Poland 1970: 55 years since workers fought back

Workers' Liberty

Author: Gerry Bates

16 December, 2025 

Today marks 55 years to the day that Polish workers were on strike in revolt against their so-called 'socialist' authorities. By the 19th of December 1970, 44 workers on the Baltic coast had been murdered by the Polish state and over 1000 people were wounded.

Two years earlier in 1968, the same government had, at the behest of Russian imperialism, sent Polish troops to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They had also engaged in a violent crackdown on student protests across Poland and forced the emigration of 13,000 Polish jews. Both the crackdown and the forced emigration was conducted under the guise of ‘anti-zionism’.

In mid-December 1970 the Stalinist government under Wladyslaw Gomulka had announced huge hikes in basic foods. On the 14th of December protests against the measures erupted in cities on the Baltic Coast, with workers walking out of multiple workplaces.

In Gdansk, protestors and strikers, predominantly from the Lenin Shipyard marched to the provincial Headquarters for the ruling PZPR Party. The authorities refused to enter negotiations and the highest-level bureaucrats were away in Warsaw.

The police gathered to demand the workers to return to work. The protestors seized the police loudspeaker and announced a further rally in front of the building and a General Strike from the following day.

The police and security forces roamed the city rounding up workers and beating them.

The following day the strikers set fire to the PZPR HQ in Gdansk. The authorities killed 6 people. Hundreds more were wounded. The government appealed for workers to go back to work. Despite this, soldiers opened fire on trains carrying workers to the shipyard in Gdynia, killing 11. Elsewhere in town, soldiers and police shot dead a further 7 protesters.

Over the next 3 days the protests, strikes and workplace occupations spread across Poland. Gomulka ordered 10k’s of solders and heavy tanks to be deployed to violently crush the resistance and at least 44 people were killed with over 1000 injured.

This fueled the indigation among the population and the growing unrest and spreading strikes and workplace occupations forced the government to reverse the price rises. Even the Russian imperialist overlords had to accept that this was the only way to prevent a potential revolution and acquiesced to Warsaw’s capitulation.

Poland would come much closer to that 10 years later when mass strikes resulted in the Gdansk Agreement, where the communist authorities were forced into accepting independent trade unions among other demands, including a demand to build a monument outside the Shipyard in Gdansk, in commemoration of the workers killed in 1970. This remains the first and only monument to Stalinist oppression to be erected by the government that perpetrated it.