West Germans as bad Germans with Prussia
remaining the proto-evil of all evils in German history, further added to the already paradoxstrewn climate of the 1960s.
The residents of cities such as Gdańsk, Szczecin or Elbląg were the main targets of the
anti-German nationalist rhetoric. While the official version justifying the annexation of the
Recovered Territories held that they were 'returning to the mother's womb', cities such as
17
Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, Nacjonalizm, Legitymacja (2001), 304.
14
Szczecin could boast no permanent connection to Polish history and had belonged to the
German national core for centuries. While Gdańsk's history has a significant Polish component,
the city has also been predominantly German for the past several centuries. The unsettling
experience of being transferred into the German material world from what was Polish Wilno in
1939 has been vividly captured by Stefan Chwin, a novelist born in Gdańsk in 1949. The
architecturally unmistakable origins of his new Gdańsk home, built in the late nineteenth
century bourgeois vorort named Oliva, provided a daily reminder of what happened in 1945
and why his parents had to move from their ancestral seat in Lithuania to the new Poland.18 In
other words, for residents of the Baltic Coast cities, the threat of German revisionism meant
something much more tangible than for those living in Warsaw or Cracow. It was present in
their everyday experience - from the shipyard cranes to the railway network, despite street
renaming and other 'decorative' attempts at 'polonization', the signs of the German past could
not have been missed.
Gomułka defended the sharp nationalist line retorting that it was merely a response to
the growing noisiness of West German 'revisionism' - an umbrella term for all voices demanding
the return of the Ostgebiete. Indeed, the activity and rhetoric of organizations such as the Bund
der Vertriebenen or the Landsmannschaft Schlesien provided more than enough reasons to
elicit a reply. The West German Ostgebiete agitation machine had been perceived by the Poles
as exceptionally well-organized and extensive. As it was put by one of the leading TRZZ activists
in a public speech, "the number of institutes, organizations and journals busying themselves
with preparing assaults against our Western border reaches tens of thousands. Our
organizations and magazines can be counted on the fingers of your hand." 19 Still, there was no
real reason to worry since "we had an ally that could not be touched by all the West German
Ost-Institutes. We have the truth, fairness and justice on our side." While his listeners must
have realized what kind of an ally the speaker had in mind, the point about the considerable
dimensions of the West German Ostgebiete forschung and propaganda was true. It was not
until 1966 and the new line of the Kiesinger cabinet that the official West German stance with
18
Stefan Chwin, Kartki z Dziennika, 2004, 159.
AAN, TRZZ (571), Sygnatura 10, II Walny Zjazd Delegatow TRZZ w Olsztynie w dn 23 24 01 1960, Referaty, glosy w dyskusji,
listy dyskutantow, unnumbered.
19
15
respect to the status of the Ostgebiete (temporarily) unter Polnisher Verwaltung began to
evolve toward accepting the status quo.
Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik gradually softened the tone of exchanges between West
Germany and Poland and eventually led to the signing of the Warsaw Treaty and Brand's
kniefall in front of the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. As Brand admitted post factum, the idea of
falling on his knees in Warsaw appeared to him on the spot - it was not something he had
planned in advance. The spontaneous origin of that humble gesture is analogical to the way the
Polish society reacted to it and they way it learned about the new opening in the Polish-German
relations marked by the Warsaw Treaty. While diplomats were going back and forth between
Bonn and Warsaw already in 1969 and throughout 1970, media coverage of the preliminary
talks between the two governments was limited and the fervor of nationalist discourse was just
beginning to abate. In this sense, the news of the Treaty, the recognition of the border, some
(limited) travel freedoms, but most importantly - the very image of Brandt kneeling in Warsaw came as a shock for both public opinions, but with a particular reverberation in the Polish
Recovered Lands. While making an analogy between this foreign policy 'u-turn' of 1970 - which
was merely a part of the larger détente package - to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact might be an
exaggeration, the point remains that the level of out-of-the-blue type of surprise produced by
Brandt's visit was for the Polish audience comparable to the worldwide sense of unbelief on
August 24, 1939.
