Word: warsaw
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite a warming spring sun and blue skies, Warsaw last week was a gloomy and uneasy city. The press had a strident, scolding tone. Normally talkative Poles suddenly felt it more prudent to avoid the few Westerners who have lately managed to get entry visas, and the government became stricter about letting Poles leave the country. Everywhere there seemed to be larger numbers than usual of plainclothes policemen and other shadowy characters. The country's severest purge since the bloodless revolution of 1956, which had started off a few weeks earlier by concentrating on the Jews in government...
...sudden dismissal. The government fired Jozef Kutin, a deputy foreign trade minister, and Wilhelm Billig, head of Poland's nuclear-energy office and a former chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Without explanation, it relieved three top-ranking generals, including the head of the vast Warsaw Military District, of their troop commands and consigned them to out-of-the-way desk jobs. It dropped an Olympics official in the department of state sports and dismissed the rector and deputy rector, both Jews, of the Lodz State College of Theater and Film, which has produced such directors...
Less than Absolute. The students en joyed a minor bit of triumph when the state-controlled daily Zycie Warszawy printed a list of demands drafted at a Warsaw protest rally. But it also printed a reply to each point, starting with the students' bedrock demand for the enforcement of constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. While allowing that some of the complaints might be justified, the paper warned that such freedoms "cannot be used against the character of our socialist sys tem." As for the students' protest against police brutality during the rioting, the paper came straight...
...anti-Semitic campaign has failed to stop it-or even slow it down. At week's end Jews were baited, in effect, to join the campaign; they were asked to denounce what the government called an international "Zionist" propaganda effort against Poland. There are rumors in Warsaw that Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar, the head of the police and an ambitious candidate to succeed Gomulka, is backing the anti-Semitic campaign in the hope of replacing many dismissed Jews with...
...students as a whole seem as dangerously irrepressible as ever. Many universities were rimmed with police guards, and the atmosphere at Warsaw University became so threatening that the rector closed it for a day. A group of 200 students decided to meet there anyway, and broke into a lecture hall to pass resolutions demanding reinstatement for the fired professors and military discharges for the drafted students. If they have not received satisfaction by the end of Easter vacation, warned the leaders, they will put out a call for a general strike at all Polish universities...