444 POLSKA LUDOWA
The crisis of December 1970 was provoked by the sheer clumsiness of a
regime which was losing all contact with reality. Advised that a steep rise in
food prices was unavoidable in view of continuing agricultural failures, the
Government decided to introduce increases of up to 20 per cent at a stroke, and,
of all times, in Christmas week. Having thus invited the strikes and demonstra-
tions which ensued, the government panicked, and ordered the militia and the
army to restore order with all means at their disposal. It is interesting to note
that the most determined strikes occurred not among the poorest areas which
would have felt the attack on their Christmas turkey most acutely, but in one of
the most highly paid and highly trained sectors of the work-force, in the Baltic
shipyards of Szczecin, Gdynia, and Gdansk. Clearly, the root of the trouble lay
much deeper than in the immediate problem of food prices; and feelings ran
high. In Gdynia, a train bringing workers to the shipyards, where a lock-out had
been proclaimed, was ambushed, and fired on by armed militiamen. The work-
ers responded with fury. Shops were looted. Party headquarters were besieged.
Militiamen were lynched in the street. A Militia Training Centre was reported
burned. Demonstrators were crushed by armoured vehicles. Army recruits,
when ordered to fire, refused orders. In the end, rumours of hundreds killed
were reduced to a total of 45. But, Gomulka was unable to defend himself.
Having retired to a Party Clinic to be treated for nervous exhaustion, he rushed
uninvited into the Political Bureau which was just about to depose him. His
protests fell on deaf ears. On 20 December, the 7th Plenum of the Central
Committee accepted Gomulka's resignation and confirmed the elevation of
Edward Gierek.^41
The terminal crisis of Gomulka's rule coincided with a great success in the
realm of foreign policy. Gomulka had always known that Poland's very real
fears of German revan-chism perpetuated the country's humiliating dependence
on the Soviet Union, and that the restoration of good relations with Western
Germany would strengthen the People's Republic in the economic as well as in
the purely political sphere. For many years, the intransigence of the USSR on the
one side, and the influence of the Bund der Vertrieben (League of Expellees) with
the Adenauer government on the other, had prevented any possibility of fruitful
contacts between Warsaw and Bonn. But the emergence in the mid-1960s both
of Soviet 'Detente' and of the German Ostpolitik began to foster a more
favourable environment. The first moves were made by religious leaders. Early
in 1965, the German Evangelical Church published an unsolicited
Memorandum... on the relations of the German people with their neighbours
in the east; and in May of that year a Protestant delegation from Germany,
headed by Klaus von Bismarck, the Head of West German Radio, arrived in
Warsaw for an exchange of views. To many people's surprise, a positive
response was forthcoming from the Hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church
in Poland, whose 'Letter of the Polish Bishops' to their German counterparts
dated 18 November 1965 contained a historic appeal to end the hereditary hos-
tility of the two nations. A long rambling catalogue of past disasters, from the