Polish historians rightly point out that "Gomułka's obsession was to [...] secure Poland's
Western Border. [The Warsaw Treaty] was his biggest success"20 - at least in his mind. It is also
likely that Gomułka calculated that that the good (in his mind) news of the Treaty will form a
certain buffer of goodwill that will help the Poles to swallow the bitter bill of the price hikes
scheduled for December 12. It is also true that the news of the price increases, especially steep
for basic staples such as meat and dairy, was the spark that ignited that protests - the
relationship between the two is beyond doubt. However, I think that there are two serious
mistakes involved in this standard narrative. The first one has been committed by Gomułka
20
After: Tęsknota za „druga Polska”, Jan Filip Staniłko, 47-54
16
himself. It was merely two years before, in 1968, that Gomułka 'successfully' rode the tide of
popular anti-Semitism employing it to mobilize grassroots 'activism' and quell the intellectuals
revolt of March 1968. Why did he think that letting go of Germano-phobia will help to keep the
country under control? He was a veteran communist apparatchik who experienced two worlds
wars first hand and by 1970 - a virtuoso of exploiting ressentiment of all kinds to mobilize the
population toward a politically desirable purpose. This paradox has been well summarized by
Gomułka's colleague Jan Szydlak, a high ranking party functionary throughout the 1960s and
1970s: "for twenty years we have been feeding the nation with fear of the Germans. We were
squeezing tears of the eyes of the elders, many of the young have also joined us... and now
what? Now, the anti-German card is on the table and we cannot use it anymore. How are we
going to keep the nation together? It is a very serious problem."21
A vast majority of accounts of the origins of the December 1970 protests start with an
introduction along the following lines: the news of the Warsaw Treaty was not good and or
important enough to mollify the frustration caused by the announcement of the price hikes. I
think this explanation is wrong for several reasons. First of all, it is misleading to put the
psychological effects of both decisions along one and simple good/bad news axis. While
learning about the Treaty might have been interpreted as a Polish 'foreign policy' success by
some, for those living in the prewar-German Baltic coast cities its primary message was of a
different order. From the very beginning of their stay in those cities in 1945, their residents
lived in a state that the German historian Gregor Thum aptly labeled as a 'permanent
impermanence syndrome'.22 Whenever there was a spike in international tension (e.g. the
Korean War or the second Berlin Crisis) and the prospect of a third world war loomed large, the
prospect of a German return became tangible. What the Treaty meant for those people can be
must have been close to 'we are safe and we do not have to fear anymore' type of relief. The
image of a kneeling German chancellor sent a different kind of message than, for example, the
maps of Germany in 1937 borders or Adenauer wearing the black-cross tunic of the Teutonic
Knights. In other words, to understand the emotional impact of the news of the Treaty - the
21
22
M.F. Rakowski, Dzienniki… 1969-1971, Warszawa 2001, 249.
A term used by the contemporaries as well. Gregor Thum, Uprooted: Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions, 2011, 189.
17
impact 'working itself out' days before the protests, we have to think back all the way to 1945,
if not to 1939 or 1914. We have to imagine the entire collective trajectory of the actors involved
and what hearing the news might have meant for them.
"Freiheit heißt, die Angst verlieren" - these are the words of an East German dissident,
participant of Die Wende from Rostock as well as the title of a recent book by Christian
Halbrock dedicated to the local opposition movement.23 It is impossible to gauge the effects of
'removing fear' and not easy to find direct evidence demonstrating that it is 'freedom' what it
leads to. This difficulty applies to the genesis of the December 1970 protests as well. While
historians are able to pinpoint the economic causes of discontent by, e.g. studying the workers
welfare postulates, no one was shouting 'we are not afraid' in the streets - this state of mind
was demonstrated by means of direct action. At the same time, the Polish Baltic coast was still
far from being a place free from fear in December 1970. There were other and more direct
threats than the relatively distant prospect of a German comeback. The armed forces
demonstrated amply that the regime was at the time very far from being 'totalitarianism with
its teeth broken out' that the leading dissident Adam Michnik saw emerging in the late 1980s.
