The social protests that took place in December 1970 and January 1971 in Szczecin resulted in this industrial centre becoming one of the most important places on the map of social resistance in Poland in the decade of rule by the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Edward Gierek. Throughout the 1970s, there were signs appearing of organised resistance against the Communist system. This included various social groups: workers, intelligentsia, and students. Metropolitan Szczecin was one of the most important locations involved in the „before-August” opposition. The specificity of Szczecin relates largely to the dominant activity of ROPCiO (Movement for Defence of Human and Civil Rights). The „before-August” opposition in Szczecin consisted mainly of representatives of students and the intelligentsia; it had a very slight influence on the workers’ environment in spite of the functioning of the Founding Committee of Free Trade Unions in Western Pomerania. To some extent, such an opposition model executed scenarios set by the government, in which the opposition was to be limited to small, or even „armchair”, intellectual circles, having no major impact on the masses, which, in the case of the People’s Republic, consisted of employees of large workplaces. From the point of view of the Communist regime, the situation that existed in Szczecin in the 1970s allowed this location to be treated as a kind of testing ground for different methods of surveillance and the decomposition of opposition groups by the
Security Service. Certainly, the experience gained by the political police in the control of the workers’ and students’ environments was later used by the authorities of the Ministry of the Interior during the „Solidarność” („Solidarity”) revolution.