‘We just wanted to be with them …’ The Workers’ Defence Committee and the Committee for Social Self-Defence ‘KOR’ (1976-1981)

The shooting of workers in the coastal cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, Elbląg and Szczecin in December 1970 led to political changes in the upper echelons of the Communist government. Władysław Gomułka left under a cloud and was replaced by the energetic, dynamic Edward Gierek. Many Poles welcomed this change with hope, and the new Party leader, with some experience of the wider world, a knowledge of French and a relatively easy-going manner, soon gained the confidence of many citizens.

His simple, direct, unstudied way of communicating was also appreciated. His official visits to numerous factories around the country were part of a propaganda campaign aimed at creating an image of a leader known for ‘wise and careful husbandry’. In a famous speech to Gdańsk shipyard workers in January 1971 he outlined his basic plans: ‘… to develop our country, to strengthen socialism, to improve the living conditions of working people.’

In the 1970s the Party raised hope among the citizens that their needs as consumers might come to be satisfied – all of course within the limits of a socialist state. The opening towards the West - evidenced in easier access to passports and increased freedom to travel, as well as the presence of Western European films in the cinemas and on television, and the famous colourful advertisements for Coca-cola – all this was a propagandist safety valve.

The inhabitants of the PRL were to attend to their individual prosperity rather than to engage in politics or demand an extension of civil liberties. The farthest reach of their aspirations had to be a mini-Fiat, or a holiday in Bulgaria or maybe a new set of furniture. The slogan ‘May Poland grow ever stronger and the people ever more prosperous,’ from a speech made by Edward Gierek at the IX Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee on the 4th of September 1971 became the economic mantra of real socialism.

Towards the end of the 1960s Poland’s per capita gross national product was 50 per cent lower than that of Eastern Germany. The country was backward and poor. But as a result of certain economic decisions - increasing wages for the lowest earners, freezing prices for several years, abolishing obligatory supply quotas from farmers while raising the price at which the state bought meat from them – Polish standards of living improved significantly. According to official statistics, wages rose by over 50 per cent in the years 1970-1975.

The increased consumption of the years 1971-1974 was, however, made possible only thanks to loans from Western European banks. From an economic point of view the scale of the borrowing was frightening, and living on credit in this way had to end badly; the first sign of the impending disaster was the dramatic increase in the price of basic foods that was announced in 1976.

The day after the price hikes were announced workers’ protests and strikes took place in several cities in Poland, including Gdańsk, Szczecin, Elbląg and Łódź. The number of strikers is estimated today at about 80 thousand. The strongest protests took place in Radom, Ursus and Płock – towns with large factories.

During the first phase of the protest in Radom, begun by employees of the Predom-Łucznik munitions factory, a crowd of five thousand people took to the streets. The workers, joined by protesters from other, smaller factories, made for the building of the Voivodship Party Committee, demanding cancellation of the price rises and the opportunity to negotiate with the local authorities.

By the afternoon the protest had swollen to about 25 thousand participants. The crowd grew impatient, suspecting the authorities of stalling. The protesters rejected an offer of ‘public consultations’ made by the authorities, and again demanded that the price rises be cancelled. The slogans chanted grew bolder; Party cards were burned; and when the demonstrators discovered that the Party officials had secretly left the building, they started demolishing it and finally set it on fire. The unrest reached boiling point.

Barricades were erected in the streets, cars were burned, stones were thrown at the voivodship police headquarters. The authorities brought in reinforcements in the form of the ZOMO, riot police from Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin and Kielce. A regular battle between government forces and protesting workers ensued.

The authorities, although they had expected some response to the price rises, did not foresee the scale and form of these June protests. Party leaders, terrified by the vision of anti-government and anti-Party protests spreading to the whole country, backed away from the ‘price manoeuvre’, as it was called in official propaganda, causing frustration and a sense of humiliation in the Party.

In a conversation with Radom Voivodship Party Secretary Janusz Prokopiak, Edward Gierek shouted: ‘You allow such a brawl and you expect us to treat it leniently? These people are nothing but hooligans! I’ll remember what they’ve done!’ And, unhappily, the First Secretary was to keep his word on this.

Between December 1970 and June 1976 initiatives opposing diktats by the Communist Party tended to emerge in, and remain limited to, specific groups or milieus. Despite this, the period can be seen as laboratory in which forms of social cooperation were developed. Among the most important dissident initiatives of the years 1970-1976 the so-called ‘Letter of 59’ must be mentioned, demanding the abolition of censorship, the right for workers to organise in independent trade unions, autonomy for institutions of higher education, free parliamentary elections, and independence of the judiciary.

