9

BREAD AND FREEDOM

Every provocateur or maniac who will dare raise his hand against the people’s rule may be sure that . . . the authorities will chop off his hand.

JÓZEF CYRANKIEWICZ, Polish prime minister

Pozna, on the banks of the Warta River, halfway between Warsaw and Berlin, is one of Poland’s oldest cities – its magnificent Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul was founded in 968. The historic capital of Wielkopolska (‘Greater Poland’) had remained fiercely committed to its Polish identity, despite more than a century of Prussian occupation and an attempt by the Nazis to eradicate any vestige of non-German culture.¹ By the mid-1950s this important centre for manufacturing and trade had been rebuilt following the massive damage suffered during its liberation by the Red Army. Away from its industrial suburbs, with their dark red brick buildings, the city centre boasted large open spaces, a beautiful old town square and an imposing stone palace (‘the Castle’) that had been built by the Germans in 1910 and which housed the offices of the local government. Half a mile to the south-west lay the grounds of the International Trade Fair, whose white, futuristic buildings conjured up images of progress and modernity. With a large and highly disciplined working-class population, Pozna was viewed as ‘the vanguard city of communist Poland’.² At the end of June 1956, however, it found itself at the cutting edge of popular opposition to the ‘People’s rule’.

At 6.30 a.m. on Thursday 28 June, amidst mounting anger over low wages and poor conditions, the workers at Pozna’s ZISPO Metal Works downed tools. As the plant’s siren was sounded, shattering the early morning calm, thousands assembled at the factory’s brick gates before heading north to the city centre, two miles away. As they walked along Górna Wilda Street, many of the protesters, just off the night shift, wore ‘black greasy working clothes’ while others ‘carried hammers over their shoulders’ or waved Polish flags and banners. Amid the singing of patriotic songs and hymns, chants of ‘We want bread!’ rang out. When the procession passed by St Martin’s Church, two priests appeared on the steps to deliver a blessing.3

Swelled by thousands of recruits from factories across the city, as well as high-school and university students, housewives and children, the demonstrators cut an impressive sight as they poured into Stalin Square, close to the Castle and the headquarters of the Provincial Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR).⁴ A British diplomat, Donald Boswell Gurrey, who was in town for the city’s famous trade fair, reported that by 9 a.m. the square was already ‘packed with people’, perhaps as many as twenty thousand, with ‘fresh lorry loads’ of demonstrators arriving ‘at every moment’. The crowd were ‘singing a hymn . . . and the whole atmosphere was one of seriousness and determination’. As Poles stood on their balconies or in their windows, applauding and cheering, people continued to head towards the square in their thousands, carrying banners that read ‘We demand bread for our children!’ and singing the Polish national anthem (‘Poland is not yet lost’).⁵ The scale of the protests was extraordinary, and as many as one hundred thousand people – more than a quarter of the population – took to the streets during this tumultuous day.⁶

At 9.10 a.m. a group of fifteen people claiming to be representatives of the crowd entered the Castle for a meeting with Franciszek Frckowiak, chairman of the Municipal National Council. But when they demanded that a government delegation be despatched immediately to Pozna, and that both prices and production targets be lowered, Frckowiak demurred, claiming that he lacked sufficient authority, and telephoned local PZPR headquarters. When he was put through to Wincenty Krako, head of the propaganda section, one of the delegates – a university student – grabbed the receiver and shouted, ‘Either we get someone here from Warsaw or you pay with your head.’ Meanwhile, more protesters from the square outside had entered the building: some placed a white flag of surrender in a window; others climbed onto the roof of the tower and, to roars from the crowd, raised a Polish flag. The delegation soon moved on to the Communist Party offices across the street for discussions that proved similarly fruitless, and when Krako addressed the crowd, in an attempt to defuse the situation, his bureaucratic language and evasions caused uproar. Catcalls and loud booing soon drowned him out.7

