Moscow understood the historic nature of the Gdańsk negotiations. Prior to the August Agreement, Soviet Ambassador Aristov told Gierek that Poland in 1980 confronted anarcho-syndicalism: one of the most dreaded heresies in the communist lexicon. He was referring to the ‘Workers’ Opposition' which had presented ‘Theses on the Trade Union Question’ to the Xth Party Congress (1921). This trenchant document explained their origin ‘from the depths of the industrial proletariat in Soviet Russia’ as an outgrowth not only of the unbearable conditions of life and labour in which 7 million industrial workers found themselves. They were also ‘a product of vacillation, inconsistencies and outright deviation of our Soviet policy from the previously expressed class-consistent principles of our communist programme’. Working-class creativity was being replaced by communists inside the unions. But what communists were they? In this process, they saw great degeneration, the direct negation of the self-activity of the masses: ‘Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy’.

Their remedies were elimination of non-working-class elements from administrative positions within the Party and freedom of discussion and publication within the Party. But decisions of the Xth Congress terminated both freedom of expression and political opposition inside the CPSU. During the proceedings, sailors on Kronstadt (a fortress in the Gulf of Finland) came out in revolt against Soviet power.