Our knowledge of December ‘70 will not be complete without access to the post-Soviet archives

An interview with Professor Antoni Dudek

Our knowledge of December ‘70 will not be complete without access to the post-Soviet archives. However, we may never know the truth, because there are many indications that in the early ‘90s some of the KGB resources were destroyed, just as the archives of the Security Service were decimated in Poland – says Prof. Antoni Dudek, historian and political scientist from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.

 

Polish Press Agency: On 7 December 1970, a treaty normalizing relations between the Polish People’s Republic and West Germany was signed. This is considered to be one of the most important moments in the history of Gomułka’s rule and one of his greatest political triumphs. A dozen or so days later, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party lost power. Would a careful observer of events inside the party have noticed on 7 December that a political breakthrough was about to take place?

Since the crisis in March 1968, it was clear that Gomułka’s rule was reaching its twilight. It was evident that his position in the party was growing weaker, and that he had lost his former popularity in society. However, it was not obvious when his departure would occur. Gomułka himself, in conversations with his comrades, stated that the moment of his retirement would happen during another party congress. He suggested that he would then hand over the reins of government to one of the “young comrades.” In the Polish United Workers’ Party, discussions about the “dolphin” took place, which are also remembered today. The names of Stanisław Kociołek and Józef Tejchma appeared. They were a generation younger than Gomułka and clearly promoted by him. Older players – Mieczysław Moczar and Edward Gierek – were in the background. The moment of change itself, however, was unpredictable.

Władysław Gomułka on Sixth Plenary Session of Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, 14 December 1970 (photo: PAP/S. Dąbrowiecki)

In this context, there are various conspiracy theories based on the assumption that the workers’ protest was triggered by price increases, but that deliberate provocations were also planned to send people onto the streets of the Tri-City and other urban centers. There were legends about miners or security personnel employed in the shipyards. Honest historical research has never confirmed these claims. However, one could undoubtedly feel that Gomułka’s rule was coming to an end but no one expected it to happen so quickly. It is often the case that a political shift takes a long time to mature, but then occurs very quickly. In this case, the change had been maturing since 1968 and took place within a few days of the second half of December. This was due not only to the political situation, but also to the sudden deterioration of Gomułka’s health, which was undoubtedly not a “diplomatic disease”. Perhaps, had it not been for this breakdown in his condition, he would have remained in power a little longer.

PAP: The aforementioned Gierek was then the first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Katowice. How did he come to the position that predisposed him to seize power in December 1970?

Let’s remember that Gierek was in charge of the “old” Katowice region, one of merely seventeen. It was the largest in terms of population and economic potential. It had the greatest amount of resources. as Gierek was extremely effective in obtaining them from the state budget. Regardless of Gomułka’s decisions, Gierek was able to find channels through which he could invest. He had an extremely efficient manager next to him – the chairman of the Provincial National Council, Jerzy Ziętek – who dealt not only with industrial investments, but also social and entertainment investments. As a result, Silesia was considered to be the “Polish Katanga” (it was the most prosperous region of Zaire), which drew Poles from other regions of the country. In Upper Silesia, it was easier to find a well-paid job and a flat. Many assumed that if Gierek moved to Warsaw, he would also spread this  “prosperity” throughout Poland.

Gierek also pursued a well-thought-out policy of flirting with intellectual circles who dreamed of modernizing the People’s Republic of Poland. He was supported by, among others, the weekly “Polityka”, which was considered to be the organ of “party liberals”. The journalists of Polityka saw it as a counterweight to the influence of Mieczysław Moczar, who in their eyes was a dangerous nationalist. At the end of the 1960s, Gierek’s activities were often described in the weekly, interviews were conducted, and program memoranda were even sent to Gierek. The leader of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Upper Silesia pretended to be interested, but he did not really understand much, because he was not well educated and did not really understand the problems related to the functioning of real socialism. However, he made a good impression, which turned out to be decisive for the acquisition of many circles that would be fascinated by him at first, and then severely disappointed.

