 Thank you very much. Interesting discussion for later and provocative but very reasonable. And now just introducing Professor Oseca from Warsaw University and his historian and researcher on political history and we are going to move to Polish case. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me here and it's my first stay in Barcelona, but I'm really really enchanted with the city. It's beautiful. So I support here Foyer in his in his love to Barcelona. Well, my ambitions of my paper are rather modest. I'm going to provide you with more factual, more detailed portrait of what happened in 1968 in Poland, actually. And I will explain later why that what's the mystery behind the title, why I'm going to talk about two revolution instead of one. So the year of, as it was told before, the year 1968 in Poland refers mostly to one month, to March. And this sentence March 1968 exists also as March only. If you refer, if you mention March in political context in Polish, it means 1968 usually. So people associate March with 1968. It's obvious, by default, obvious association for everyone. And it was a very peculiar moment in Polish history because it fuses a few different social and political phenomena, a few social and political processes. It was a time of student's revolt. On the other hand, it was a time of noxious propaganda aimed at the elites. It was, at the same time, it was a time of ferocious antisemitic parties. So this is why it was the tale of two revolution, which mostly by the coincidence occurred at the same time, and which referred to each other. It's somehow a very difficult story to tell shortly, briefly. So if you don't understand much after my presentation, don't worry. Most of Poles don't understand this story as well. So it's very, very mysterious. So the Polish March 1968 started on March 8th with the rally at the Warsaw University. It was illegal rally that gathered up to 3,000 students. Perhaps it doesn't look that impressive here, but believe me, it is this very iconic picture of Polish history, one of the most iconic, probably like, you know, Mustaczo Wawensa or something like that. This is the iconic picture of students in front of a library at Warsaw University. It was illegal rally because it was not staged by the government. It was not summoned by the authorities. So it was by definition illegal because it was spontaneous one. And it was first such rally since almost 10 years, since 1956. So it was very impressive even for students to take part in such event. And the immediate reason for the rally to be called was the Communist Party ban on the theatrical play for Father's Eve. It was its classical piece of Polish romanticism that required reading in schools, the most important one piece of Polish literature. And basically, there are many layers of this play, but the main story is the story of students revolting against Tsarist despotism. So it was an obvious dead ringer for young people in late 60s because they found obvious similarities with Poland stuck within the Soviet zone of influence. And they seen it very similar, the struggle of the students depicted in the play. So there was a lot of meaningful applause at the most significant moments of the play, for instance, when the Tsarist despotism was denounced during the play. The people in the auditorium applauded and shouted, for example, yes, yes, good say, well said, and it was very political meaningful. And to understand why it happened, we need to go back a few years earlier when at the University of Warsaw emerged a student milieu of some kind. Basically, the 60s in Poland, this time of so-called small stabilization, the term was invented to denote the life at low, albeit predictable standards. And after the toll of 1956, people weren't interested in politics anymore. It was, it's the time when parties' rules seemed totally unchallenged to the extent that party officials even urged youth to engage in politics. They tried to encourage them to organize some discussion clubs because from an authority's perspective, young people totally lacked the sense of community, were completely focused on their individual careers and didn't pay respect to values of socialism and of socialist society. So they were urged to engage in political life, which Communist Party soon came to regret. In 1964, the group of young people, the first year student mostly, entered the ranks of the Socialist Youth Association at the University of Warsaw and they organized a discussion club, the subversive nature of which soon became clear. They were discussing topics like economy, sociology. They were trying to reinterpretate Marxism theories. They were debating on forbidden historical topics like cutting massacre, for instance, or Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939. So definitely it wasn't that kind of political activity that Communist authorities were interested in. So soon the discussion club was banned, which didn't prevent young people from taking part in more subversive activity. Quite the opposite, they became radicalized and the legal activities were replaced with illegal ones. They started to gather at their private places and the debates went on. For instance, they were discussing a very important document, the open letter to the party by Karol Modzelewski and I decided to show you their faces because they are also very iconic persons of Polish history and contemporary Polish left as well. So you can see them in the bottom row, Karol Modzelewski in the middle, Jacek Kuroń unfortunately he deceased over 10 years ago to the right and Karol Modzelewski thankfully is still alive and in good shape and they were young academics, approximately 10 years senior