At the outset, the demonstrators had focused on economic issues – there were constant chants of ‘Chleba, chleba, chleba!’ (‘Bread, bread, bread!’), as well as demands for higher wages and lower prices.⁸ Gurrey had encountered the crowd shortly after quarter to nine, as he attempted to drive from his hotel to the trade fair. On being stopped by the protesters, he ‘asked what was up and was told they were on strike. I asked why. Two of them – middle-aged men – struck their stomachs and spoke the Polish word for “bread”.’⁹ Demands for greater religious freedom had also begun to circulate, with workers appealing for the release of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyski, the Primate of Poland, who had been held under house arrest since September 1953, and requesting the return of religious instruction into the schools.¹⁰ Soon, though, overt opposition to the regime itself bubbled to the surface.

Peter Wiles, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, was in Pozna with a delegation of visiting economists when the protests broke out. Wiles, an expert on Communist economies, had ‘lost no time’ in venturing into the city centre to observe the protests, despite the objections of his official guides (who had ‘offered all short of physical opposition’ to try and dissuade him).¹¹ Arriving on the scene at 10 a.m. he noticed that, while the ‘lorry loads of workers’ who were still arriving were ‘demanding only more bread, more wages, etc.’, the atmosphere in Stalin Square itself increasingly resembled ‘that of a popular revolution’. By this point many trams had been overturned and one, draped with Polish flags, served as a makeshift podium, from which a succession of speakers harangued the crowd.12 ‘We want freedom!’ and ‘Down with Soviet occupation!’ were shouted out, or scrawled on placards and banners, and the protesters talked freely, claiming that only 5 per cent of Poles supported the Communist regime and insisting that ‘the people’ had now ‘risen against’ the Russians.¹³ There was also excited talk that other cities were in revolt.¹⁴

The protesters’ mood was also becoming more aggressive. When the strike had begun, it had the air of a holiday. People marched with ‘smiles on their faces’, according to one secret police report, and waiters at the Europejskii Café had offered refreshments to those at the head of the column, rushing out with ‘trays of drinks and appetisers’ as the crowds arrived in the city centre. There had, though, been ugly hints of what was to come. When one plant director tried to prevent his workers from joining the strike, for instance, his furious employees poured oil over him.¹⁵ Several hours into the protests, the anger had built precipitously. At about 10 a.m., amidst shouts of ‘Down with the Russkis!’ and ‘Let’s destroy the Communist shits!’ a group of workers forcibly entered the headquarters of the PZPR Provincial Committee and chased out its employees. The protesters collected up all of the red banners that they could find and threw them into the street, along with portraits of various Communist leaders (in a sign of respect, Lenin alone was spared this indignity; his portrait was turned against the wall). Busts of eminent figures, including the late Bolesław Bierut, were smashed. A banner reading ‘Death to the Betrayers!’ was hoisted over the building, and blackboards were placed in the windows, bearing the slogans ‘We want freedom!’ and ‘We demand a free Poland!’ Outside, as the crowd cheered their support, some burned their Party membership cards on a bonfire.16

Other symbols of authority soon came under attack. Amid rumours that a delegation of ZISPO workers had been arrested, a group marched to the Młyska Street jail, where they overpowered the guards, released the inmates and destroyed files, furniture and equipment. They also helped themselves to weapons. A second group forced their way into the offices of the public prosecutor and were soon setting fire to documents in the street.¹⁷ Others headed to the city’s fairgrounds, site of the Twenty-fifth International Trade Fair, where they tore down the Soviet flag and raised banners proclaiming ‘Down with this phony Communism!’ and ‘Russians get out!’ Meanwhile, red banners and Soviet flags were destroyed all across the city and the city’s radio station was ‘sacked’: jamming equipment was hurled out of the sixth-floor windows to the streets below, where the crowd took evident enjoyment in stamping on the wrecked machinery. ‘Now’, said one striker, ‘we shall be able to listen to the BBC at last.’¹⁸

