The Katowice Party Forum
Remembrance and Justice, Vol. 22 No. 2 (2013), pages: 209-232
Publication date: 2013-12-30
Abstract
In spring of 1981, conservative forces within the Polish United Workers’ Party
(PUWP) sprang to life, articulating a necessity to strengthen the Party
ideologically and to engage into a decisive struggle against “Solidarity” Trade Union. One
of the main representatives of the conservative fraction was the Katowice Party
Forum (KPF). The founding meeting of the Katowice Party Forum was held on
15 May 1981. The Forum was established at the Katowice Regional Committee
of the PUWP under a patronage of its first secretary, Andrzej Żabiński. In the first
stage of its activities, the Forum consisted of over 100 people who were mostly
activists of the Polish United Workers’ Party from the Katowice Region,
functional activists of the industry trade unions and officers of the Citizens’ Militia (MO)
and Secret Police (SB). The executive body of the Katowice Party Forum was the
Programming Council consisting of highly positioned functionaries of central and
regional echelons of the PUWP. The Council was chaired by a member of the
Politburo of the PUWP Central Committee, Gerard Gabryś and a Marxist ideologist,
Wsiewołod Wołczew. The main objective identified by the Forum activists was
a struggle for keeping the socialist system intact and maintaining the ideological
line of the communist party. First of all, the KPF members underlined a critical
diagnosis of the Party condition, for which they blamed the PUWP Management.
As particularly dangerous, the Forum regarded the functioning of linear structures
of reformative, grass-roots, internal movement described as revisionist and
right-wing. The Forum accused the members of that movement of the will to transform
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