Topics of coins
March 1968 Events
This conventional concept includes a few various and unnecessary
interrelated trains of thought. What's more, depending on who uses
the concept 'March events', these persons first of all underscore these
aspects which primarily concern themselves and the community they
used to mingle with. Thus, it is clear that the persons who emigrated
from Poland after that March and their relatives who chose to stay
in the country most frequently recall the disgraceful anti-Semitic
campaign; it was ineptly hidden by official authorities under the
banner of anti-Zionism. In such a climate, over 15,000 Jews and
citizens of Jewish origin left Poland in the years 1968-1972.
To the people who studied in 1968, the student factor of the
Polish March events is the most important aspect. Student rallies,
sit-ins and demonstrations were most strongly engraved in the
memory of the people. In 1968, Polish students protested under
the slogans of freedom, drawing on leftist phraseology. They were
engaged in the struggle for democratisation and liberalisation of
the political system as well as in the battle for the right to live in
truth. 'The press tells lies', one of the most popular slogans of the
time, may have come from the urge.
In turn, to people from the worlds of culture, science and
art, the Polish March events appear - even after all these years
- primarily as an anti-intelligentsia pogrom. It was the time when
named writers and scholars were extremely brutally attacked
in the mass media. What all the attacks (the carbon copy of the
comments made by the party activists) had in common was that the mass media accused the persons attacked not only of the
lack of ideological and moral qualities but simply of the lack of
professionalism.
The origin of the 'March events' can be found at the turn of
the 1950s and 1960s when the Władysław Gomułka team began
to more openly depart from the liberalised policy of October
1956. Conflicts between intellectuals and the party and state
authorities steadily intensified. These conflicts were accompanied
by a secret struggle for power and influence within the Polish
United Worker's Party leadership. The younger middle and lower
level activists, who wanted to get promotion at the expense of
the old comrades - not infrequently of Jewish origin, were mostly
engaged in the infighting. They backed the so-called partisans,
an informal party clique formed around Gen. Mieczysław Moczar,
the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. To achieve their own
goals, they wanted to use the students who protested against the
administrative decision to pull Adam Mickiewicz's Forefathers'
Eve, performed at the National Theatre.
On 8 March 1968, students organised a rally on the Warsaw
University campus in defence of their fellow students expelled
for their role in the protests. The gathering participants were
brutally clubbed with truncheons and scattered by workers from
the so-called 'factory defence' units and regular militia units.
However, the rally ushered in a wave of demonstrations held
in solidarity with the Warsaw students at almost all Polish
universities. Students held street demonstrations and clashed
with the militia in several cities.
At the same time, anti-intelligentsia and anti-Semitic
campaigns were launched in parallel to the youth demonstrations.
A lot of people in key positions were removed from the party and
their posts. A 'purge' began and its first target was the security
apparatus, then members of the party apparatus and state
administration, the world of science, culture and art, the media
and the armed forces. Poland had an explicitly bad reputation
in the West, which further worsened after Polish troops had
participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia and suppression of
the Prague Spring.
Prof. Jerzy Eisler
Institute of National Remembrance