Initially, the strikers faced little resistance – both the police and the local Citizens’ Militia were reluctant to maintain order, and some troops fraternised with the strikers, even handing over their weapons. When two trucks of Militia arrived at the Castle, they were greeted with enthusiastic cries of ‘The Militia is with us, the Militia is with the nation!’¹⁹ However, when thousands of protesters began to converge on the Provisional Office of Public Security – an imposing structure, built in the Constructivist style, on Kochanowski Street – the situation quickly deteriorated. The headquarters of the hated secret police was an obvious target for the demonstrators, who suspected that the missing ZISPO workers were being held in its underground cells (in fact the rumour about the arrested workers was false). At about 10.15 a.m. a group of protesters, headed by a contingent of children aged between ten and fourteen, arrived at the Security Office building, carrying Polish flags and singing patriotic songs. Stopping in front of the headquarters, they chanted, ‘Down with the Communists’ flunkeys!’ and ‘Down with the nation’s butchers, you shits!’ before attempting to force open the doors.20

At first, the security forces sought to disperse the crowd by using water hoses, but the protesters proved determined. Creating a barricade out of overturned trams, tree branches and broken equipment from the nearby radio station, they responded with a hail of stones and rocks, and shouts of ‘Down with the Communists!’ and ‘Your time is come. Today we will be rid of you!’ Further attempts were made to force open the doors. Some time around eleven o’clock, shots rang out from a second-floor window.²¹ One British observer explained how ‘for a second everyone froze in his tracks. Then everyone tried to run in the same direction – away from the firing . . . many . . . got trampled. I heard screams of women and men . . .’²² Several people were hit, including a number of children; according to one account, the body of a sixteen-year-old boy was carried aloft as a Polish flag ‘dipped in his blood, was escorted by a proud and pretty Polish girl’.²³ The secret police headquarters was now under siege as the protesters, armed with Molotov cocktails and guns, responded in kind, and ‘small arms fire, ranging from sporadic to continuous’ continued throughout the afternoon.²⁴ Observing the situation from an apartment block in Roosevelt Street, some four hundred metres away, a German reporter noticed how ‘again and again the frightened crowd would run into the archways to hide from the bullets’. At about twelve thirty, two tanks which had been commandeered by a group of protesters on nearby Dbrowski Street ‘rumbled through the streets wet from the rain’ before coming to a halt outside the Security Office. A woman attached a flag to the turret of one of the tanks, and the crowd delivered an emotional rendition of ‘Boe, co Polsk’ (‘God Save Poland’). Using its top-mounted machine guns (there was no ammunition for the cannon), the tank then opened fire on the building.25 Meanwhile, a number of workers had taken up positions on the rooftops of nearby buildings, from where they exchanged fire with Security Office guards. Across the city, overturned trams, cars and even furniture were used to erect makeshift barricades, and both of the town’s railway stations were closed down in an effort to prevent military reinforcements from entering the city.²⁶

Although only a minority took up arms, there was plenty of excitement about the attack on the Security Office and the fact that the workers had risen up against the Communist Party.²⁷ But there was a vengeful element at work, too: the crowd outside the Security building denounced the ‘fascists’ inside and threatened to burn them alive, and secret police came under attack across the city. The most notorious incident occurred at the main railway station, where Corporal Zygmunt Izdebny was cornered by a mob. As they kicked the twenty-five-year-old to death, they boasted of their intention to ‘stamp out all the Security Office employees like bed bugs’.²⁸

