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

officially sanctioned name-giving rituals for newborns—but people kept asking priests to baptize their babies. The party offered benefits for teens who participated in communist coming-of-age ceremonies—but parents continued getting their children confirmed. The state promoted civil wedding services—but couples kept tying the knot in churches instead. In 1975, despite decades of antichurch propaganda, 77 percent of Poles surveyed declared that they regularly participated in religious activities. The most active group of churchgoers were workers (about 90 percent). 14
    For intellectuals, the church offered the possibility of regular immersion in a competing narrative, one that was not couched in the language of historical materialism. Children who attended Catholic Sunday schools learned about a system of morality that contrasted with state utilitarianism. Those who read Catholic books and regularly attended mass absorbed a Christian eschatology that stood at odds with the dictatorship of the proletariat; along the way, too, they sometimes picked up a historical narrative about their own country that had little in common with official communist myths about the triumph of the working class. By the late 1970s, the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly) had a circulation of forty thousand (compared to three hundred thousand for the party’s official equivalent). 15 The Catholic University of Lublin was the country’s only nonstate institution of higher education.
    By the second half of the 1970s, the optimism of the early Gierek period was evaporating. The government was having trouble finding the hard currency to service its growing foreign debt, and its only choice was to squeeze domestic producers harder to make up the shortfall. A new round of price hikes in 1976 triggered strikes and protests in the industrial city of Radom. Gierek rescinded the increases within twenty-four hours, but the upheaval had an interesting side effect. A new civil society began to emerge. One of the dissident groups perceived a growing but inchoate potential for working-class protest. What if the intellectuals started helping strikers with political and legal advice? The new organization called itself KOR, the Polish acronym for “Workers’ Defense Committee.”
    The assertiveness of these new activists spooked Gierek’s Politburo. Western leaders wanted to see their East-bloc counterparts observe the niceties of respect for human rights, and Gierek, eager to preserve the flow of foreign credit, accordingly ordered his secret police, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service, known by its abbreviation as the SB), to tolerate a certain degree of dissident activity—a policy wryly referred to by its beneficiaries as “repressive tolerance.”
    The tolerance was not always in evidence. On May 7, 1977, a young university student named Stanisław Pyjas, a member of KOR, was found dead in a Kraków alleyway. He had been murdered. His classmates took the opportunity to stage public demonstrations against the killing and call for an investigation. Even workers and peasants from the area joined in—testimony to the increasing effectiveness of KOR’s efforts. 16 The students who organized it all called themselves the “Student Solidarity Committee.” The priest who chose to preside over the funeral mass for Pyjas was none other than the archbishop of Kraków himself, Karol Józef CardinalWojtyła, the man who would later be known as John Paul II. Pyjas, he said, had “fallen victim to the authorities’ hatred of the democracy movement among the students.” 17 He openly supported the protests.
    It was a bad moment for Gierek. In July, eager to avoid being censured by the West, he announced an amnesty for some KOR members (though the secret police continued to harry the group, albeit less visibly). The activists returned to the work of building ties among themselves, the workers, and the Roman Catholic Church, thus laying