In Paris, West Berlin, London, and Rome, the spring of 1968 was marked by student protests against the Vietnam War. In Warsaw, too, students were protesting, but their cause was not the same as their Western counterparts. Young Poles took to the streets of Warsaw not to chant “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh in solidarity with the Viet Cong, but rather to defend their own country’s freedom and culture against a smothering Communist rule.
Instead of chanting Ho’s name, young Poles put flowers under the monument of Adam Mickiewicz, a nineteenth-century poet whose drama Forefathers Eve, written in praise of the struggle for freedom, had recently been declared subversive and anti-Soviet, and its performance at the National Theater in Warsaw closed down.
These are only a few of the differences between West and East European students in that springtime of rebellion of forty years ago. Although the two youthful revolts were undertaken by the same generation and took similar forms of street demonstrations and sit-ins, there were far more differences than similarities as students rebelled on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
It was, of course, the context that made the difference. The point of departure for Western students – freedom of speech and assembly, ideological pluralism, and a democratic political system – was, for their Eastern colleagues, a distant objective that they were unlikely to achieve.
Unhappy with the capitalist consumer society that was metastasizing all around them, West European and American students attacked the system from far-left positions. Polish, Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav students directed their protests against the Communist dictatorship, which was depriving their societies of elementary civic freedoms. For the Westerners, the main threat was American imperialism, blamed for the “dirty war in Vietnam. For the Poles and other Easterners, the threat was Soviet imperialism – a threat soon realized in Brezhnev’s crushing of the Prague Spring. While the former wanted a revolution, the latter demanded only – but no less audaciously – that the authorities obey the law.
“The press lies! demonstrators shouted in Warsaw and burned Party-controlled newspapers. For Wladyslaw Gomulladyslaw Gomulka, then Poland’s Party leader, and other Communist brass, free media was a bourgeois aberration. That same spring, demonstrators in Paris burned cars in opposition to the bourgeois lifestyle. What you see depends on where you sit. While students in Paris and Berkeley turned against academic science, their contemporaries in Warsaw and other Polish cities demonstrated in defense of the traditional role of the university and its autonomy, and were supported by many of their professors.
Unlike in the West, intergenerational conflict played a minor role in the Polish 1968. Writers and scientists, who were also enraged by official censorship of Mickiewicz’s play and national culture, joined the young in protest.
The student movement in Poland took on a mass character during a demonstration at the University of Warsaw on March 8, 1968. Students united to support two of their colleagues who had been expelled for their protests at the National Theater. One student was Adam Michnik, later a long-term political prisoner, who became a political strategist of Solidarity in the 1980’s.
The peaceful demonstration was brutally dispersed by the police and “volunteer party vigilantes. No dialogue was ever sought. In violation of a centuries-long tradition of university autonomy, the police marched onto campus, beat up students, and arrested a large number of demonstrators. In response, a wave of protests spread to universities around the country, often supported by young workers.
Mendacity in the Communist press, which distorted the protests’ meaning and personally attacked student leaders, inflamed matters more. The party resorted to anti-Semitic propaganda, pointing to the Jewish ancestry of some of the student leaders.
The campaign of hatred that followed underscored the country’s utter lack of free speech. The demand for the abolition of censorship was one of the first political slogans of the Polish March ’68. Demands for freedom of assembly and the right to organize followed.
Crucially, the protesters did not demand free elections. In this they were realists, but they did demand a measure of civic control over the authorities, both in the political and the economic sphere. One slogan was “No bread without freedom.
After 1968, Western student protestors gradually entered their countries’ political and intellectual establishments. The Polish dissidents found themselves in prison or exile. Several thousand were expelled from universities, and 80 were imprisoned following political trials. The authorities also sacked prominent professors who had influenced and supported the students. The regime’s darkest response, an anti-Semitic purge, resulted in an exodus of more than 10,000 people, who were also deprived of their citizenship.
The springtime of protests that many in the West remember fondly led to very different outcomes. Anti-capitalist radicalism pushed many Western protesters toward the extreme left, rejection of liberal democracy, and, in some cases, terrorism. The ideological evolution of the Polish students led in the opposite direction – from efforts to “improve socialism in the name of “true Marxism to anti-totalitarian opposition and the construction of a free civil society.
Imprisonment completed the evolution of the March combatants and left them free of illusions. In the 1970’s, they created the biggest center of opposition in the socialist “camp. The Solidarity movement of the 1980’s and the peaceful overthrow of communism was, in large measure, the work of their generation. It was the only suitable end to the road begun in 1968 under the monument of Mickiewicz.
Jan Skórzynski is former deputy editor-in-chief of Rzeczpospolita and author of several books about the history of the Polish democratic opposition to communism and the Solidarity movement. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences (www.project-syndicate.org).