In Warsaw, news of the disturbances had reached Edward Ochab, first secretary of the PZPR Central Committee, shortly before 10 a.m. During a private meeting, the defence minister, Konstantin Rokossovsky, warned that local forces might prove insufficient and, asking to be given a ‘free hand’, suggested that army units should be sent in. Ochab agreed immediately, and the decision was rubber-stamped retrospectively by the Politburo.²⁹ Rokossovsky deployed overwhelming firepower, sending thousands of troops (both army regulars and soldiers from the Internal Security Corps) and hundreds of tanks to crush the uprising.³⁰ As air force jets swooped low over the city, tanks, infantry trucks and armoured vehicles poured into Pozna.³¹ At times, the events seemed distinctly surreal. One British businessman, for example, ‘described . . . his astonishment at seeing two tanks’, one of which had joined the rebels, ‘firing at each other with spectators lined up along the pavement rather as though they were at Wimbledon watching a tennis match’.32 And some of the young men who were firing on the Security Office ‘seemed to be very pleased with themselves, even posing for photographs while aiming at their targets’.³³ The situation was, though, deadly serious. While some soldiers used tear gas to disperse the protesters, others fired directly into the crowds. One eyewitness saw five people lying dead in Stalin Square and ‘another one collapsing under machine-gun shots a few yards away from me’.³⁴ Others were crushed to death. In one gruesome incident an eighteen-year-old university student was run through with a bayonet as he attempted to surrender. Even when troops fired into the air the effects could be fatal, as ‘children who had climbed trees to escape tanks, or for a better view, fell dead like sparrows’. Throughout the afternoon makeshift ambulances – little more than trucks daubed with red crosses – shuttled back and forth, ferrying the dead and the injured.³⁵

As the scale of the military assault became clear, protesters desperately sought out Western observers, shouting out in French and German, ‘This is our revolution! Tell people abroad about it. The Soviets must go . . .’³⁶ From the start, the strikers had greeted foreign visitors with enthusiastic displays of friendliness. When a car with a foreign licence plate was stopped on University Bridge, near to Stalin Square, for example, the driver was hoisted into the air as the crowd shouted, ‘Long live!’³⁷ Similarly a British trade delegate recounted that when the strikers saw his car was flying the Union Jack they cheered and clapped. On arriving at his hotel in the early afternoon, he was approached by several workers, who urged him to ‘please tell people in your country what is happening here. We want bread, we cannot live any longer under these conditions . . . This tears the mask off the Party which is supposed to be our friend . . .’³⁸ As one revolutionary put it, ‘Tell the men in the West that Poland wants to be free. The dead bones of June 28 will rest one day in a shrine of marble, and millions will remove their hats before them.’³⁹

Armed only with Molotov cocktails, grenades and small arms, the insurgents were outgunned. Although fierce fighting continued in and around the Security Office, the resistance elsewhere had petered out by 4 p.m.40 The sound of gunfire and the occasional explosion punctuated the night, but by daybreak order had been restored.⁴¹ The toll, though, was a heavy one: seventy-three killed, including sixty-four civilians, and four hundred wounded.⁴² More than six hundred people were rounded up, and many of them subjected to brutal treatment. One eighteen-year-old girl had seen her own father, an electrician, cut down by gunfire. Arrested for participating in the uprising, she was held in the notorious Kochanowski Street jail, and later recalled how one of her cellmates was taken away for interrogation, only to return with all the teeth in her upper jaw removed. The corridors of the jail echoed with the sound of ‘inhuman screams and howling’, akin to that of ‘slaughtered animals’.⁴³

The Pozna uprising was triggered by deep-rooted economic discontent. A BBC correspondent, travelling around Poland just a few weeks earlier, had reported that ‘complaints about the low standards of living were bitter and universal’.⁴⁴ But while life was tough across the nation, the 380,000 residents of Pozna had particular reason to feel aggrieved. The level of per capita investment, at 368 złotys, was dramatically lower than elsewhere (the figure was 572 in Łód and 1,147 in Kraków), and Pozna province had been at the forefront of efforts to collectivise agriculture and establish industrial co-operatives. Indeed, Poznaians, with their proud tradition of efficiency, appear to have been particularly outraged by the waste, chaos and incompetence that characterised Stalinist economic planning. By 1956 the monthly salary of an industrial worker in Pozna was significantly lower than the national average, the price of everyday necessities (such as bread, fruit and sausages) was high, and medicines cost so much that, it was said, hardly anybody in Pozna could afford to buy them.⁴⁵ The city also faced a chronic housing shortage, which caused particular hardships for younger workers who were forced to live with their parents in overcrowded and dilapidated apartments.46

