Dissidents and Police: The Polish March 1968 and a Tale of Two Generations

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation ’68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective).

March 1968 in Poland witnessed two different revolutions. The first one occurred at the universities. The students—the generation of twenty-year-olds—revolted against an oppressive, authoritarian state and demanded freedom of speech. But there was also a second, parallel revolution. It exploded with the anti-Jewish purge carried out by low- and mid-level party officials in their forties. These apparatchiks, born around 1930, denounced the student revolt as a “Zionist plot” and pushed for a nationalist version of the communist system. This article explores why those two generations clashed in 1968 and what was the outcome of that struggle, both in political and social terms.