(3 of 3)
The workers had made their point: the Poznan revolt now had a celebrity to rank with the Berlin rising of June 1953 (where only a few lost their lives) and the 1953 rioting in the Arctic Circle labor camp at Vorkuta. The revolt was one more signal of the repressed feelings of millions of hungry people in the satellite states. Visitors who left next day by car were conducted for an hour and a half through a heavy cordon of troops and tanks drawn up around Poznan. Russian units several hundred miles away had been alerted for action in case the revolt spread. Rumblings of discontent were being heard from Stettin and the neighboring Baltic states.
Polish Communists, already shaken by ideological and leadership changes in the party, had a hard time coping with the obvious message of the Poznan workers. Premier Cyrankiewicz acknowledged the justice of their grievances ("To a large extent caused by errors and the improper application of regulations in force"). The decision had "already" been taken before the strike, he said, to give the locomotive workers a 15% pay raise. He was at work on "a plan of action" for the gradual "raising of the standard of living of the working masses."
This kind of talk was necessary to disperse the crowds; but plainly the regime was determined to isolate those whom they regarded as ringleaders and deal unmercifully with them. Once the fair closed and the foreign visitors departed, a dark night would settle down on Poznan.
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing of the anxious days before the French Revolution, said: "The evils which are endured with patience so long as they are inevitable seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from them." It was an observation that exactly fitted the circumstances of Poznan, Vorkuta and East Berlin.
The same situation, tragic for its victims, would undoubtedly rise again to plague the Kremlin's leaders, who, feeling the need to relax the oppression, hope to escape the vengeance.