Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed, Poles took to the streets to protest the communist system. In 1956, workers rioted in the central city of Poznan. In 1968 students took to the streets, inspired by the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia and the youth revolts in Western Europe. In 1970, workers in factories and shipyards along the Baltic seacoast went on strike and marched through cities. All of these public protests were suppressed by force.
    Some of the worst violence took place in 1970, when at least three dozen workers were killed and some one thousand others wounded during an operation involving thousands of heavily armed troops. The reigning party leader, Władysław Gomułka, had sparked the unrest by sharply hiking food prices. He was now forced into retirement as punishment for his error. Gomułka, who had lived for years in Moscow, was a classic slogan-intoning apparatchik. The man who replaced him as communist party leader, Edward Gierek, seemed to offer something different. Gierek—who had studied for a while in Belgium and even spoke a bit of French—was a natty dresser and a self-confessed technocrat who felt equally at home meeting with workers and foreign dignitaries. As soon as he assumed power, he headed off to Gdańsk to apologize to the workers there for the bloodshed and to promise a fresh beginning. Then he embarked on a series of “consultations” with various social groups to demonstrate his democratic credentials. German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing pronounced Gierek a man they could do business with and took every opportunity to sing his praises.
    Gierek differed from Gomułka in economic policy, too. Gomułka, like many traditional Stalinists, had praised the values of economic self-sufficiency, but Giereksaw nothing wrong with expanding foreign trade. Gierek believed, in fact, that cooperating with the West might even offer a way out of an economic impasse that failed to provide Poles with adequate supplies of meat, milk, or housing. As he saw it, his government didn’t need to make fundamental changes to the existing system of central planning; instead, it could borrow money from Western banks to modernize the economy. The resulting growth would enable repayment of the loans, Poles would have more consumer goods, and everyone would be happy.
    And for a while, it seemed to work. In the first half of the 1970s, Poland posted growth rates of 10 percent per year. The number of private cars in Poland rose from 450,000 in 1970 to more than 2 million by the end of the decade. 12 An opinion poll in 1975—yes, there was such a thing, even in communist Poland—found that some three-quarters of the population judged that their living standards had been rising. 13
    Poles were happy that life seemed to be improving. Yet this still did not mean that they accepted the official view of communism as the best of all possible systems. This skepticism was something that they had in common with many other citizens in the communist bloc. But there was one particularly striking thing that set Poles apart, and that was their loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church. For centuries—even when their nation had been divided up among more powerful European empires—the Poles had linked their national identity with the church, and this pact continued even in the People’s Republic of Poland.
    The party had done everything it could to efface its rival from the hearts and minds of Poles. In 1953, the Polish primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, who had managed to maintain important church prerogatives at the very height of Stalinist persecution, went to jail rather than bend to the dictates of the Politburo. When he emerged three years later, he enjoyed a moral prestige that few party functionaries could have challenged and firmly established the church as a credible spiritual alternative to official Marxism-Leninism.
    For whatever reason, Poles kept going to church. The communists inaugurated