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Moreover, although his moves - when they came - were economically defensible, they were profoundly insensitive to the political and social mood of the country. Above all, they were ill-timed. Thus, the immediate cause of the relatively short crisis that led to Gierek's remarkable smooth takeover of power was Gomulka's miscalculation in raising prices of food (mainly meat) and fuel just before the traditional Polish Christmas feast.

Sparked by the price increases announced on 13 December, riots began among shipyard workers in the Baltic city of Gdansk (formerly Danzig), spread to nearby Gdynia and, having broken out also in Szczecin (formerly Stettin) on the northwest coast, by 17 December were threatening to spread throughout the country. The explosion of accumulated economic and social grievances caught the Gomulka regime off guard and unable to offer a viable alternative to open warfare with the working class. On 17 December, the then Premier Cyrankiewicz broadcast a condemnation of the rioting workers as "hooligans" and announced a government decision to authorize the security forces and the army to quell the disturbances. The results were catastrophic for the old regime; the total number of casualties resulting from the ensuing incidents between the workers and the security forces are still unknown, but rumors placed them in the thousands. The Gierek regime's own subsequent tally placed the number at 45 killed and 1,165 injured, of whom 564 were civilians, 531 policemen, and 70 soldiers. Of those injured, 153 had been shot.

Most accounts of the events of 14-20 December 1970 assume that some time in midcourse of the crisis Gomulka asked for, but was denied, Soviet assistance; indeed, no Soviet forces took a direct part in the Polish developments. With unrest spreading, bereft of Soviet support, and with the power of his coterie disintegrating, Gomulka apparently collapsed and was hospitalized. The change of top leadership was accomplished on 19 December, and formalized and announced by a Central Committee plenum on 20 December. In addition to the replacement of Gomulka by Gierek, the plenum ratified the ousters from the party Politburo of four of Gomulka's close associates; ideologist Zenon Kliszko, head of State Marian Spychalski, Boleslaw Jaszczuk, who was responsible for the economy, and party cadre chief Ryszard Strzelecki.

Gierek neither schemed to precipitate the crisis nor welcomed the potential danger it posed to Communist rule in Poland, but he seemed ready for the challenge and may have long had in mind the possibility of Gomulka's downfall on the heels of an economic and social crisis. With the country on the brink of open revolt, and with the ideologically embarrassing spectacle of a Communist regime being overthrown by the working class in whose name it was purported to rule, Gierek was face with several immediate tasks. First, he had to defuse the explosive situation among the workers, who showed signs of improving and widening their initially spontaneous strike organization. Second, he had to show that his leadership was prepared to respond quickly to the most acute needs of the people. Thirdly, he had to gain control over the levers of authority, the party and government bureaucracies. Finally, and most importantly, he had to insure that the Soviet Union and Poland's other allies would go along with his style of rule and that they would not renege on their rapid initial endorsement of his regime.

Gierek's success in achieving these goals stemmed largely from several fortuitous factors that were not present for Gomulka in 1956. Most importantly, the worker's disturbances did not take on an anti-Soviet coloration and, although the workers laid their grievances at the feet of the old party leadership, neither the party as a whole nor Poland's socialist system were the main targets of attack. Moreover, the agitation was confined mainly to the urban working class and, even more narrowly, to the skilled workers who felt they had the most to lose from Gomulka's ill-considered price rises and changes in work rules. The mass of the Polish peasantry, whose spontaneous decollectivization of farmland had an important political impact in 1956, remained quiet in 1970, having been largely unaffected by Gomulka's economic measures. Similarly, Polish intellectuals and the youth remained largely inactive, possible still piqued over the failure of Polish workers to support their cause in early 1968 when political and cultural freedom, and not bread-and-butter issues, were involved. Finally, the powerful Roman Catholic Church, despite clear sympathies with the workers, kept its peace except to counsel nonviolence.

Gierek could thus point to these factors as proof that a change in leadership would not entail a danger to the continuity of Communist control, that it would not give rise to dangerous, nationalistic, anti-Soviet political action that had been the hallmark of 1956, and that it did not inherently contain the seeds of a politically runaway situation that Moscow had seen in Czechoslovakia 2 years earlier. The fact that Gierek, unlike Gomulka, assumed power with Soviet endorsement and not in the face of Soviet hostility enabled him to gain substantial early economic assistance from his allies and to turn his attention to

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