to the student group, which were their friends and the open letter contained over criticism of the Communist system mostly based on Marxist theories. The letter was inspired, for instance, and here we have Yugoslavian clue by Milo Vanjila's notion of the new class. In 1965 Kuroń and Modzelewski were arrested and sentenced to three years and there were significant demonstrations during the trial. Their younger friends came to the court and arranged the demonstration in the corridor, they sang international, they shouted subversive slogans. This is the time basically when the youth group was nicknamed commandals because the students used to invade official meetings at the university overtaking the course of the discussion through subversive confusing, I speak that loud that I don't need a microphone, I think, through subversive confusing questions, like for instance asking speaker, you condemned American aggression against Vietnam and what could you tell us about Soviet aggression against Hungary in 1956 or what could you tell us about persecution of underground movement after Soviet entered Poland in 1945 and so on and so on. And well, who was those young people, the commandos? Here you can see picture of New Year's Eve party from 1967 to 1968. And it was a group of no more than 100 individuals. It was informal, circle of friends. They had some common political beliefs but they also did sports, drank together, they did love, they were simply close-knit group, group that was still raising because new people would join the group attracted by its political stance, its audacity. The most important names, I'm not going to drown you with names but there are for instance Adam Michnik, well-known Polish dissident. On the picture you can see him in the upper right corner or for instance Jan Tomasz Gros, the famous historian from Princeton University in the very bottom, the one who smiles and the girl in the center, it's Irena Gros, also famous sociologist from United States nowadays. So they represented all social strata. They came out from different families, from different classes, yet many of them came from communist families. Their parents were usually former but communist officials, high rank party members, often of Jewish origin, which was fact which was very important for secret police and secret police would later take advantage of the fact of their Jewish origin. It will be used against them in future. So in autumn 1967 the commandos started the demonstrations at the theater auditorium. This is what I told you previously during the Forth Fathers Eve play and eventually the play was banned. Two of the students were expelled and protesting against the repressions commandos summoned the rally, the very rally on March the 8th, which was brutally suppressed by the police both uniform and by the so-called workers, activists of workers, vanguards. They were simply hit squad pretending to be voice of the outrage working class. You can see here in the middle the people in plain clothes holding truncheons. There were very dangerous truncheons because they were made of plain steel. They hit really hardly. Obviously the reason to introduce those workers, activists, those workers, vanguards was that police were not allowed to enter university without rector approval and the outrage workers as regular civilians were allowed to enter just like that, the university. So they started beating as a first force, but then it turned out they couldn't manage with students because students they were too much students. So the regular police entered the university and carnage started. They were strongly and very brutally, the students were very brutally bitten. And the news of the political attack, police attack was disseminated mostly via Radio Free Europe, which was the most important source of independent information in communist Poland. It broadcasted from Munich, but it was operated by Polish journalists who emigrated from escape from communist Poland or in 1956, a year or later, and they provided Poland with independent information. So the radio was the main source of the news on the police brutality and then something quite happened. The student protest quite unexpectedly spread all over the country and police brutality and the great shock it entailed triggered the revolution actually. And it was the student's revolution all over the country. Here you can see example of student manifesto displayed on the front wall of Warsaw Polytechnic. But similar student strike, student rallies, protests of any kind sprouted in all major academic centers. A few dozens of manifestos were proclaimed with demands, demanding freedom of speech, condemning police brutality and the lies of the press. It was the core demands of student protest. Freedom of speech and condemning police and condemning the lies in the press because the official coverage was incredibly warped, which I am going to describe in details later. And in the same time students kept declaring their commitment to socialist values and their loyalty toward the system and toward the communist party. This is very similar to what happened in Yugoslavia. It wasn't protest against communism. It was protest, they demanded communism to deliver its promises. They demanded socialism to deliver its promise. They demanded socialism to be what it was expected to be, to cease to be dictatorship and to became a real representation of the nation, of the people. Very characteristic and worth remembering trait of those students' protests were efforts to approach factories, to win over the workers in factories. The slogans like workers are with us were shouted in many student rallies and demonstrations. And although many of the