regime?
STUDENT CLASHES WITH POLISH REGIME RESOUND THROUGH EAST. EUROPE
By George Saunders
Polish students are showing determination to continue their fight for socialist democracy despite harsh police repression ahd an unparalleled campaign of slander against them in the official press.
Student demonstrations in Warsaw began March 8 and culminated March 12 in an outpouring of tens of thousands, including many workers, who fought police for eight hours. Then, as street protests subsided in Warsaw, students in outlying areas began solidarity demonstrations.
In Cracow and Poznan March 13 student demonstrators clashed with police. Solidarity meetings in Lublin, Gliwice, Gdansk, Lodz, Szeczin, and Wroclaw were calm. Cracow students who began a boycott of classes March 14 were joined by the Warsaw students the next day. Some Warsaw students were reported planning a 72-hour sit-in strike.
The Gomulka regime has responded with many arrests and has begun to purge liberal elements within the party; relatives of demonstrators and Jewish party members have also been ousted.
In a judicial amalgam of the Moscow-trials type, the regime is blaming Zionists, liberals, and -- of all things -- 01d Stalinists (1) for the disorders. With phrases such as "Zionist and cosmopolitan" the ruling clique of the Polish party is reviving memories of the last months of Stalin's rule which culminated in the "Jewish Doctors' Plot."
By mounting a virulent press canmpaign and staging rallies against "the enemies of People's Poland," the regime obviously hopes to whip up mass hysteria against the dissidents and demonstrators. Worst of all, it is clearly trying to stir up an ugly tradition of anti-Semitism for its reactionary political ends.
The leading clique, headed by party chairman Wladyslaw Gomulka, President Jozef Cyrankiewicz, and Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar, is using the occasion to strengthen its hand by removing from the party those with differences on various questions. The existing differences within the party over Mideast policy are really incidental. The truth is that the leading group fears that the protests of students and intellectuals, paralleling recent events in Czechoslovakia, may cause a split within the bureaucracy which could mean that the present leading group might share the fate of Novotny and his entourage. They are shoring up their defenses in advance, not only by repressing the
dissident students and intellectuals but
by removing "unreliable" elements from
their own midst.
The students have borne themselves
well in the face of the regime's methods
of violence and pressure. A meeting of
8,000 at Warsaw Polytechnic School adopted
a resolution that included the following
demands:
@ Respect of the constitution,
especially its guarantees of freedom of
speech.
@ Release of all students arrested
since March 8.
@® Punishment for those who called
police onto school grounds in violation of
university autonomy.
@® Guarantees against persecution
of teachers who sympathize with the stu-
dents.
@® Public accessibility of proceed-
ings of all court trials.
@ An end to distortions in the of-
ficial press.
® Publication of this resolution.
in all newspapers and on the radio.
Political positions taken in the
resolution were as follows:
@ Assurances to "our professors
and all Poland that we wish to study and
build socialism."
@® A stand dissociating students
from anti-Semitism and also Zionism, and
rejecting “anti-Russian tendencies."
The key question is to what extent
the working masses will intervene in the
situation. The regime's campaign of ral-
lies against "enemies of People's Poland"
is aimed at heading off such an eventual-
ity. In Poznan the students responded by
chanting at workers coming back from such
a rally, "Long Live the Workers of Poznan"
and "We Are Not Zionists."
There were reports that workers
were not responding enthusiastically to
the official campaign. According to one
report, half the workers at the Zeran auto
factory in Warsaw disobeyed orders to at-
tend a rally against the student demonstra-
tions. In a speech to workers in Gdansk,
one party official used wording that indi-
cates lack of popular support for the
present line: "Our party has often taken
difficult and unpopular decisions."
What brought the present crisis to a head? There has been increasing irritation among students and intellectuals over a series of repressive actions by the Gomulka regime in recent years. In 1964, thirty-four writers who signed a letter to President Cyrankiewicz requesting more cultural freedom and less censorship were denounced by the regime.
In 1965 two teaching assistants at Warsaw University, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, both Communists and sons of high party officials, were arrested and jailed for circulating an "Open Letter" to the Communist party, which called for the establishment of workers' democracy and a return to proletarian internationalism. (Both men, released in 1967, were rearrested at the height of the current Warsaw demonstrations as the alleged ringleaders of the actions.)
In October 1966 the noted philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was expelled from the party for his outspoken lecture on the tenth anniversary of the "Polish October," which criticized the Gomulka regime for not developing the democracy hoped for as a result of the 1956 upheaval. During 1967 many of those who came to Kolakowski's defense were also expelled or otherwise victimized. Among them was Adam Michnik, a Communist student expelled from Warsaw University. (See World Qutlook, June 30, 1967, p. 650.)
