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Draft: do not cite without the author's permission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

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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.

In order to show how the 'point of origin' of 1945 and the entire process of Polish-

German population transfers had formed the structural conditions leading up to the outbreak 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.

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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 Polish-

German 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.

II. Marxism and the allure of structural thinking2 William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, Chapter 8, 2005.

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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

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.

3 As quoted in: Timothy Garton Ash, The Revolution of the Magic Lantern, The New York Review of Books, January 18, 1990.4 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.

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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

geographic patterns of recent Presidential Elections provides a telling confirmation of the

weight of those legacies:

5

Map 1. The results of the 2015 Presidential Elections (the first round).

Map 2. Imperial Legacies and Border Changes.

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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.

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/

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While many sociologists and political scientists have focused on studying the grand

socioeconomic transformations of communist societies such as urbanization, industrialization

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).

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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.

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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-

Neisse line by West Germany. From the Polish perspective, this treaty put an end to the 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.

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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

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 12 After: Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, Communism Unwrapped, Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, 2010, 10.

11

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

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.

13 AAN, TRZZ (571), Syg. 508, Polityka ZSRR w kwestii polskich granic zachodnich, 1967,Referat Włodzimierza T. Kowalskiego 14For 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.

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The peak of anti-German rhetoric designed around the alleged threat to the Oder-

Neisse 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 paradox-

strewn 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

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 17 Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, Nacjonalizm, Legitymacja (2001), 304.

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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

respect to the status of the Ostgebiete (temporarily) unter Polnisher Verwaltung began to

evolve toward accepting the status quo.

18 Stefan Chwin, Kartki z Dziennika, 2004, 159.19 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.

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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

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

20 After: Tęsknota za „druga Polska”, Jan Filip Staniłko, 47-54

15

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

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.

21 M.F. Rakowski, Dzienniki… 1969-1971, Warszawa 2001, 249.22 A term used by the contemporaries as well. Gregor Thum, Uprooted: Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions, 2011, 189.

16

"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 in-

between 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.

V. The Revolutionary Moment

23 Christian Halbrock, "Freiheit heißt, die Angst verlieren" : Verweigerung, Widerstand und Opposition in der DDR: Der Ostseebezirk Rostock, 2014.

17

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,

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.

18

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

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.

24 Henryk M. Kula, Dwa Oblicza Grudnia: Oficjalne i Rzeczywiste, 2000.

19

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.

20

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.

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

21

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

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.

22

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

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.

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-social-stratificationwhy

23

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.

24