Im Schatten Danzigs?
In the Shadow of Gdańsk?

Szczecin and the Political Culture of Poland between 1970 and 2015

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the social protest movement against the socialist regime in the Baltic port cities of Szczecin and Gdańsk, in particular between 1970 and 1981. It intends to discuss the impact of these strikes on the formation of a regional and national political culture, which is widely connected to the concept of civil society, in a longer perspective. While Szczecin, after the bloody clashes with the regime’s law enforcement in mid-December 1970, saw a longer-lasting period of strikes, which led to an intervention by First Secretary Edward Gierek, these protests remained limited to the community of workers and did not yet challenge the rule of the Polish United Workers’ Party. They contributed, however, to the formation of a local Polish identity from below. However, in Gdańsk and, in a broader perspective, in the entire Polish Tricity (consisting of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot) a close cooperation between workers and intellectuals emerged during the 1970s, which proved to be decisive during the strike of August 1980. In Szczecin, the similarly strong strike movement of summer 1980 lacked the national (and international) resonance of the protests in Gdańsk. In addition, the political impact and the collective commemoration (as well as the scholarly research) of the workers’ protests in the case of Szczecin remained mostly a local issue even after the fall of the socialist regime. Which stands, once again, in sharp contrast to the situation of Gdańsk.

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