Edward Gierek (photo: PAP/T. Zagoździński)

PAP: Gierek was “the hope of the liberals”, but in March 1968 at a rally in Katowice he said that “Silesian water will crush the bones of the enemies of socialism”…

Gierek, like every politician, was a man with many faces and he used each of them according to his current needs. It was clear to the Warsaw elite that in the event of a power struggle between Moczar and Gierek, the latter should be supported, because he was “the lesser evil”. Everyone was scared of Moczar. He was a symbol of all the worst. Against his background, Gierek appeared to be a liberal. I think that was the real opinion. If Moczar became Gomułka’s successor, there would be a much stricter political order in the People’s Republic of Poland. He had a cautious attitude towards the West just like Gomułka. This is another important difference when comparing Moczar and Gierek, who knew the West and was not so much afraid of its influence. Many Poles must have liked it, especially the more educated classes who dreamed of going to the West or following various patterns from behind the Iron Curtain.

PAP: The aforementioned conspiracy theories concerning December ‘70 are not documented. Another, more persuasive, theory assumes that the growing aversion to Gomułka could have been used by his comrades to announce an increase in prices at an absurd moment, just a dozen days before Christmas. Perhaps someone did not deliberately stop comrade “Wiesław” from making such a decision?

Gomułka could have been misled by various false economic data. However, the introduction of the price increase was his decision, formally supported by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. In the final period of Gomułka’s rule, this body met extremely rarely. Many decisions were approved through the circulation of documents, without any discussion. The decision on the price rises was undoubtedly a personal decision of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Perhaps the data presented to him were darker than reality and suggested that not introducing increases in 1970 would be disastrous for the state’s finances. This, however, is a not very plausible scenario. Gomułka was passionate about the economy and numbers. He could demand to be shown statistics from a very low level of the economy and he was well aware of the realities of the functioning of a centrally planned economy.

Protesters in Szczecin, 17 December 1970 (photo: PAP/Andrzej Witusz)

It can be said that it was rather Gomułka’s economic policy in the second half of the 1960s that led to this situation. He succumbed to the pressure of the heavy industry lobby and allocated enormous resources to its development. On the other hand, less and less resources were directed to increasing the productive forces of the light and food industry. Gomułka completely did not understand the growing material aspirations of Poles, especially the younger generations. He himself grew up in terrible poverty and lived very modestly all his life. It seemed to him that since there had been visible progress in living standards compared to the interwar period, and no one starved anymore or walked barefoot, this was a significant and sufficient achievement.

He treated many consumer goods as an unnecessary luxury. He couldn’t imagine that the average Pole might want a car. His asceticism “embraced” other products, including citrus, the import of which he limited, considering that it was better to allocate valuable foreign currencies, for example, to the purchase of licenses necessary for the development of the chemical industry. This caused understandable disappointment, all the more so since 1956 when contacts between the People’s Republic of Poland and the West, including through the local Polish community, were much more frequent. The items brought from there aroused admiration and jealousy, and Gomułka’s speech, constantly referring to poverty from the years of the Second Polish Republic, caused growing frustration and irritation.

PAP: Among the key figures of December ‘70, there is no man who would soon become “second after Gierek”. What was the role of Piotr Jaroszewicz in those events?

Prof. Antoni Dudek: Jaroszewicz, at the key moment of the crisis, when blood was shed on the coast, was in Moscow. There he met with the Prime Minister of the USSR, Alexei Kosygin, who unambiguously declared that Gomułka should leave, and that the Soviets saw Edward Gierek as the successor. Jaroszewicz shared this knowledge with the group that was preparing the removal of Gomułka in Warsaw. Following this conversation, a letter from the Soviet Politburo reached Warsaw in which Soviet comrades advocated a political solution to the conflict. Gomułka rightly read their message as an indirect vote of no confidence in his leadership. Of course, Moscow was not after the workers’ lives, but they were fed up with Gomułka. Brezhnev, and Khrushchev before that, had a peculiar Gomułka complex, which had its roots in the Stalinist era. The future First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party was the only communist politician, apart from Tito, who had opposed Stalin and survived. Thanks to this, Gomułka was a legend in the international communist movement.

Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz (left) in Kołobrzeg, 1971 (photo: M. Parzniewski; NAC)

In the following years, Gomułka made it clear many times that the Soviet Union was an “older ally”, but that the People’s Republic of Poland would not be a servant, but rather a smaller partner with its own interests and needs. In this context, he made further demands to the Kremlin, such as the supply of grain, various raw materials or the transfer of licenses for the development of a modern armaments industry. The latter postulate particularly irritated Khrushchev and Brezhnev, because they believed that all the secrets about Soviet armaments were leaked from Poland. It ended in the time of Gierek, who obediently followed Moscow’s demands and asked for approval of his plans.

PAP: On 20 December, events accelerated. After Gierek was elected to the position of First Secretary, in a speech to other members of the Politburo he said that they should “sympathize, not congratulate him”. In this context, it is worth asking how his companions perceived Gierek. Did they consider him a “firefighter” whose purpose was to put out a social fire that had broken out a week earlier, or rather a politician with a real vision and program for change?

The decisive moment of change at the summit of the Polish United Workers’ Party authorities took place on 19 December. On that day, a seven-hour meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party took place, without the participation of Gomułka, who was hospitalized. During the heated discussion, the supporters of the change prevailed. The postulates to suspend Gomułka from his duties and to elect his temporary deputy were also rejected. This position of the Politburo left the Central Committee unable to make any other choice the next day.

On that day, Gierek played the role of the one who was to calm the public mood, despite the fact that the party did not comply with any of the demands of the strikers. This intention was successful and the strikes were ended. They erupted again in January and only ended in February. Only after the textile workers’ strike in Łódź, did Gierek’s team finally withdraw the increase introduced by Gomułka. Undoubtedly, however, Gierek was seen as the one who would calm the mood with beautiful words, not tanks and bullets. With this first impression there was hope that “now it would be different”. However, no one knew exactly what these changes would look like. It was only obvious that personnel changes were carried out at the top level of the government. Gierek carried them out very quickly. Following Gomułka, the eternal prime minister Józef Cyrankiewicz and Gomułka’s closest associates left: Zenon Kliszko, Ignacy Loga-Sowiński and Bolesław Jaszczuk.

Janek Wiśniewski’s body carried by demonstrators in Gdynia (photo: Edmund Pepliński)

Later, Gierek made it clear that his policy would mainly aim at improving living conditions. This postulate was largely realized in the end. Gierek did it in a way that Gomułka had been terrified of: he reached for foreign loans on a large scale. At the same time, he continued the existing development of heavy industry. However, he also took into consideration the desire for consumption. Symbols of this were the appearance of the small Fiat on the roads, and Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola in stores. Fulfilling the promise to modernize Poland made him very popular in the first half of the 1970s. To this day, the legend of the best host in the history of the Polish People’s Republic remains.

PAP: There is often a question that is difficult to resolve about the nature of the events of December ‘70. Was it the first successful workers’ revolt in a socialist country, or rather a palace coup that took place in the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party?

Let us remember that the workers’ revolt in Poznań in June 1956 also turned out to be successful. It did not cause a change as quickly as in 1970, but undoubtedly the sequence of events initiated in June brought about changes in October of the same year. In turn, without the December revolt, the palace coup, which led to the removal of Gomułka, would not have taken place.

Of course, this was not only a one hundred percent coup in the Central Committee, because Moscow was interfering in its course. We still don’t know how great its real influence was. We do not know the documents in the Russian archives. This is important because some historians believe that Gierek may have been an agent of the Soviet secret services since he became involved with the communist movement during his economic emigration in France and Belgium. Our knowledge about December ‘70 will not be complete without access to the post-Soviet archives, although we may never know the truth, because there are many indications that in the early nineties some of the KGB’s resources were destroyed, just as happened to the archives of the Security Service here. In any case, Gierek’s actions in the 1970s clearly showed that he pursued an unequivocally pro-Soviet policy. Its opening to the West was not an attempt to turn away from the Kremlin, but the implementation of the policy was backed at the time by the USSR, which promoted the concept of the so-called détente between countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

 

Interviewer: Michał Szukała (PAP)
Translation: Alicja Rose & Jessica Sirotin