These difficulties were compounded by detrimental changes to bonuses, production targets and working conditions that affected workers in many of Pozna’s industrial enterprises during the early months of 1956. At the Metallurgical Works, for instance, productivity bonuses were abolished, tram workers were denied the cold weather payments that their counterparts in other cities received as a matter of course, and workers at the Rolling Stock Company had their coal allowances slashed. Meanwhile, at the giant ZISPO works – which produced high-quality ship engines, locomotives and train carriages as well as machine tools and other metal products – the fifteen-thousand-strong workforce faced the abolition of bonuses, the raising of productivity targets, and cramped, unsafe and often foul-smelling working conditions. All this on top of revelations that, over a period of several years, more than five thousand of the plant’s employees had been cheated out of eleven million złotys in overpaid taxes (the equivalent of two months’ wages, annually, for each worker affected).⁴⁷ It was little wonder that ZISPO’s workforce was so belligerent.

Efforts to mitigate the situation had failed. More than four thousand petitions were submitted to the ZISPO management, and negotiations took place with Communist Party officials, government representatives and factory managers. All proved fruitless. As discontent smouldered, workers engaged in silent protests, work stoppages and mass rallies. Discussions were also held with workers in other factories to co-ordinate action. Attention naturally focused on the International Trade Fair, scheduled to open on 17 June: as one ZISPO worker put it, ‘Let the foreigners see that there is poverty in Poland, and not enough to eat.’⁴⁸

The ongoing effects of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ were also at work. In the months prior to the uprising the Polish press had reported extensively on the criticisms aimed at the government by writers and intellectuals; mass meetings, held in towns and villages all over Poland, had seen unprecedented attacks on the Communist Party, and letters of complaint had flooded into newspapers and local Party offices.49 In this more liberal climate, Pozna’s workers expressed their own grievances publicly.⁵⁰ At an open meeting at the ZISPO plant to discuss the Twentieth Party Congress, the writer Piotr Guzy had urged the workers to defend their interests ‘with greater courage’ and ‘without fear’; secret police reports provided plenty of evidence of the workers’ newfound willingness to speak out.⁵¹ In fact, the Pozna uprising offered a stark illustration of the difficulties involved in de-Stalinisation. The more open, critical atmosphere that emerged in the wake of the Twentieth Party Congress raised expectations and emboldened dissent. It was an explosive mix that proved difficult to contain. As the Manchester Guardian put it:

freedom in small doses is a tricky prescription. Between consent freely given and the consent of the prison cell lies a no man’s land in which the Polish Government has just struck a mine . . . we now see how hard it is for communism to slip out of the Stalinist mould, even though its leaders may wish it. By now, the outer air is a killer.⁵²

On 27 June a ZISPO delegation had returned from Warsaw, following talks with the minister of metal industry. They believed that they had won important concessions, including the reimbursement of the overpaid taxes, improvements to work norms and the reinstatement of some bonuses. But at mass meetings held across the plant, many workers were sceptical. Later that day, when the minister himself spoke to the workers of the railway carriage factory, the mood worsened. Using convoluted language, the minister appeared to row back from the earlier agreement, prompting boos and shouts of ‘lies, down with him . . .’ When he ended his speech, declaring ‘things are not so bad – just get back to work!’ a strike was a certainty.53