In addition, one of the largest Soviet military bases - the Kaliningrad Oblast - was merely 50
miles away across the Gdańsk Bay, with its units ready to move in at any moment and its
warships visible from the promenades of Gdańsk and Gdynia.
Admittedly, more research is needed to assemble written evidence that would pinpoint
the causal stream between Brand's visit in Warsaw to the shipyard protests one week later not everything could be said in Poland then and important messages were often smuggled inbetween the lines. The most determined participants of the protests did not live to tell their
story. Nonetheless, an exercise in emphatic historical imagination based on a careful study of
long-term trajectories of people's personal stories, including the sorrow of expulsion and lost
homelands, allows one to realize why the German-related context of the Recovered Territories
was important and why the protests took place there and (virtually) nowhere else in Poland.
23
Christian Halbrock, "Freiheit heißt, die Angst verlieren" : Verweigerung, Widerstand und Opposition in der DDR: Der
Ostseebezirk Rostock, 2014.
18
V. The Revolutionary Moment
If we add the interpretation sketched in the preceding section to the existing body of
literature, the causal narrative of the genesis of the 1970 protests is enriched and closer to
being 'comprehensive'. This causal picture, however, takes us only up to the moments when
thousands of workers leave the shipyards to demonstrate in the streets, the first shots are fired
in anger and the first casualty, Zbigniew Godlewski, is being put on the stretches and carried
through Gdynia's main street.
Picture 1. The body of Zygmunt Godlewski is being carried through Gdynia's main street, December 17, 1970.
The precise reconstruction of the sequence of events, putting the facts in a coherent
chronological narrative or trying to explain how and why each of the protesters was wounded
or killed, where and what time - is a task that can be attempted, but never fully accomplished.
As the most violent days of the Ukrainian Euromaidan (February 19-20, 2014) demonstrate,
19
even thousands of cameras and journalists and millions of direct and indirect witnesses do not
make the task of untangling a mass revolutionary event a merely 'technical' task. There are
numerous competing narratives and conflicting evidence and it is far from clear who was
shooting or who gave the orders and why. It is even more true of the December 1970 Protests.
The difficulty of providing a precise chronological reconstruction of a mass revolutionary
turmoil shows through the fact that even local professional historians are far from anything
resembling a 'consensus interpretation' today. In a highly controversial book published by
Henryk M. Kula entitled Two Faces of December, one can find plenty of evidence supporting an
interpretation that the riots had been initially 'provoked' by undercover secret police agents
equipped with orders to push toward confrontation.24 There exists evidence indicating that the
several individuals who initially captured a police vehicle and used its loudspeaker to mobilize
the workers to "show how strong they are" instead of carrying on with negotiations.
Furthermore, there are several documentary clues suggesting that some 'hard-liners' (focused
around the military and the so-called Moczar group) did discuss how to utilize the price hike in
order to 'stir unrest', use it as an excuse to attack Gomułka and replace him with a more
compliant First Secretary. While Kula admits that there are many unanswered questions and
missing bits of evidence, he is inclined to support the thesis that the casualties of the December
Protests can be understood as a result of intra-party power struggles. The workers were angry,
disappointed and confrontational, no doubt, but the key connection between 'unrest' and
'revolution in the streets' could have been provided by the regime itself.
What is the significance of the question whether the revolution was 'artificially'
provoked from above or rather a spontaneous outburst of justified discontent? For a social
scientist studying social structures and evolutionary macro-processes, it is perhaps secondary.
