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Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 No. 1, March–April 1977, pp. 18–19.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
“DISSENT IN POLAND, 1976–77”: Reports and Documents in Translation
Published by the Association of Polish Students and Graduates in Exile, London, 1977.
Anyone wishing to gain a detailed picture of the Polish dissident movement must read this book of documents. Well researched and clearly laid out, Dissent in Poland contains a representative collection of documents from the mainstream of the civil rights movement outside the Party. The texts are linked together by means of a factual commentary with biographical notes and a detailed chronology at the end of the book.
Such a collection cannot, of course, provide a complete account of the various oppositional currents within Poland: tendencies at the base of the Communist Party itself, though undoubtedly active, remain hidden from public view. The letter from Edward Ochab and other former Party leaders, published in this issue of Labour Focus gives an inkling of some of these trends and other more radical Marxist currents undoubtedly exist also.
In addition to portraying the views of the intellectual dissenters, the editors have provided the most detailed account yet available in English of the workers’ protests and the subsequent government repression in June and July 1976, and it also provides some valuable insights on the policy of the Polish Church, by quoting large extracts from speeches by Cardinal Wyszynski and from documents issued by the Catholic hierarchy.
The editors do not conceal their strong support for the Polish Church and praise its “humanitarian principles”. Yet they do not conceal such facts as the Church’s major campaign against free abortion which was one of its main themes at last year’s Czestochowa pilgrimage, a central festival for Polish Catholics. The quotations from Wyszynski also bring out the Cardinal’s appeals to a narrow Polish nationalism, as when he mourns the supposed fact that the Poles are being expected “to save the world at the cost of Poland ... It is a disaster to be preoccupied with the whole world at the expense of one’s own country.”
Although the authority of the Church in Poland is enormous it would be wrong to imagine that the Polish hierarchy takes a disinterested view of politics or that it is wholeheartedly committed to the struggle for democratic rights. There is plenty of evidence that the Church hierarchy today, as in the past, is more concerned to use expressions of popular discontent for its own narrow purposes of increasing its own institutional privileges and ideological influence through negotiations with the authorities. Indeed the section of Dissent in Poland devoted to the Church brings out some of the ambivalence in the hierarchy’s posture and it was possible to foresee that the, recent rapprochement between Church and state was likely to be a prelude to police repression of the more leftward leaning sections of the dissident movement (See my article in Labour Focus, Vol. 1 No. 6).
Many British socialists may be disappointed with the section of the book on Perspectives for the Future which includes documents outlining the longer- term aims of the various strands within the dissident movement. One could argue that the Programme of the Polish League for Independence is given too much weight the strength of this current is in my view not great within the opposition. And it would have been useful to have had Kuron’s programmatic document that appeared at the end of 1976, rather than the short interview and subsequent retraction in Le Monde. But the lack of material on the overall aims of the opposition is not really the fault of the editors. It is rather a reflection of the shortage of such statements even in an unsigned samizdat form from leaders of the movement of intellectual dissent within Poland itself.
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Last updated: 15 February 2023