The Workers and the March Events 1968 in Poland—An Unknown History

Few enough know outside Poland of the “March Happenings” in 1968 across that country.  Here too, as elsewhere, students came together, to protest Poland’s restrictive cultural policies and call for other reforms, drawing on events both in Western Europe and in Prague.  What is still less known is the role that workers too played in these demonstrations: a complicated but highly significant role, with serious implications.  Officials initially called on “worker battalions,” to put down the demonstrations with brutal force.  Dismayed students appealed to these workers to see common interests, and to join them in protest.  Nervous officials attempted in turn to isolate the students, unleashing a campaign describing them as “intellectuals” who knew nothing of workers’ lives and needs—and, indeed, as “Jewish foreigners” and the “children of bourgeois Stalinists.”  This turned quickly into a hate campaign, resulting in the identification and expulsion of some 15,000.  At the same time, officials attempted to force a national counter-protest, impelling laborers at factories around the nation to join demonstrations and a petition drive against the students, with threats of economic and political repercussions for non-compliance.  Even for those who know of the events, this is usually taken to be the end of the story.   But indeed thousands of workers, particularly younger ones, along with schoolchildren and other populations, defied authorities to protest in support of the students and their demands, signifying a notable “generational” shift.  This is significant enough, but, equally important was the lasting effects of this clear shift.  In the aftermath of these events, the worker protests that took place throughout the 1970s took on broad and significant meaning, as wider populations now came to support the workers, including in a bid for broader reform.  These activities formed a critical antecedent to the formation of Solidarity in 1980.