The 'key ingredients' of the 'revolutionary situation' were there largely independently of the
machinations of the secret security apparatus. What was needed was a 'spark' - it could have
been any act of escalation at the time. On the other hand, there are many people for whom the
question of why innocent people died is as important as it gets: relatives, friends, local
24
Henryk M. Kula, Dwa Oblicza Grudnia: Oficjalne i Rzeczywiste, 2000.
20
communities, human right activists. It is also important for historians, especially on the local
level. But the kinds of skills needed to be able to answer that question are different than those
useful in social sciences. What is required is deep expertise on the workings of the secret
security apparatus in communist societies and a very close, judicious reading of available
evidence: a type of work not unlike the one performed by criminal persecutors.
The events in the Lenin Shipyard of August 1980 are more widely known worldwide. But
the nature of the birth of Solidarity in 1980 was markedly different from the protests ten years
earlier. The 'Carnival of Solidarność' was seen by its participants also as a self-limiting
revolution: there were no victims until late 1981, the demands of the workers were written
down on paper and emissaries selected to negotiate with the regime, the 'internal discipline'
among the strikers was strictly enforced and 'irresponsible acts' suppressed collegially. On
August 30, the August Accords were signed by the government and Lech Wałęsa and the
worker's protest transformed itself into a legal entity - the NSZZ Solidarność. Despite numerous
attempts at 'provocation' from the regime's secret police, law and order ruled supreme
throughout the entire duration of the strike. In addition, there were numerous foreign
journalists in the shipyard who broadcasted news on a daily basis. In this sense, the protests of
December 1970 approach the classic revolutionary moment modeled on the taking of the
Bastille much closely. The birth of Solidarity in 1980, on the other hand, approaches a
Herrschaftsvertrag - a negotiated delineation of power and establishing (temporary as it turned
out in December 1981) a modus vivendi.
21
Picture 2. The taking of the Central Commitee, Gdańsk, December 17, 1970.
A close look at the 1970 Protests reveals numerous parallels to the revolutionary
summer of 1789. It had its own 'storming of Bastille' moment - on December 17, the edifice of
the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party had been set on fire and effectively
destroyed. There were martyrs and villains, barricades, marching songs (Janek Wiśniewski padł)
and songs of mourning. The bodies of the dead were buried at night furtively in a nearby forest
without informing the families. After the first shots were fired, the demonstrations began
spreading like wildfire across the entire 300 miles of the coast - thousands clashed in regular
street battles with heavily armored units of the army. Things 'got out of control' also in Szczecin
and Elbląg, assumed a revolutionary dynamic and threatened to engulf the entire country. After
a semblance of public order had been restored by December 21 and Gomułka was dismissed,
Gierek still hesitated and a full-scale political crisis remained a real possibility. But history failed
to turn in 1970.
22
A larger analytical point emerges from the provisional picture sketched above: the work
that historians do in trying to understand 'why', 'where' and when' revolutions happen is of a
different methodological character that the work done to 'recreate' an accurate picture of how
exactly they unfold. In this context, the conceptual distinction between 'structure of processes'
and 'sequence of events' is helpful. Similarly, the old categories of 'a road to' an event and 'a
turning point', schematic as they are, are also useful. The danger of over-schematization stems
from the fact that these binaries tempt to divide the past into moments when 'history happens'
and when it does not or when the 'troubles are brewing' perhaps, but do not reach the surface
of public life. History of course 'happens' all the time. Self-evidently, it is easier to spot 'history'
when thousands of angry people demonstrate in the streets than when, for example, the pain
of expulsion lies dormant for decades or income-disparity-based stratification quietly
accumulates before it becomes striking. On the other hand, when revolutionary turmoil starts in the 'thick of the battle' and in the 'fog of war' - 'causal' histories suspend their significance
and direct action takes precedence over right and reason. 'Crowd behavior' has thus a logic of
its own and the traditional tools of a historian are just one among many ways to study what
happens during revolutionary moments - insights from behavioral science, including 'crowd
psychology' and 'mass culture' events such as sport games and rock concerts offer a necessary
supplement.