The violent suppression of the Pozna demonstrations was met with predictable howls of outrage in the West. The British government (itself by no means averse to using lethal force when it came to keeping colonial subjects in check) was distressed at the ‘considerable loss of life’, while in Washington the State Department declared that it was ‘profoundly shocked by the shooting’ and offered its sympathy to the families of those who had been killed. Arguing that the demonstrators had been ‘merely expressing their . . . grievances’, the Americans called for ‘the peoples of Eastern Europe’, including the Poles, to be given the ‘right to choose the form of government under which they live’.⁵⁴ Given that many of those who took to the streets – and lost their lives – were ordinary workers, trade union leaders were understandably quick to join the chorus of criticism. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, an anti-Communist labour organisation that had been founded in 1949, and which represented tens of millions of workers (including those affiliated with Britain’s TUC and America’s AFL-CIO), ‘saluted the fighting spirit of the Polish workers, their unflinching courage, and their burning love for freedom’. It also paid ‘homage to the true heroes of labour who fell dead or wounded when the communist masters ordered the police and the army to fire on the workers’.⁵⁵

There was condemnation from the press, too, with the New York Times declaring that ‘the first barrage of Communist bullets stripped off the mask from those who claim that the Communists represent and rule for the working class. It was the proletarians of Pozna who took to the streets to voice their demands and it was the proletarians whose lives were taken . . .’ The brutal response of the authorities had demonstrated the ‘moral and political bankruptcy of Polish communism . . .’⁵⁶ Writing in the French daily Franc Tireur, meanwhile, Charles Ronsac predicted that Poland’s Communist leaders would ‘not be able to hide a genuine outburst of working class feeling . . .’57 That, though, did not stop them from trying.

On the evening of 29 June, as troops continued to mop up pockets of resistance, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz broadcast from a Pozna radio station. Explaining that he was in ‘great pain’ because this ‘beautiful city, known for its diligence, patriotism, and love of order’ had witnessed ‘murderous . . . and bloody riots’, the forty-five-year-old former Auschwitz inmate blamed ‘provocateurs’ and ‘imperialistic agents’ for the trouble. He also praised the ‘heroic soldiers, militiamen, and members of the security forces’ for their bravery, and claimed that they had ‘avoided using weapons until the last moment when they were shot at by the aggressors’. The Polish leader also issued a chilling threat to anyone contemplating further resistance: ‘Every provocateur or maniac who will dare raise his hand against the people’s rule may be sure that in the interest of the working class . . . in the interest of our Fatherland, the authorities will chop off his hand.’⁵⁸

Claims about foreign imperialists working in concert with domestic reactionaries were repeated across the Polish press. The Communist youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych (‘Flag of Our Youth’), for instance, claimed that Pozna had been ‘intentionally chosen by the provocateurs’ who wanted to ‘take advantage of the presence of numerous foreigners’ in order to undermine confidence in the Party and to discredit the nation before the eyes of the world.⁵⁹

There was, in fact, no evidence at all that ‘nests of agents’ had organised the uprising. In fact, Party members supported the strike in large numbers, and even provided some of its leaders. Although Moscow remained keen on the line that ‘subversive imperialist activity’ was behind the trouble, in Poland such claims were not taken seriously (except, perhaps, by a few officials).⁶⁰ Even as Polish politicians and journalists pointed the finger of blame at ‘bandits’ and reactionaries, they also acknowledged that the country’s economic situation was ‘not easy’ and that there were ‘shortcomings in the life of the workers’.61 A report on the riots, published in Trybuna Ludu on 30 June, for example, conceded that the ‘economic demands of workers were to a large extent justified, and their grievances were understandable’.⁶² In his 29 June radio broadcast, Cyrankiewicz had admitted that workers in many of Pozna’s factories had legitimate grievances and that mistakes would have to be ‘immediately corrected’. Now the government moved to address the workers’ concerns. On 10 July, it announced that some 6.5 million złotys in taxes were to be repaid to the ZISPO employees. Meanwhile various officials, at both national and local level, were dismissed from their posts.⁶³

