Gerry Foley Archive | ETOL Main Page
From International Viewpoint, No. 7, 24 May 1982, pp. 9–11.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Over Warsaw’s clandestine Radio Solidarity, Zbigniew Romaszewski, a member of the regional leadership of Solidarity and organizer of the station, spoke:
“We are broadcasting today on the eve of the working-class holiday, May 1. When we were looking for a theme song for our radio station, we realized that there was no tune loved by every Pole that had not been used by official propaganda. The society has been deprived of all its important symbols. They have all been taken by the regime. This is also true of May Day. We have decided to take back these symbols.
“Today is also the 31st anniversary of the death of one of the main leaders of the Polish Socialist Party, Kazimiez Puzak, who was tried in the Moscow trials and whose health was broken in the Stalinist prison at Rawicz, where he died.
“Every year, comrades faithful to Polish socialism put flowers on his grave and sing the old workers’ song, The Red Flag. Let this tune be the theme song of our broadcast this May Day. Let it be a warning to all those who want to force the workers to their knees and terrorize the society. On their red flag, the one they will carry in their march tomorrow, is the blood of the workers of Poznan, of the Baltic Coast, the blood of those who have fallen in the war they declared on their own people.”
The mass demonstrations in Poland on May 1, 3, 9, and 13 mark the start of a decisive test of strength between the underground movement for workers democracy and the bureaucracy.
Tens of thousands of people came out onto the streets in cities across the country in defiance of martial law and a regime that has shown its determination again and again to strike out violently against any attempt by the population to organize or protest.
The people are no longer afraid. That was the feature of the demonstrations that struck observers. For a regime that staked everything on an attempt to terrify and humiliate the population, the implications of such defiance are dramatic.
In the wake of the December 13 military crackdown, the workers at the giant Nowa Huta steel works in Cracow issued a statement that said:
“The battle is one of fear. Hiding behind their masks, their clubs, their riot shields (literally, the glass panes used on reptile cages), they are afraid of us! There are not many of them. Pistols, tanks, clubs are no good against a unified people. They are counting on fear ... If we want to remain free, we must ... conquer fear. Even if they go to the last extreme, our quiet courage will bring victory, today and forever. We are not fighting for big words, we are fighting to remain human beings.”
What the early May demonstrations indicated precisely was that the battle of fear has been won by the Polish workers. Le Monde of May 5 published the following eyewitness account of the way the May Day demonstration developed in Warsaw:
“At about 4:00 in the afternoon, on May 1, the crowd started to assemble on Castle Square, which soon filled with demonstrators who unfurled banners. Among the slogans was ‘Give us back Lech!’ There were also red and white Polish flags. The police surrounded the square, barring the adjacent streets. Soon another demonstration formed behind the police lines, the demonstration of onlookers who started shouting: ‘Gestapo, Gestapo,’ ‘Down with the junta!’ ...
“From the top of armoured cars equipped with water cannon, the police called on the groups to disperse. As if with a single voice, the two crowds answered with shouts of ‘Gestapo!’ The police lowered the visors on their helmuts. They picked up clubs and a supply of tear gas grenades.
“At 4:22, the tanks began advancing toward the demonstrators. The crowd massed in Krakowskie Przedmiescie street. It answered the police again with shouts of ‘Gestapo!’ and whistling. Two lines of police now separate the two groups of demonstrators. One of the tanks points its water cannon at the crowd of onlookers.
“Ten minutes later, the order to go into action is given to the police. Tear gas grenades were fired at the onlookers, who retreat in disorder. The police attack the demonstrators with grenades and clubs and use their water cannon. Some of the demonstrators retreat toward the Old Market, others counterattack. At 6:00, two thousand people wearing Solidarity badges are still in the square. But the fighting is dying down. However, battles are still going on in other parts of the city.”
Le Monde cited an AFP dispatch about the battle at the Old Market.
“Several thousands of youth mounted an assault on the Old Market, where the ZOMO (the special police) were hiding behind their plastic shields from an avalanche of stones, bricks, and objects of all sorts. Armed with flag poles, the demonstrators charged the forces of order, who retreated under the pressure. The youth take the square. The flag of Solidarity flies over the Old Market square; thousands of hands raise in the victory sign.”