Nonetheless, even if the December 1970 protests very much resembled what happened
in Paris in July 1789, they did not lead to the destruction of the ancien régime. Significant
'personnel rotation' followed in the top echelons of the regime's power structures, but the
basic contours of the system remained similar for the next two decades. The most important
reason for why the revolution did not assume the critical mass required to topple the regime
was the acute awareness of the potential Soviet intervention. The Brezhnev doctrine had just
been tested in Czechoslovakia two years ago. Furthermore, the revolution did not spread to the
capital from the provinces - Warsaw remained calm throughout the entire duration of the crisis.
To understand why it was the case - it is again necessary to study both big structures - such as
23
the specificity of the Recovered Lands or specialized economies of port cities, but also particular
events - such as the act of cutting off communications between the Baltic coast and the rest of
the country and pulling up all available troops to surround the capital city.
VI. Conclusion
Geopolitics is not a field of 'human activity' studied by social scientists. There was
nothing scientific or measurable about the Second World War or Stalin's strategic
considerations at Yalta. However, this paper shows that a combined application of conceptual
tools used by social scientists and historians can lead to productive results - it sheds light on an
important cause of the December 1970 events that can be missed easily if tools of merely one
discipline are deployed.
The 1970 Protests had a more 'orthodox' socioeconomic background lying at the heart
of the way that social scientist see the world - social stratification rooted in income disparities. I
approach this problem in detail in a different paper.25 In essence - it was the growing wealth
gap between those employed in the state-controlled industrial sectors (such as the shipyard
and dock workers) and those profiting from the second economy construed around siphoning
of the corruption-ridden foreign trade services passing through ports that constituted the
socioeconomic backbone of the crisis. While workers in the Lenin shipyard toiled for the
meager state salary in unconvertible Polish zlotys, the dollar or deutschemark revenue of those
who sailed the ships the workers had built to any larger port in the West (if they gave same
forethought on how to arrange quasi-illicit smuggling operations) made more profit than the
workers in years. The vast new fortunes of those employed in the maritime export services
were not to remain covert. The conspicuous consumption of the black market kings was meant
to be seen. The relationship between wealth and quiet cooperation with the SB (secret police)
was not meant to be seen, but was even more self-evident than the often nebulous origins of
25
A paper I have presented at the ASN Conference in New York (April 2015) entitled: “World trade, underground capital
mobility and social stratification: Why has Solidarność been created on the Baltic Coast?" Work in progress, available at:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/tomaszblusiewicz/publications/%E2%80%9Cworld-trade-underground-capital-mobility-and-socialstratificationwhy
24
wealth. This stratification dynamic in port cities is essential to understand why Solidarność was
created in shipyards, but also why its egalitarian message reverberated so strongly in a country
where the egalitarian promise was the only remaining appeal of the Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Societies do not function in anything resembling an equilibrium state governed by justly
universal laws of motion - certainly not the societies of Eastern Europe in the twentieth
century. The stratification dynamic that unfolded in the Baltic port cities cannot be understood
without taking the unique context of how central economies, their foreign trade sectors and
international currency regimes operated at the time. Only within this context can Gini
coefficients and other measuring rods of social sciences help us to understand what inequality
meant in that particular context. In the same way, the consequences of Yalta's 'structural shift'
cannot be understood without, for example, learning about what kind of social meaning the
collective memory of expulsion conveyed for the people resettled to the Recovered Territories
and how it interacted the intricacies of the Cold War international relations. In turn, only within
this 'broader picture' can the 'unintended consequences' of an event such as Brand's kniefall be
traced. Consequently - only with all of the necessary contextual background can a term such as
'a turning point of history' be fully appreciated. That being said, Brandt's humble gesture
certainly deserves the honor of being spoken of as a moment that 'changed the course of
history'. It can only be pondered why so many human lives had to be lost in yet another among
history's unintended consequences.
25