It was followed by the ‘Letter of 101,’ which opposed planned changes to the Polish constitution: clauses guaranteeing the ‘leading role of the Party’ and making civil rights and liberties contingent upon the fulfilment of civic obligations. An amendment that was to make a lasting alliance with the Soviet Union part of the Constitution also provoked dissent. At the same time, the final act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (known as the Helsinki Accords), signed in Helsinki on the 1st of August 1975, provided the basis for cooperation between human rights groups within Europe. The so-called ‘Basket III’ contained provisions regarding cooperation among signatory states in matters of human rights and fundamental liberties. Dissident groups in Poland demanded that these provisions of the Helsinki Accords be respected.

One of the chief aims of KOR was to gather information about the persecution suffered by the workers. Jacek Kuroń’s private phone number was known to virtually every dissident in Poland. All information was recorded in a KOR ‘log’, and violations of human rights were being publicised through contact with western journalists as well as in the underground ‘KOR Bulletins’.

The editorial board of the Bulletins consisted of Jacek Kuroń, Jan Józef Lipski, Antoni Macierewicz, Piotr Naimski and Wojciech Ziembiński. The texts, typed in up ten copies at a time using carbon paper, contained information about arrests, beatings, interrogation methods and verdicts, as well as about the help offered to the persecuted. The dry, matter-of-fact language of the ‘Bulletins’ was modelled on that of the ‘Chronicle of Current Events’ published by Russian dissidents.

Western media soon learned of the activities of KOR. Adam Michnik, who was abroad until May 1977, kept European intellectual circles informed of the Committee’s activities, and Polish political emigrés in the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the USA, Germany, Belgium and Austria also became involved. On the initiative of the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, the ‘Appeal in Support of Polish Workers’ was proclaimed, which provided an institutional framework for funds to be collected to support KOR and the growing independent publishing movement. Panel discussions and seminars were organised.

On the 9th of December 1976 in London, Leszek Kołakowski, Włodzimierz Brus and Adam Michnik held a press conference to present KOR to the international media. Contacts with dissidents from other Eastern bloc countries were also crucial, in particular with the signatories of the Czecho-Slovak Charter 77. This cooperation inspired what became one of Václav Havel’s best-known political essays, ‘The Power of the Powerless.’

The Workers’ Defence Committee was never an ideologically uniform group. On the contrary, it was only the shared goals that enabled cooperation among people who were divided by deep ideological and political differences. Those differences are can be seen in the debates and conflicts that occurred within KOR. One example is the controversy concerning Jacek Kuroń’s views on the ‘finlandisation’ of Poland. Kuroń envisaged Poland gaining a status similar to that of Finland – a parliamentary democracy with limited sovereignty, respecting the international interests of the USSR – as a step on the way to independence.

The group around Antoni Macierewicz opposed such ideas, as well as visions of a compromise with the reformers in the Communist Party, as proposed by Adam Michnik in an article submitted for publication in ‘Głos’, one of the first underground magazines. As a result of the latter controversy, some members of the ‘Głos’ editorial board left and established the magazine ‘Krytyka’.

KOR members were subjected to wearying harassment: arrest and detention for 48-hour periods, searches, anonymous letters, dead phone calls, often in the middle of the night, and ‘spontaneous visits’ from attackers claiming to be ‘worker activists’. Despite such treatment, they continued to pursue the aims described in their founding declaration: to bring help to workers persecuted after the June events.

At the same time, the question of future forms of activity and initiatives, such as the development of independent publishing, was already on the horizon. The immediate and most important goal of the Workers’ Defence Committee was, however, achieved when all the arrested workers were released under an amnesty declared on the 22nd of July 1977.

In an attempt to curtail opposition, in May 1977 the police arrested several KOR activists. KOR continued its work. A hunger strike was organised in St Martin’s Church in Warsaw from the 24th to the 31st of May 1977 in solidarity with the arrested activists and the workers who still remained in prison.

Artists and writers protested; official petitions were directed to the parliament and the cabinet. The May arrests were noticed abroad, with US President Jimmy Carter speaking in Congress of the need to maintain respect for human rights within Poland. Russian dissidents issued an appeal. Protests came from various quarters in France, Italy, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands. Under pressure, the Polish government declared an amnesty, under which the last of the Radom workers still in prison, as well as the KOR activists, were released.

One of the greatest achievements of Polish dissidents was the creation of an independent publishing movement. It offered a way of circumventing the omnipresent censorship; providing access to information and freely-expressed opinion; and restoring to the public domain the work of many forbidden writers.

All of this was made possible by the efforts of underground publishers, editors, translators, printers, book folders, bookbinders, and distributors. Publications included independent magazines (‘Biuletyn Informacyjny’, ‘Robotnik’, ‘Głos’, ‘Krytyka’, ‘Zapis’, ‘Puls’, ‘Spotkania’) as well as books, for most of which the underground edition was the only form in which they were available. The largest of the publishers was the Independent Publishing Office, NOW-a (Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza), run by Mirosław Chojecki.

November 1977 saw the launch of the so-called ‘Flying University’ in Warsaw – a series of independent lectures and seminars on topics banned by state censorship. The activities were coordinated by Andrzej Celiński. The lecturers included both well-known academics as well as those who were making their debut; among them were Władysław Bartoszewski, Tomasz Burek, Bohdan Cywiński, Jerzy Jedlicki, Adam Michnik, Jan Strzelecki. The sessions were often interrupted by groups of young Party activists, who beat the participants. Shortly after the Flying University had started, the Society for Academic Courses (Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych, TKN) came into being on the 22nd of January 1978.

This second self-education initiative was also created by a mix of well-established intellectuals and young academics linked to dissident groups. The founding declaration of TKN was signed by several dozen people, including a number of university and Polish Academy of Science professors. Bronisław Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki were both members of its academic board. According to estimates made by Jan Józef Lipski, in total about a thousand participants attended the sessions. The Security Service considered the Society for Academic Courses to be a particularly dangerous phenomenon, being outside, as it was, of the control of the government and Party apparatus.

Of all the actions that were made possible by the activities of CSS ‘KOR’, the one with the most far-reaching results was the establishment of Free Trade Unions. The first of these were the Free Trade Unions of Upper Silesia, started by Kazimierz Świtoń. Soon afterwards, on the 29th of April 1978, the Founding Committee for Free Trade Unions for the Coast was formed by Andrzej Gwiazda, Krzysztof Wyszkowski and Antoni Sokołowski.

The aim of the Free Trade Unions was to defend the rights of workers and citizens, and their activities would later lead to the strikes of the summer of 1980, which ultimately resulted in to the formation of ‘Solidarity’. Free Trade Union activists included Bogdan Borusewicz, Lech Kaczyński, Bogdan Lis, Alina Pieńkowska, Anna Walentynowicz and Lech Wałęsa.

The strike in the Gdańsk Shipyard started on the 14th of August 1980 and was called by the Free Trade Unions of the Coast. One of the leaders of the protest was KOR member Bogdan Borusewicz. The limited action soon developed into a sympathy strike or - as it is known in Polish - a solidarity strike, as workers from other enterprises joined the shipyard workers of Gdańsk. The presidium of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee, led by Lech Wałęsa, included other Free Trade Unions members: Bogdan Lis, Anna Walentynowicz, Joanna Duda-Gwiazda and Andrzej Gwiazda.

Initial quite modest claims finally grew into the famous list of ‘21 demands’, the key first two of which stipulated the ‘acceptance of free trade unions independent of the Communist Party and of employers’ and ‘a guarantee of the right to strike without danger for strikers and their supporters’. Clearly, members of CSS ‘KOR’ belonged to the latter group. On the 31st of August 1980 the Gdańsk Agreement (also known as the August Agreement) was signed in the ‘BHP’ room of the Gdańsk shipyard.

Most of the members and supporters of the Committee for Social Self-Defence ‘KOR’ became actively involved in Solidarity. They became either members of the Union or of its advisory bodies. The future of the Committee itself was not clear, especially in the light of the ideological divisions within it. Gradually, Solidarity took over all the functions of the Committee. In a residual form, CSS ‘KOR’ lasted until the 1st National Congress of Solidarity.

On the 28th of September 1981 one of the oldest members of CSS ‘KOR’, Edward Lipiński, read out a statement in which the Committee announced the end of its operations. This, and the speech with which he followed it, was received by the delegates with considerable applause. Yet a resolution that was proposed by Andrzej Sobieraj, the delegate for Radom, acknowledging the contribution of CSS ‘KOR’ to the establishment of ‘Solidarity’, met with unexpected resistance. The Congress finally adopted it only on the last day.

From a resolution of the First National Congress of Delegates of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union ‘Solidarity’:
‘The Workers’ Defence Committee, established following the June 1976 events, brought help to persecuted workers and their families. It was the first organised form of democratic opposition which came into being after 1976.

It was an expression of convictions shared by the intelligentsia and the workers alike. KOR members and supporters were frequently persecuted, imprisoned and harassed for their activities. The First Congress of Delegates expresses its thanks to the members and supporters of the Workers’ Defence Committee, which has made valuable contributions to the defence of workers’ interests and to the common national cause.’