Shortly after that, there was a huge traffic jam near the Old Market, with both automobile and bus drivers blowing their horns in a sign of sympathy for the demonstrators.
In Gdansk, where it was more difficult for foreign reporters to circulate, the correspondent for the Paris left daily Liberation watched the fighting from a distance.
“When we left the cathedral, it took a half hour to reach the church of Saint Brigitta, the parish church of the shipyard area, also it is quite close. In every street, the same scenario was repeated. The police standing a ways off, and young demonstrators throwing paving stones at them. The most striking thing was the hatred and determination of the youths.”
From the church, automatic weapons fire could be heard. One person came in and said that he had seen a group of young teenagers knock a policeman unconscious. A passerby protested: “No matter what he is, he’s still human.” The youth answered by kicking the cop in the face.
In Szczecin, a crowd reportedly burned down a ZOMO headquarters.
The regime arrested hundreds of people and made a major display of force in the attempt to head off the demonstrations planned to follow the May Day ones. Since those protests had a more passive character, it is harder to assess their effect from outside. But it is clear that the confrontation is continuing to develop.
Both the regime and the underground Solidarity leaders knew that a collision of this type was unavoidable. In a statement written in Bialoleka in February, Jacek Kuron, who was the main ideologist of the pre-crackdown Solidarity and an advocate of compromise with the government, wrote:
“No appeal will prevent the youth who want to fight from doing that. If it is effective enough to deny them other means of fighting, it will throw them into the impasse of terrorism. No appeal can defuse the explosive combination of dis- pair and hatred that exists.
“Our poverty is a result of the state of war, as well as the terror. To the violence and poverty inflicted on it, a healthy society will respond by fighting. Today there is only one front. We are in Poland. In this country, as history teaches us, oppressors can establish calm only by blood and ruin lasting for a generation.”
Wladyslaw Hardek, leader of the Warsaw region organization of Solidarity also favors a national accord with the government. But he explains that in order to be able to achieve such an agreement, Solidarity has to conduct confrontations with the regime on both the regional and national levels.
“In the south, very diverse clandestine groups have arisen, which for the moment follow the decisions of the National Coordinating Committee, in the hope that coordinated actions will lead to results. But if the government takes these actions lightly, these groups may get out of our control, and we will see acts of sabotage and terrorism.” (Liberation, March 11)
In fact, over at least nine months before the bureaucratic crackdown, every time the Solidarity leadership appeared to have reached a modus vivendi with the government it found itself outflanked and forced to step up the level of its confrontation with the regime. The Bydgoszcz events in March 1980 and the hunger marches that started late in the summer of that year are cases in point.
Michnik, along with Kuron one of the most prominent historic leaders of the anti-bureaucratic opposition, lamented this in a statement he wrote in prison in February:
“The constant strikes provoked by the power apparatus wore out the society, which was already exhausted by the difficulties of daily life. The lack of positive results in terms of the quality of life led to a polarization ...
“Some said: ‘No more strikes, that is getting us nowhere.’ Others said: ‘No more indecisive strikes.’ It is hard to say which were in the majority. But certainly the latter made themselves more heard.
“These people, most young workers from the big factories, demanded more radical action from the Solidarity leadership. And it became harder and harder to hold this back (although both Walesa and Kuron tried to).” (Der Spiegel, March 8)
There has obviously been a lot of thinking going on both in the prisons and in the underground Solidarity organizations about the lessons of the crackdown.
In the March 15 issue of Wola, a Solidarity journal published in the Warsaw area, Krzysztof Piotrowski wrote that there had been stages since the crackdown.
In the first, most Solidarity members thought that the state of siege was only another in the series of confrontations between the movement and the government since August 1979. The second was a period of despair. The third was the period of reorganization:
“This phase covers the entire month of January. It is the period of the formation of the clandestine groups. They were built up mainly on the basis of formerly existing trade-union structures. In certain plants, the leadership of these bodies was given to the union leaders, but more often it was given to less-known activists ...
“Another element in the resistance was the building up of organizations in the housing projects. In the first case, it was the experience of the union structures that helped. In the second, it was the curfew that strengthened the ties between the people living in the big housing projects. It was in this phase that the printing and distribution of an underground press began.”
The start of the fourth stage, that of expansion and consolidation of the resistance, Piotrkowski wrote, was marked by:
“... the days of action in solidarity with Solidarity and the introduction of the price rises at the end of January and the beginning of February. These events led the different groups to coordinate their activities in order to build common actions with a mass character. The most important ones were the general strike on January 19 in Wroclaw, that affected 90% of the plants; the street confrontations that occurred in Gdansk on January 30; the mass demonstrations in front of the Poznan monuments on February 13; and finally the boycott of the television news that began in Swidnik, and then in Lublin, and Pulawy.”
One of the factors in the development of the resistance was the spread of information about the scope of resistance to the crackdown.
“As information spread, not only did the illusions of the first phase disappear, but also the psychology of failure. It became clear that despite the lack of communication, the arrest of the Solidarity leaders, despite the threat of draconian penalties – including the death penalty – people in total isolation from each other reacted in the same way, by strikes everywhere. According to the most recent information, more than 80% of the plants were struck.”
Solidarity had made an error before the crackdown, Piotrkowski wrote:
“December 13 showed the total lack of preparation by Solidarity in the fight against the violence of the regime. Although this was totally in accord with the principles and statutes of Solidarity, it nonetheless testified to a naive belief that it would be possible to prevent the state apparatus from resorting to violence, even when its rule was in danger. This reflected the illusion that the will of the entire society could impose democracy without the need for resorting to force.
“So, the opportunity to set up clandestine structures capable of organizing prolonged resistance while there was still relative freedom was wasted, and now we have to start form square one in immeasurably more difficult conditions. It was only in the Wroclaw region, and at the last moment, that preparations for work in underground conditions were made. The result of this, therefore, is particularly conclusive.
“This was an error identical to the one made in 1939. While people were aware of the unfavorable relationship of forces, nothing was done to prepare the way for the future resistance movement ... and it was necessary to start from square one under the occupation.”
However, the resistance to the “internal occupation” had developed more rapidly than the resistance to the Nazis:
“To realize the breadth of the resistance that is growing up, you have only to remember that at the beginning of 1940, there were about 200 resistance organizations in Poland. Today, on the basis of the number of underground journals published, there are 1,700 resistance organizations in the country.”
Piotrkowski mentions that one of the illusions of the period immediately preceding the crackdown and the first week after it was that the army would go over immediately to the people. It did not happen just like that, although there were many cases of insubordination.
It is notable that the May Day demonstrators in Warsaw directed a lot of their slogans to the soldiers. In the May 14 issue of Rouge, the weekly paper of the French section of the Fourth International, Cyril Smuga pointed out: “The underground Solidarity bulletins are publishing more and more reports about what is going on in the barracks.” He cited one such report from the March 22 issue of the Cracow regional leadership of Solidarity:
“Our correspondents in the paratroop regiment inform us that the soldiers have recovered from their first shock. After a period during which the soldiers were terrorized by the state of siege, informal groups of soldiers formed, which were subjected to active persecution by the officers. The commanders informed them informally that two soldiers were executed for refusing to obey orders.”
The Cracow regional leadership also issued a leaflet for soldiers that began as follows:
“Polish Soldiers!
“There are orders that you must not carry out, even under threat of death!
“You do not have the right to knock down the walls of factories with tanks! You do not have the right to arrest Polish patriots! You do not have the right to lift your hand against workers! You do not have the right to fire on the working people! Refuse to carry out such orders.”
The leaflet went on to explain how soldiers had refused to fire on workers in the 1970 strikes and how they dealt with officers who tried to force them to at gunpoint.
With the increasing explosiveness of the situation, the Catholic church authorities have expressed a fear that things could get out of control. For example, on May 2, Archbishop Glemp said to a crowd of a hundred thousand people in Cracow:
“We beg the Holy Mother that our youth will not go out in the streets with stones, that nobody will throw stones or other objects at anyone.”
Glemp even suggested that the youth could be manipulated by unnamed clandestine forces, echoing the bureaucracy.
“We know how numerous are those who would be ready to give their lives for their country. But another which would exist inside our society may want to manipulate this patriotism.”
The Western governments also could be expected to be worried by the May demonstrations, Leopold Unger wrote in the International Herald Tribune, May 12:
“Western governments may soon learn that the psychological repercussions of the recent demonstrations are international, and that it was wishful thinking to imagine that ‘normalization through force’ could quickly – or ever – lead to business as usual.”
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