- POLSKA LUDOWA
impasse. In order to pay its steeply rising foreign debt, whose interest alone con-
sumed over half of export income, every available item, including the food prod-
ucts and consumer goods which were originally destined to reward the Polish
workers, had to be sold abroad. Thus, after thirty years of building socialism,
the country still faced emergency austerity measures. Meat shortages and power
cuts were daily facts of life. Far from deferring the need for reform, the Party's
policies made reform an urgent necessity. Yet here lay the horns of an acute
dilemma. If the Party admitted its mistakes, and agreed to make concessions to
popular demands, it risked losing control of the political situation altogether.
For the most important development of the Gierek era had been the emergence
of a united political opposition.
The opposition movement first coalesced in 1975 in face of the impending
constitutional amendments, and made its presence felt in the form of several
open protests - the Letter of the Eleven, the Letter of the Fifty-Nine, and the
Appeal of the Thirteen. Groups dedicated to independence and the defence of
human rights appeared, such as RUCH and ROPCiO. In 1976, the demarche of
the much respected Znak Group brought the Catholic intelligentsia into the
fray, whilst brutal police action during the June riots inspired the formation of
a Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). Very soon, each of these separate
groups, and numerous spontaneous imitators, were circulating a rush of unau-
thorized, illegal periodicals headed by Zapis (Record) and Opinia (Opinion),
and by KOR's Komunikaty (Communiques). After that, some twenty titles were
published regularly, with a nominal imprint of 40,000 copies, each one passed
from hand to hand among scores of individuals. A private Society for Academic
Courses (TKN) revived the traditions of the nineteenth-century Flying
University, holding secret komplety or 'study classes' in each of the major cities.
Despite police surveillance and harassment, and in May 1977 the murder in
Cracow of a student activist, Stanislaw Pyjas, the opposition leaders extended
their activities at home and kept in contact with sympathizers abroad. In one
sense, they could be seen as a Polish variant of the wider movement for Human
Rights which had sprung up in several countries of the Soviet bloc in conse-
quence of the Helsinki Agreement. Like their counterparts in the USSR, or the
Czechoslovak Charter 77 Group with whom they held clandestine meetings on
the frontier, they cannot fairly be described as 'dissidents'. They took their stand
on the letter of the Constitution, and demanded only that the State and Party
authorities honour their commitments in an open and legal manner. On the
other hand, they displayed several features that were specifically Polish. In their
pronouncements on domestic affairs, they claimed to have bridged the gulf
which had normally separated the radical intelligentsia both from the Catholic
societies and from the workers. In their statements on foreign affairs, they
expressed the desire to move Poland in the direction of 'benevolent neutrality',
akin to the position of Finland. From the viewpoint of the Western journalists
who reported these matters, it all seemed very encouraging. It looked as though
Poland was moving slowly but steadily along the road to 'liberalization'. All