young workers joined the street demonstrations, no factory announced a solidarity strike and students' delegations were not allowed to enter factories. Students basically undertook many efforts to reach the workers but to no avail. Workers weren't as a group, as a whole, weren't interested in joining the student protest at all because basically they didn't consider the students' slogans to be important. It didn't reverberate it among workers. It was a time when workers were mostly considered with low wages, bad safety, the factories were plagued with terrible accidents, but they were not interested in freedom of speech. It wasn't an important issue from a perspective of the factories. The very inability to mobilize the workers was seen as the main cause of failure of the movement. People I interviewed on 1968, the activists of 1968 told me we lost because we didn't manage to rise the workers. And in the middle of March, the first secretary of Communist Party rejected any idea in public speech. He rejected any idea of negotiations with students and then the protest was soon suppressed. It was totally suppressed after three weeks of its existence. People were arrested, expelled from the universities. They were hit with sort of penal conscription. I mean there was extra conscription beyond the calendar announced for young people and obviously when the young people ceased to be students they were conscripted to army with this conscription. It was obviously meant as a tool of punishment to get them in the ranks of the army. It seems obvious to me that it was a generational movement. The March revolt was carried out by young intelligentsia born mostly between 1945 and 1949. These people were peers of communist Poland to some extent. Born just after the war, they didn't know any other political system. So one party rule, the common economy, unanimity of the media, all of these comprised their kind of natural environment. They were not scared of the system because they didn't remember the Stalinist period as well. It's a very important barrier. Whether you remembered Stalinist terror or not. And people who, like their parents or older brothers, sisters who remembered the fear of Stalinist time were not that much eager to involve in political activity because they knew how it could happen, how it could end. They knew what could happen. And for younger people, they didn't know that kind of fear. They were not scared, they were not afraid. And as I said, there was another kind of revolution. The student's protest has been denounced by propaganda as Zionist plot. The media displayed the protest as a collusion of former Jewish Stalinists who used their children to provoke the students and to stir up anarchy and thus to reinstate themselves in power. This is a very iconic example of antisemitic propaganda of 1968. It denounced allegedly double-faced students, activists who pretend to be Polish patriots and to take care of freedom in Poland, but actually taking instruction from Israel, from Tel Aviv. But the propaganda was about the idea of hidden foe, hidden enemy within the society which should be unmasked, should be fined. It was very tricky and actually very catchy. So I think many Poles liked the trade of propaganda, the story about hidden traitors from the privileged elites because the propaganda at the same time was aimed against Jews, but also against the intellectual elites. Elites portrayed as Jewish, as conceited as detesting ordinary Poles and immersed in inconceivable luxury. The luxury could be pair of jeans from France or French cosmetics or American toys or electronic equipment. Every artifact from the West were perceived in Poland at this time as a token of luxury, of belonging to privileged elite. If you possessed something from the West, you were in the upper middle class by the very definition. And obviously most of the people was envy of those privileges. The press was also condemning those who in the past had been reportedly distorting national history, tarnishing the reputation of Poland, downgrading national martyrology and national suffering in the time of the German occupation. It was a very important strength in the tale about the fall. The enemy detests Polish martyrology. The enemy detests and mocks Polish heroism. So he detests Polish history. The propaganda was accompanied by massive, antisemitic purge that hit thousands of Poles of Jewish origin, be they high-level party official or, for instance, pediatricians at the provincial clinic. Mostly the latter, of course, because the, besides what propaganda claimed that it's against elites, the purges affected mostly normal people of Jewish origin, normal Poles of Jewish origin. They were the first and most important victim of the switch hand. The PED was launched mostly by the party apparatus in the 40s. So we can see another generational pattern here. Party apparatus in the 40s frustrated and yearning for some sort of career boost. There were people who had no chance previously to enter the higher ranks of Communist Party, and they still stayed on the margin of political life, hoping for some kind of incident, of some kind of development, some kind of crisis which helped them to go up the ladder of the political hierarchy. They were dreaming about the ethnically clean version of the communism, and they pinned all the blame for the failures of the system on Polish Jews. And the student revolution provided them with kind of hundred pretexts to, let's say, further their cause. Thus, 1968 in Poland has got its noble and its sinister feature. It witnessed both the struggle for freedom and civil rights and the outbursts of the vitriolic nationalism. Thank you for your attention.