Poland: The View from Headquarters

From their balconies and windows high in Warsaw's party headquarters, top-rank Communist officials stared grimly down on Jerusalem Avenue. There, in the March slush, a mob of 10,000 students from Warsaw's two largest universities converged on the grey building, howling slogans, pelting police with bricks and smashing windows with rock-centered snowballs. Across Poland last week, the regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka gazed in alarm upon similar scenes in what became the country's most menacing riots in eleven years.

The protests were originally ignited by the government's closing of Dziady, an anti-Czarist drama by Adam Mickiewicz (TIME, March 8), but they soon...

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