Irritation over continuing repressions came to a head in January around the order suspending performances of the play "Dziady" at the Narodowy Theater in Warsaw. "Dziady," a play by the nineteenth-century revolutionary nationalist poet Adam Mickiewicz, contains some harsh anti-Russian lines. At the time it was written these were directed against the tsarist occupation, but apparently the modern players and audiences were giving them a contemporary reference. The cancellation of "Dziady" was met with a protest demonstration by several hundred students. Police dispersed them, arresting fifty.
On March 2, the Warsaw Writers Union, at its first extraordinary meeting in its 48-year history, adopted a resolution after heated debate criticizing the regime's cultural policy and calling for an easing of censorship. A resolution by party members of the union condemning antigovernment demonstrations was defeat-— ed.
Clearly encouraged by the writers' action, the students poured out of Warsaw University March 8, demanding release of two of their number jailed for leading the January 30 protest. One of those two was Adam Michnik. The students shouted "Long Live the Writers!"
In striking at the dissent of stu-
dents and intellectuals, the Gomulka re-
gime, like other bureaucratic regimes in .
the East European workers' states, is
primarily trying to stave off elemental
pressures for democratization. Like the
literary personalities before them who
have often been political rebels, intel~
lectuals and students are today express-—
ing the deeper, not yet fully stated
strivings for democracy among the masses.
That the crisis in Poland is only
a local variant of similar trends else-
where in Eastern Europe can be seen from
some of the international ramifications
of events in Warsaw. The Warsaw students,
in their first demonstrations, raised the
ery "Long Live Czechoslovakia," clearly
encouraged by the example of liberaliza-
tion underway there.
These sentiments of solidarity
were reciprocated in Czechoslovakia. A
rally of Communist youth in Prague
March 13 adopted a resolution of support
for the Polish .students and condemned the
official Polish press attacks on: then.
Earlier it was reported that a group of
Czech students had asked for radio and
TV time to broadcast their "solidarity
with the Warsaw students," but their
request was denied by officials, at least
temporarily.
On March 16, a rally of 1,200
Czechoslovakians who had fought in the
Spanish civil war or against Hitler in
World War II passed a resolution protest-
ing the use of anti-Semitism by the Pol-
ish party and government in its campaign
against the students.
The East German regime of Ulbricht
took a peculiar measure to prevent the
spread of the contagion from Poland and
Czechoslovakia. It announced a ban on
outdoor demonstrations...against the Viet-
nam war! It obviously feared that anti-
imperialist action would overflow into
antibureaucratic channels.
By way of ironic contrast, in West
Berlin March 13 a group of 500 young peo-
ple, most of whom had participated in
recent anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations,
marched down the Kurfuerstendamm to ex-
press "solidarity with students and work-
ers demonstrating against authoritarian-
ism." Carrying red flags and a giant por-
trait of Trotsky, their placards bore
such slogans as "Against Stalinism in
Poland" and "Against Cyrankiewicz's In-
stigation of an Anti-Semitic Pogronm."
Among the marchers was Peter Brandt,
son of Willy Brandt, German Social Demo-
cratic party leader and foreign minister
in the present Bonn government.
The demonstrators went to the Pol-
ish consulate to deliver a protest letter
addressed to the chairman of the Polish cabinet. Met by locked doors, they nevertheless read their message aloud over a bullhorn and left it attached to a telephone pole outside a window of the consulate.
Bureaucratic nervousness in Moscow was evidenced in a blackout of news about developments in Warsaw and Prague, with Pravda stressing "national pride" as the strongest cotnter to the influences of foreign "bourgeois propaganda."
Security measures and the checking of personal documents was reportedly
dNalinismusin Pole
ANtisemitischg
YOUNG REVOLUTIONARIES IN WEST BERLIN demonstrate in support of Polish students. These young people are representative of the new radical forces that in the past year waged dramatic and effective struggles against authoritarianism in West Germany. One of those holding the portrait of Leon Trotsky is Peter Brandt (right), "wayward" son of Willy Brandt, leader of the class-collaborationist Social Democratic party (SPD) and foreign minister in the Bonn government. Like others of his generation, young Brandt has broken from his elder's procapitalist stand. tightened up at Moscow University. There had been rumors that a group of Soviet dissenters were planning a march in Moscow, concerning their own grievances. But memories of protest demonstrations at the university during the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 must have made the authorities extra sensitive.
Even in quiet Bulgaria the Zhivkov regime called a special meeting of state security and party officials. First Party Secretary Zhivkov told them of "certain matters" of the foreign and internal situation and reminded them of the responsibilities entrusted to them by the party.
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"IT believe Trotsky has very great meaning for the revolutionary youth movement today, because of his idea of permanent revolution," the young man was quoted in the newsweekly Spiegel. The magazine did not say how Willy Brandt felt about his son's views, but a guess may be made from the recent expulsion from the SPD of two leftwing "deputies to the West Berlin parliament -- for participating in a demonstration against the Vietnam war.
Part’ of a banner in the background reads "Against Stalinism in Poland."
Sta INismus in Pole
ANVSernitische
‘alinigmusin Pole