[The following report was published as a document in the January 18 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste (Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International). The translation from the French is by Intercontinental Press. The footnotes are in the original.]
Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot!
Discontent had been building up for a long time among the workers in the
Malinowski
Paris Commune shipyards. The workers had been paying the price for poor management of the enterprise. Their regular and year end bonuses were eliminated.2
The announcement on radio and were suddenly changed, although the delivery date remained the same. The result was that the ship was not built in time and the enterprise had to pay a big penalty for failing to meet its contract.
It was the workers who suffered the consequences of this affair by losing their bonuses. It must be said that this case was not iso lated and that for five years this kind of thing has been frequent in Poland.
was what happened.
The workers ran into grocery stores and collected bottles, which they made into Molotov cocktails and heaved into the building (it was not until afternoon that the scenes of looting occurred, which the bourgeois press compliantly played up). When the firemen arrived, the workers allowed them to evacuate the wounded but vigorously opposed any attempt to put out the fire. This was when the clash occurred during which a fire truck was burned.
The first detachments of police arrived and attacked the demonstrators with their clubs. The workers, armed with chains and reinforced by new demonstrators, resisted and took the offensive themselves. They drove the police back toward a railway viaduct and threw the police cars on the track. They seized weapons and police command cars equipped with loudspeakers, which they used all afternoon to broadcast appeals to the population.
A delegation of workers was sent to the School of Sciences to ask the help of the students and offer "apologies for March 1968."3 Throughout the afternoon, urban guerrilla warfare raged through the streets of Gdansk. In the evening, local television broadcast the first speech by Kociolek, the first secretary of the provincial party committee. He addressed the population in a conciliatory tone and promised the shipyard workers that he would examine their demands, calling on them to resume work the next day. Already that evening Kociolek prudently left the city to take refuge in the naval barracks in Oksywie.
The next morning a section of the workers, putting their faith in Kociolek's vague promises, left the station to return to the shipyards. At the gate, riot police armed with machine guns were waiting. The police opened fire. Then the massacre began. The big square was raked with bullets. The men tried to take refuge in the railway station building. By that time there were hundreds of dead and wounded. A manhunt began. The police chased the men into the station waiting room. Maddened and desperate, the crowd seized everything it found that could be used as a weapon. After the battle, several cops were found hanging in the burned-out station.
On Tuesday the three cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot were ringed by the army and sealed off from the rest of the country. The army and the police combed the city. Tanks were stationed every fifty meters and patrols circulated continually. Back from Warsaw, Kociolek gave his second speech, a threatening one this time. But it had no effect. The strikes and street fighting continued until the end of the week.
Szczecin
As soon as the events in Gdansk became known, the workers in the Szczecin shipyards, motivated by the same grievances as their comrades in Gdansk, organized a meeting in their work area. This meeting was also a demonstration of solidarity with the Gdansk workers. During it, a strike committee was formed, including party members, which drew up a list of twenty demands. Among other things, the government's foreign policy toward the USSR and West Germany was approved (in order to block any accusation of anti-Soviet motives or disagreement with the new German policy). The workers reaffirmed their desire to build socialism but they demanded, above all, the resignation of Gomulka and his team. The work of the trade unions was vigorously criticized and the workers demanded the resignation of the chairman of the union organization, Ignacy Loga- Sowinski. As in Gdansk, the workers demanded wage raises to compensate for the price increase.
A delegation was sent with the list of demands to the party Regional Committee located in the center of the city. The police were already waiting for them in front of the party building. The delegation returned to the yards after being badly beaten. Confronted with this attitude on the part of the authorities, the workers asked the factory manager, who was a member of the strike committee, to turn the ferries over to them (to get to the city you have to cross the Szczecin bay).
The workers formed a procession with banners and red flags and, like their comrades in Gdansk, sang the "Internationale." They rallied a good part of the population behind them - workers from other factories, clerks, housewives, university and highschool students. They reached the Regional Committee building which was surrounded by a cordon of police. A corps of marshals arose instantlyfrom the demonstration, encircling the police, driving them back, and keeping them under surveillance. Then, as an expression of protest, the workers decided to burn the party building. However, before setting fire to it, so as not to be accused of destroying public property uselessly, with impressive order and silence they removed all the furniture, documents, and food found inside.
In the meantime, fresh detachments of police arrived as well as army units and tanks. The battle erupted. The police headquarters was also burned. As in Gdansk, the workers fought with heavy chains attached to steel hooks. Other workers, also as in Gdansk, rushed into the stores to get bottles for Molotov cocktails. (Some tank drivers even supplied the workers with diesel oil). While this was going on, the worker marshals prevented looting.
In these days of fighting, the inhabitants of Szczecin invented a bloody game of hide-and-seek. The people shouted "Gestapo! Gestapo!" at the police and then hid on porches and in houses. When the police ran up they were greeted with Molotov cocktails, bricks, and other projectiles. The strike spread throughout the city, but it was a special kind of strike. The gas and electric workers cut off the current and gas for the residential districts where the high party and police functionaries live. But they kept up the supply to the shipyards and other parts of the city.
