The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland

Abstract

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE JUNE 1956 UPRISING IN POZNAN', Solidarity labor leaders in that city unveiled a monument to those who died in that struggle; two massive crosses, lashed together, were emblazoned with five dates of popular struggle against communism: 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. At least until recently, every Pole knew the meaning of this litany of dates and could connect them to the seemingly inevitable fall of communism. Indeed, the history of the Polish People's Republic is framed largely by the drama of Polish resistance. Towering over the nation both literally and figuratively, that series of monumental dates has forced postwar Polish history into a rather tight teleology. The events of those years seem to accelerate and build on one another until they culminate in the victory of a presumably informed and organized society in 1988-1989. Poland was the site of the most sustained and articulate resistance to state communism anywhere in the world. No case is better .documented or more evidently central to the fall of communism. These events of resistance are the most compelling-and hopefulmoments in the otherwise gray era of communist rule, in Poland or elsewhere. The events of the last decade have challenged many assumptions about the communist experience in Europe. While some questions-about the nature of revolution and transition, or about desires for democracy and the free market-are already the focus of new academic subfields, the central question of opposition to communism remains largely unexamined. Who participated, and why? What effect did opposition have on the communist regimes? How should historians evaluate the experience of opposition? Surely it is impossible to understand either communism or its fall if we do not know what opposition in fact was. The Poznan' monument is emblematic of the difficulty of studying Polish resistance to communism. As monolithic as opposition may seem fifteen or twenty-five years later, it was not experienced the same way by all Poles, even all Polish workers. In fact, divisions in Polish society were no less than those that