Archive / Magazine / History / The Year 1968 / Background | 26/03/2008

The March 1968 events

Various tendencies can be summed up under the "March 1968 events" umbrella. In reality they have only two things in common: the time (Spring 1968) and the place (Poland).

The events of '68 are associated with different issues for different people depending on who reflects on them and for what reason. They are most often issues with which the person was concerned personally or which effected their surroundings. It is therefore understandable that for those who were studying at the time the youth uprisings are most commonly of utmost importance. Protests in one form or another were held in nearly all institutions of higher learning in Poland. Street demonstration and violent clashes with the State police occurred in dozens of cities.

Student demonstrations in Warsaw in March 1968
Photo: AP

Different from Western protests

In the context of students' issues, March '68 is often considered to be similar to the wave of student upheavals in the West. However, despite a range of apparent similarities (university strikes, vigils, clashes with law enforcement bodies) the events which took place at that time in Poland can only be accurately compared to the reform movement which took place in Czechoslovakia. Under the banner of freedom, the Polish students struggled for the same values and goals as their Czech and Slovak brethren.

The students in the West, on the other hand, were battling with a state which functioned under a different system. They did not need to fight for the freedoms of speech and assembly as they were fundamental principles of a democratic state. Still, it must not be forgotten that despite these differences French students of May 1968 made a point to emphasize their connection with their Polish friends by chanting "Rome, Berlin, Varsovie, Paris!" The French translation of Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski's "Open Letter" to the Party was found amongst the most popular readings of the Sarbone at the time.

Vilification in the media

Still it must be born in mind that the students in the West could be sure that their protests would be widely covered in the press and moreover in an friendly manner. Meanwhile, Polish students, who were living in a country where the sole owner and distributor of the mass media was the State, could not count on such coverage. Instead they were forced to challenge an onslaught of misinformation, lies and slander found in the press, on the radio and on television. Student leaders in West immediately became heroes of the crowds, often becoming even more popular than rock stars or athletes.

Meanwhile their Polish counterparts were thrown in prison in an atmosphere of persecution reminiscent of a witch hunt. Utilizing leftist rhetoric, the Polish students fought to democratise and liberalise the Communist system and for the right to live in truth. The events became part and parcel to the creation of the term frequently referred to as the "'68 Generation". Many people from this generation went on to become anti-Communist activists in the 70's and later Solidarity activists and advisors.

Attack on artists and scientists

Yet for many of those functioning in the worlds of culture, science and arts, March '68 and the years following was a time of an anti-intelligentsia pogrom. Authors and scientists who were often extremely well-respected and worthy of merit were brutally attacked in the media, having their full names printed. The universal trait of these publications was, in line with Party activists, a refutation of not only the attacked person's principles and morals but also their professional qualifications.

Finally, those who emigrated from Poland after March '68 often associate the era with the disgraceful anti-Semitic campaign, which was ineffectively covered up by officials who claimed it to be a form of "anti-Zionism". There were, are and most likely will for a long time be anti-Semites, but it was difficult to openly espouse such beliefs in post-Shoah Europe. In democratic countries these elements were pushed out of the mainstream to the margins of society and were forced to anonymously voice their opinions through small niche publications. In Communist Poland, where preventative censorship and the political police existed, the publication of anti-Semitic materials was banned yet, as is turned out, it was not impossible to do so.

Political cleansing

Due to the Communists, anti-Semitism found its way into the front pages of the newspapers as well as primetime radio and television in 1968. As a matter of fact, from as early as the beginning of the 60's the Ministery of the Interior began to show a growing interest in the Jewish community. This despite the fact that by the mid-60's not more than 30,000 Jews or people with Jewish background lived in Poland. A political cleansing took place in the spring of '68 encroaching upon practically all areas of public life: the Party apparatus, national and regional governmental offices, State administrative bodies, the armed forces, mass media outlets, the educational system, cultural and academic communities.

The operation (as it was called amongst those who carried it out) to "Aryanise" the security forces had already been completed years before. In Warsaw alone, between March and September 1968, close to 800 people were dismissed from managerial posts, while a bit more than 600 such changes took place in the years between 1965 and 1967. Hence it was conceived as a wide scale operation.

Emigration of intellectuals from Poland

Over 15,000 people emigrated from Poland between the years of 1968-1972 under these circumstances. The scale of this emigration is not so shocking simply in terms of the number of people but rather the fact that amongst the 9,570 adults who applied for emigration, 1,832 of them had higher education and another 944 were students. Amongst those who wished to emigrate to Israel (at the time it was only allowed to identify Israel as an emigration destination, even if the applicant did not truly intend to go there at all) 217 were former-university employees and 275 had worked at various academic institutions. This wave of emigration was therefore very much an emigration of the intelligentsia.

Those who orchestrated the anti-Semitic campaign, most likely refrained from considering how, 25 years after German Nazis carried out a Holocaust on Polish ground, international public opinion would regard their actions. It turned out that the West found it completely unacceptable where it awoke a wave of protests. Due to this, many countries had a uniformly bad opinion of Poland at that time.

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