The shipyard workers were also supplied with food which the strikers in the city sent to the island. In the yards, some workers who shouted "Down With the Pro-Russian Policy, Hang the Party Members!" were sent home by the other workers who smelled a provocation. Still other workers proposed destroying the dry docks (where the ships are built), but the strike committee rejected this proposal.
The sit-in strike ended on Monday, the day following Gomulka's dismissal.
In Other Polish Cities
The discontent revealed in Gdansk and Szczecin existed more broadly throughout the country. There were two basic reasons for the exasperation of the population.
1. Recurring scarcities of food products. In most Polish cities, butter, meat, fish, and coffee regularly disappear from the shelves. The supply of foodstuffs tends to follow this pattern. When there is meat in Cracow, there is none in Wroclaw. At the same time you can get butter in Wroclaw but you can't get it in Cracow. And so it goes all through Poland. Only Warsaw, the center of the bureaucracy, is an exception.
2. For several months the wages of certain strata of the population had declined. For example, white-collar workers, technicians, industrial designers, and university employees have not been payed their bonuses and overtime. The result was an immediate slowdown.
On the pattern of the coast cities, strikes and street fighting broke out in every city in Poland. For example, there were bloody clashes in Koszalin, Slupsk, and Cracow.
In Elblag the workers of the ZAMECH factory (a big machinemaking enterprise) sent a delegation to the first secretary of the city party. He refused to meet with "bandits and hooligans." A few hours later, when he was driving home, a group of workers seized him and hanged him.
In Warsaw also individual policemen were lynched. The main enterprises in the capital went on strike, notably the Huta Warszawa steel works and the FSO Zeran automobile factory. The big stores and printing plants also stopped work. How, one might ask, could the papers come out? Well, as in Czechoslovakia at the time of the intervention, the army and the police printed the daily press.
Even cities known for their "apathy" did not escape the general strike, like Bialystok on the Russian frontier, and Lublin. The movement also spread 96
into Silesia (Gierek's fief) which has had a reputation for "dynamism" and been played up as a showcase by the bureaucratic press.
In Nowa-Huta, a working-class city next to Cracow, where one of the most important iron and steel complexes is located, as an act of despair the workers wanted to extinguish the blast furnaces.
In Wroclaw you could read on the walls, "Before It Was Bad, Today It Is Worse, Tomorrow - Revolution."
In the light of these facts, the panic at the top and the measures taken are understandable. A state of siege was put into force throughout the country, with a total curfew and a ban on all meetings in the labor camps (where it had already been difficult enough to hold meetings).4 For forty-eight hours the army was on the alert. They even handed out 150 cartridges to every soldier (a supply normally given only in wartime) and explained that an imperialist attack was imminent.
There is a persistent rumor in Poland that fifty-four troop carriers were flown to the coast to forestall any extension of the conflict.
The army holed up in the party buildings behind several rows of tanks. The private apartments of high
MEMO to from:
party functionaries were also protected by special forces. Drumhead courts were in permanent session, dispatching the people arrested to labor camps for six to eight months at an assemblyline rate.
In order to prevent the students from siding with the workers, the schools and university cafeterias closed a week in advance of the holidays. This forced the students, 80 percent of whom live in the country, to return home. That is the reason for the small degree of involvement of the students in the workers' struggles.
It might seem astonishing that after twenty-five years of what the bureaucracy in Poland calls "socialism," the bulk of the workers demonstrated their loyalty to socialist principles. Was it a tactical ruse on their part to force the police to fire on people singing the "Internationale" and carrying red flags? That would have to be some kind of mass Machiavellianism ... But at a more profound level, the Polish workers remain attached in fact to certain social gains of the system threatened by the [technocratic] reform - full employment, free medical care and education, as well as other social services. Furthermore, the present crisis of imperialism, which the workers sense in a confused way, robs the image of Western affluence of much of its attractiveness.
Grows Peanuts, Too
Hsinhua, the Chinese government news agency, reported January 6 that Mao Tsetung Thought helped peasants in Shantung province increase peanut production.
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Notes
1. These three cities make up a single urban industrial complex.
2. This, in fact, is the sort of thing that happened. The Gdansk shipyards were to fill an order for the Soviet Union. The work was already well along when the construction plans
3. Polin students, a mes manted sioe
3. In March 1968 a mass mobilization 1956, swept the entire country. The Polish bureaucracy savagely repressed the revolt and prevented the workers from joining in the students' struggle.
4. These camps are located in the most remote parts of Poland where no one wants to work. "Marginal" elements are sent there - incorrigible criminals, "hooligans," etc. In Poland, this is the way workers are persuaded to do a useful job for socialism.