The Institute of National Rememberance Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation Translated by Jerzy Giebułtowski WARSAW 2019 Translation Jerzy Giebułtowski Proofreading Piotr Chojnacki Index Piotr Chojnacki Typesetting Marcin Koc Cover design Sylwia Szafranska Photo on the cover ? Printing Pasaż Sp. z o.o. ul. Rydlówka 24 30-363 Kraków © Copyright by The Institute of National Remembrance Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, 2019 ISBN 978-83-8098-785-2 www.ksiegarnia.ipn.gov.pl www.ipn.poczytaj.pl Contents Introduction . 7 1. “The Polish Calendar” . 18 2. What Were The “Polish Months” ? . 66 3. A Breakthrough Or Continuity ? . 86 4. Social Protest Or Political Provocation ? . 112 5. The Catholic Church And The “Polish Months” . 141 6. Moscow Vis-À-Vis The “Polish Months” . 171 Epilogue . 215 Glossary . 217 Index . 243 5 introduction The title and the topic of this book call for a few sentences of explanation. First I need to explain why I have decided not to choose the plural “crises” over the singular ‘crisis’, which is a after all a fundamental distinction. But it is an issue I feel unable to solve, although I have professionally dealt with it for over thirty years. I cannot give an unequivocal and well-motivated answer to the key issue whether in the People’ s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczypospolita Ludowa, PRL)1 we had a sequence of crises symbolised by the “Polish months” or whether it was one and the same structural crisis of a non-democratic and unsovereign regime, which every now and then “merely” manifested itself in more or less violent form. I need to stress at this point that the better acquainted I am with the spe- cific character of the “Polish months”, the more inclined I am to agree that they had so many similar or even identical characteristics that one could indeed speak of one crisis of a dictatorial regime (totalitarian until 1956), which subsequently was rather authoritarian, albeit with marked totalitar- ian tendencies. Nearly all the “Polish months” have one feature in common, namely a part of the society protested against some specific decisions of the 1 I treat the name “Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa” as appropriate for the years 1952–1989, although the enactment of the PRL Constitution in 1952 practically had no bearing on the political system of the state that was being established after 1944. Nevertheless, although many use the term “PRL” to describe the entire period 1944–1989, one should bear in mind that during 1944–1952 the official name of this state was “the Republic of Poland” (Rzeczpospolita Polska). 7 party and state authorities, and theses would employ all the means available in order to quash those protests. In each instance, albeit without sufficient grounds for it, the rulers could feel surprised with those social protests. Also, in each instance, the recalci- trant social groups would launch a new round of their fight against the non- democratic regime, although one needs to be very careful in one’ s general conclusions, and avoid a priori dismissal of such factors (which are difficult to prove) as police provocation, which I discuss at length in chapter 4. On one occasion, however (on the night of 12/13 December 1981) the authorities surprised, nay, attacked the society. Let us add that Wojciech Jaruzelski’ s historic achievement in the field of semantics is that he brand- ed the police and military operation “martial law”. Had he done otherwise, we would probably call the shooting at workers, the presence of hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles in the streets, the clubbing and spraying of water on people at below zero temperatures “events” or “December inci- dents” as we did before. Let us, therefore, recall that the “Polish months” usually had three dimen- sions: the political crisis proper, which was nothing more than an external- ised manifestation of a power struggle among different groups within the party; the social crisis that consisted in efforts of significant sections of the society to expand civil liberties and aimed at democratisation and liber- alisation; finally – the economic crisis. Naturally all the three currents are discussed below. Let us recall here that it has become customary to identify profound political turmoil and social upheavals by the name of the month in which they took place. And so the specific “Polish calendar”: June, October, March, December, and another June, August and one more December – how hard it is to overestimate their role in Polish history! Put most simply – this study aims to acquaint the reader with the “Polish months” and try to explain their historical role. Let me start by emphasising that this terminology was primarily employed by independent and opposition milieus. The names of these months trig- gered enormous emotions, sometimes even sentiments of martyrdom, as they symbolised fight for one’ s subjectivity by a significant segment of the soci- 8 ety, which struggled with a dictatorial regime imposed by a foreign power. However these names also belong to a kind of magic of political language, because they rather tend to blur the picture than explain anything, and in no circumstances do they characterise the events they denote. Regardless of any doubts that the use of names of months might arouse, in this case such it is largely conventional. In practice, the direct and indi- rect consequences of each crisis went beyond a given month. So when we say “August”, we think not only of the strikes on the Northern Seaboard, but also of the emergence of Solidarity, which officially took place in Septem- ber 1980. Some scholars, quite rightly, use the term to cover the earlier July strikes in the Lublin region as well. Similarly, the notion of “March’68” covers the earlier Dziady (Forefa- thers) affair, and the February meeting of the Union of Polish Writers, as well as the dramatic session of the Sejm (parliament), when Party leaders (not only, as they were joined by the leader of the PAX Association, Bolesław Piasecki) brutally attacked the Catholic “Znak” MPs, who stood up to defend the protesting students. The branding of the crises with the names of months is largely conven- tional for one more reason. Namely, one term tends to hide events that are rather loosely connected with one another, and sometimes even contradicto- ry. What was the connection the student and intellectuals protests demanding liberalisation with the anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual witch hunt of March 1968? What was the connection between the great social reform movement of October 1956 with the simultaneous faction infighting with the Party.2 What linked the great workers’ protest of December 1970 with the probable if not virtually certain coup within the Party leadership? It seems that pre- cisely this complexity and multiplicity of currents was one of the features of some of the “Polish months”. To be sure, one could say that one of their common features were pre- cisely those social protests that had a dramatic and often tragic character, which were recorded in the common memory in the form of dates featured 2 That is the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR). Throughout this edition, the term ”Party” is used. In very rare cases the abbre- viation PZPR is employed. 9 on the Monument of the Poznań June: 1956, 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980. Eventually the year 1981 was added. Let us add here that during the First Congress of the “Grunwald” Patriotic Union (an organisation that masked the anti-Semitism of some of its members by calling it “anti-Zionism”) in October 1981, one of the speakers said that he believes that the day would come when the workers would chop off the year 1968 form the Poznań monu- ment. Clearly, there were attempts to manipulate those dates and depend- ing on one’ s personal experiences and political status (once and now) they were assigned respectively greater or lesser importance, and in extreme cases attempts were made to eradicate them from the pages of history. One should also bear in mind that the men of the regime far less frequent- ly chose to name the political crises and social upheavals after the months than independent researchers or participants in social protests. In this case the more often used terms were “events”, “incidents”, “crises” or “turning points”, because all these names minimised the depth of the socio-political crises, and primarily the masked their frequently bloody character. At the same time, those milieus were keen to stress the reform-oriented (as the ruling party members understood it) and intra-systemic character of those “events”. Many representatives of this orientation would add one more date – 1948. After all, in practice serious research on this very “turning point” was carried out only in the broadly understood Party milieu. On the other hand, this “turning point” did not arouse much inter- est among non-communist historians, who did not regard it as a crisis or believed that it was an exclusively internal Party matter and did not affect the society at large. From this point of view the year 1948 somehow resembled a “family row”. One could agree with this view, but with one reservation: namely the consequences of the “turn of 1948” in practice affected, directly or indirectly, the majority of Polish society. After all the consequences of changes of the First Secretary of the Polish People’ s Party and the launching of the campaign against the “right-wing and nationalist deviation” included the beginning of collectivisation of agriculture, the proclamation of social- ist realism in art and culture, and a sudden change of course against the Catholic Church and a radical acceleration of the process of Sovietisation of Poland.