Although the United States had no involvement in the Pozna uprising, it did attempt to exploit it. Washington’s official policy was to encourage ‘determined resistance to dominant Soviet influence over the satellites in Eastern Europe and to seek the eventual elimination of that influence’ by developing ‘feasible political, economic, propaganda and covert measures’ to ‘create and exploit troublesome problems for the USSR, complicate control in the satellites, and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet bloc’.⁶⁴ When news of the riots broke on the evening of 28 June, it generated considerable excitement. Just before six o’clock John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, spoke on the telephone with his brother Allen, the CIA director. As the latest reports from the ticker were read out to him, Foster responded, ‘When they begin to crack they can crack fast. We have to keep the pressure on.’⁶⁵ Dulles was keen to generate maximum leverage from the uprising, believing that it presented the West with an ‘excellent opportunity’ to exert ‘psychological pressure on [the] Soviet orbit’.⁶⁶ In an attempt to embarrass the Polish and Soviet leadership, the American government made an offer, via the International Red Cross, of ‘appropriate quantities of wheat, flour, and other foods’ to help ‘relieve the critical situation in the Pozna area’ where recent disorders had apparently been ‘marked with demands by the population for bread’. It was rejected out of hand.67 Radio Free Europe – the US-funded broadcaster – also sought to exploit the uprising, not just in Poland (where listeners were told that Pozna had illustrated the ‘bankruptcy of Communist rule’) but throughout Eastern Europe.⁶⁸ Broadcasts to Hungary, for example, pointed out that workers there had ‘similar reasons for dissatisfaction and despair’, claimed that a ‘Pozna revolt’ was stirring in Hungarian intellectual life, and drew parallels with what they called ‘Hungary’s Pozna’, when on 25 June 1919 workers in the nation’s capital had risen up against the short-lived Communist regime of Béla Kun.⁶⁹ In truth, these efforts had little practical effect, other than to encourage the regime’s opponents to believe that, in the event of a serious challenge to Communist rule, meaningful support from the West might be forthcoming.

The Pozna uprising sparked a wave of dissent across Poland.⁷⁰ Flyers and graffiti – pledging solidarity with the workers of Pozna, expressing anti-Russian sentiment and demanding greater political and economic freedoms – appeared in towns and cities all over the country, while anonymous letters and manifestos were sent to newspaper editors, radio stations and local Communist Party offices. Dissent was also voiced at several of the rallies and mass meetings that, ironically, the authorities had themselves encouraged in order to denounce the ‘provocateurs’. Meanwhile, workers in factories and farms across Poland demanded pay rises or reductions in the price of goods, calculating that the authorities would be likely to offer concessions rather than risk further disorder. There were increasingly bullish demands for more radical reforms and a growing clamour for the return to power of Władysław Gomułka – the ‘national’ face of Polish Communism, who had been expelled from the Party in 1948 for challenging Stalinist orthodoxy.⁷¹

The shockwaves from Pozna were also felt some four hundred miles south, in Hungary. In the immediate aftermath of the revolt, the Hungarian interior minister had placed both the police and the ÁVH (State Protection Agency) on high alert. In Csepel, an industrial suburb south of Budapest, for example, police patrols were doubled while in Gyr, in the north-west of the country, leave was cancelled for guards at the power station, gasworks and other key facilities, arms were distributed and reinforcements were deployed.72 Unnerved by growing evidence of unrest that spring, Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi was determined to hold the line. On 30 June, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party denounced the ‘demagogic’ and slanderous attacks that had recently been made on the Party by ‘enemies of the working people’. With one eye firmly on the recent disturbances in Poland, it further declared that the ‘Pozna provocation is a warning to every Hungarian worker and every honest patriot firmly to oppose attempts at troublemaking and to help the unfettered development of those forces which . . . lead our People’s Democracy to new successes’.⁷³ It was a desperate attempt to steady the ship.

CAPTION:

Crowds gather in the courtyard of the Officers’ Club in Budapest, 27 June 1956, where loudspeakers have been rigged up to broadcast the Petfi Circle’s debate on press freedom.

(© Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos)