In June 1977, a group of analysts from various US government agencies produced a memorandum more than twenty pages long entitled “Prospects for Eastern Europe.” For our purposes, the following statements in the memorandum were of paramount importance: “unrest is likely to grow in Eastern Europe over the next three years… . Poland will be the most volatile, and a blow-up there, which might bring down Gierek and even conceivably compel the Soviets to restore order, cannot be ruled out.” The authors of the memorandum suggested that “if order should break down, both Warsaw and Moscow will want to see it restored by Polish forces, [and] only if these fail will the Soviets intervene.” Regardless of what one thinks of the competence of the American intelligence community at that time, one must admit that this prediction, formulated with extreme restraint, has to a large extent been vindicated—a rare event, since intelligence services err just as often as meteorologists do.

The conviction that Poland, of the eight East Central European communist states, was most likely to experience violent protests was also held among members of the region's nascent democratic opposition, and even within Poland's own ruling elite. Members of both groups were aware of a growing social discontent that stemmed from the worsening economic situation. The kinds of violent protests seen in Poland took place in other communist states either not at all or on a much smaller scale. Unrest in Poland was usually sparked by economic grievances and came to resemble political rebellions against the ruling cliques. While other countries also experienced these kinds of revolts—for example, Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1953, and even the Soviet Union itself during the Novocherkassk riots in 1962—these were just isolated events. In Poland, meanwhile, strikes and demonstrations took place in June 1956 in Poznań, in August 1957 in Łódź, in December 1970 on the coast (the largest were in Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Szczecin), and in June 1976 in several other cities, including Radom. In two cases (in 1956 and 1970), strikes were violently broken up by means of military force, including armed units, resulting in the deaths of dozens of protesters. In Poznań alone, approximately seventy people died.