According to Moczar’s partisans, a huge conspiracy was afoot, and Gomułka called for the Party to be purged of ‘revisionists, lackeys of imperialism, Zionists and reactionaries’. This impressive umbrella reflected the fact that while he was principally concerned with ridding it of intellectuals and revisionists, Moczar, who was more in tune with the virulent anti-Semitism of his Russian colleagues, saw the whole thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He pointed out the Jewish origins of some of the student ringleaders, and indeed of some high-ranking Party officials. On 13 March a number of senior officials were dismissed for Zionism.
Moczar’s partisans played heavily on the fact that during the first years after the war some of the best Party jobs had gone to people of Jewish origin. The envy of the lower ranks did the rest, and a purge began as Party members sniffed at each other’s pedigrees. Among the most vociferous of the anti-Zionists were those like Edward Gierek, Secretary of the Silesian Committee of the Party, new men hungry for power. At a lower level, disgruntled workers and peasants were more than happy to express their hatred of intellectuals of every kind by calling them ‘bloodsucking Jews’, a random linkage that would resurface more than once in the future. Hundreds of Party officials and people in senior posts were sacked for ‘Zionism’.
Gomułka was no longer in control, but hung on in the hope that the witch-hunt would deflect the discontent with his own leadership. He decided to grant exit visas to those ‘Zionists’ who wished to emigrate, and over the next few months up to 15,000 Polish Jews availed themselves of these, including a couple of hundred former employees of the Ministry of the Interior and the secret services. Gomułka’s Jewish wife was not among them, nor were some highly placed Jews who had managed to sidestep the attack, nor was Adam Michnik, who was in gaol.
Gomułka’s position was nonetheless tenuous, and he had to reach out for Soviet support. He secured it with the participation by 26,000 Polish troops in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of that year. But this did nothing to enhance his popularity within the Party and in the country at large—on 8 September a former AK officer, Ryszard Siwiec, burned himself to death before Gomułka and a huge crowd in the country’s largest stadium in protest.
People were also far from enthusiastic about the effects of Gomułka’s economic policy. He had tried to decentralise the economy, but it had proved impossible to shrug off the old habits of central planning. As wages slumped and working conditions declined, absenteeism and careless work crippled production. The private sector in agriculture was starved of investment; socialist principle demanded that it should be eventually phased out, although it was responsible for 80 per cent of all production. Terrified of the country becoming a debtor, Gomułka resisted imports, including those of grain and animal feed. The result was a fall in the quantity of livestock, and following two bad harvests in 1969 and 1970, a severe shortage of meat.
The cost of living had risen throughout the 1960s, while wages lagged far behind. The sudden increase by an average of 30 per cent in the price of food announced on 13 December 1970 produced an instant reaction. The following day workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk went on strike and marched in protest to the local Party headquarters. Militia and Interior Ministry forces had been placed on full alert two days before, and those guarding the building opened fire on the strikers, who burnt it down. Similar confrontations took place in nearby Gdynia and in Szczecin, and on the following day tanks moved in, supported by 27,000 troops. The fighting spread to Elbląg and other coastal cities, and on 17 December the whole area was sealed off by the army. By the end of the first four days, forty-one people had been killed, over 1,000 injured and 3,200 detained.
On 19 December an emergency session of the Politburo assembled without Gomułka, who had suffered a stroke, and voted to replace him with Edward Gierek. Gierek managed to impress the workers with his apparent goodwill, but it was not until he rescinded all the price rises that the strikes abated. He admitted that the episode was ‘a painful reminder that the Party must never lose touch with the working class and the nation’, and many believed in his sincerity. But the next ten years of his rule were to transform this lack of contact into an unbridgeable chasm. The unimaginative traditionalist communists of Gomułka’s generation were replaced by a new breed of apparatchiks who fancied themselves as modern managers and socialist captains of industry, and felt a concomitant contempt for the grimy peasants and workers.