Manufactured Ambiguity: Party-State Mobilization Strategy in March 1968 Crisis in Poland.∗ Grzegorz Ekiert,y Dominika Kruszewskaz This Draft: May 31, 2016 1 Introduction In January 1968, Poland's communist government banned Dziady, a Romantic play by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's national poet, from the stage of the Warsaw National Theater due to its alleged anti-Russian and anti-Soviet undertones. After its last showing on January 30, a couple hundred students gathered to protest government's decision, ending with a demon- stration in front of the poet's monument. The police responded with force, beating the protesters and arresting 35 participants. Two students, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, were expelled from the University of Warsaw. On March 8th, students from UW organized a rally at the university in their defense, expressing their solidarity and condemning govern- ment's cultural politics. This protest also ended violently - the police (Milicja Obywatelska, MO) and plain cloth Workers Militia (ORMO) dispersed the demonstration and brutally beat up participating students and bystanders. This repressive action triggered a protest wave that swept through the country - in the following few weeks, university students and high school students came out in solidarity with Warsaw students in cities all over Poland ∗Draft prepared for the Mobilized Contention Conference, June 1-2, 2016, Cambridge. Work in Progress: Please do not cite or circulate without authors' permission. yDepartment of Government, Harvard University,
[email protected] zDepartment of Government, Harvard University,
[email protected] 1 (Eisler, 2008). Students won support of a part of the country's academic and intellectual elite, the Polish Church, and members of the catholic caucus in the Polish parliament.