Poland: the main event was in March 1968
Polish student protest is a real and important story, but its centre is March 1968, not 1967. In 1967 the pieces were being put in place: a philosopher had been expelled from the Communist Party, an official campaign against so-called Zionists followed the Six-Day War, and in November a theatre production opened that would become the trigger a few months later. This article follows that sequence and keeps the dates straight.
Leszek Kolakowski and the 1966 expulsion
Leszek Kolakowski was a philosopher at the University of Warsaw who had begun as a committed Marxist and became one of the party’s best-known critics from within. In October 1966, at a meeting marking ten years since the 1956 political thaw known as the Polish October, he gave a speech that evaluated the decade and concluded, in effect, that the promise of 1956 had been betrayed. The party expelled him soon afterward, in the autumn of 1966.
The decision caused some protest among students and academics. Reports describe petitions, meetings and statements of solidarity in Warsaw, and several colleagues were disciplined as well. This is the first of the 1966 to 1967 events that matter. It was not a mass movement, but it showed that a group of students and young intellectuals was willing to defend a critic. Among the young people active in these circles was Adam Michnik, who would become important in 1968. Earlier, in 1964 and 1965, two young academics, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, had been imprisoned after writing an open letter attacking the party as a bureaucratic ruling class. Their case remained a reference point for the opposition.
June 1967: the anti-Zionist campaign
The next development came with the Six-Day War. Poland, following the Soviet line, broke diplomatic relations with Israel in June 1967. A few days later, on 19 June, party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka spoke at a trade union congress and referred to a possible “fifth column” in Poland, which was widely understood to mean Jewish citizens who sympathised with Israel.
In the months that followed, a campaign gathered pace in the press and the party. People of Jewish origin were removed from posts in the army, the state apparatus and elsewhere, and rivalries within the party leadership, notably involving the security-minded faction of Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar, played a part. The exact scale in 1967 is hard to state precisely, as the purges continued and widened in 1968. Many thousands of Polish Jews, a remnant of the pre-war community, later emigrated under pressure. The episode is sometimes described as anti-Zionist in name and antisemitic in practice. It shaped the way the party responded to student protest in March 1968, since the authorities blamed “Zionists” and troublemakers for the unrest. How closely this campaign relates to the Soviet Middle East policy of the period is a subject on which historians continue to draw different conclusions.
November 1967: Dziady at the National Theatre
On 25 November 1967 the National Theatre in Warsaw premiered a production of Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), the 19th-century Romantic drama by Adam Mickiewicz. The director was Kazimierz Dejmek. The staging coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and was part of the official cultural calendar, which makes the sequel more ironic.
The play contains scenes about Russian oppression of Poland in the 1820s, and audiences are said to have responded strongly to lines that could be read as comments on the present day. Reports say that the production drew attention from officials and, reportedly, complaints from Soviet representatives. The authorities decided to end the run. The last performance took place on 30 January 1968, and at its close members of the audience demonstrated in the theatre and then in the street, shouting against censorship.
March 1968: the student protests
The ban became the spark for a student movement. After the closure, students from the University of Warsaw collected signatures on a petition asking for the play to be restored. Two students involved, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, were expelled from the university in early March. On 8 March 1968 students gathered in the university courtyard for a rally to protest against those expulsions and against censorship. Police and groups of party-organised workers attacked them, and many were beaten and arrested.
Over the following days demonstrations spread to other Polish cities, including Krakow, Wroclaw, Gdansk and Lodz, and a number of university sites were occupied or surrounded. Chants and banners called for freedom of expression, with slogans such as “The press lies” often cited. The government replied with arrests, expulsions of students and the dismissal of professors, including Kolakowski, who lost his university position and later left Poland. On 19 March Gomulka made a speech that blamed Zionists and “anti-socialist elements”, linking the student unrest to the earlier anti-Zionist campaign.
How it fits into the 1968 picture
Polish students were not alone in 1968. They were acting in the same year as the Paris upheaval, the Prague Spring and the West Berlin protests. But the Polish movement had its own character. It centred on freedom of culture and speech, and it was driven by the memory of Mickiewicz as much as by international ideas. It was also isolated: workers did not join, and in many cases they were mobilised against the students. Poland’s regime, in turn, took part in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, a decision that cost the movement some of its sympathy.
Why 1967 matters
For the writer of history, 1967 is the year before. It contained the philosopher’s expulsion, the anti-Zionist campaign and the premiere of Dziady, all of which fed what happened in March 1968. Placing any large student demonstration in Warsaw in 1967 itself would be inaccurate. The more careful phrase is that 1967 prepared the ground for a movement that broke out a few months later.