ABSTRACT
Lechoslaw Gozdzik was an unusually intelligent party secretary who had the gift of speaking seriously and in a captivating way. Everyone listened to him: old, young, workers, intellectuals. He spoke about socialism without distortions, about workers’ councils, the abolition of censorship, and democracy. A record of a conversation between Wladyslaw Gomulka and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev retrieved from Soviet archives reveals that Khrushchev warned that a workers’ revolt in Poland might lead to serious consequences, with repercussions not only in Poland but across the Eastern bloc. After World War II, the factory was nationalized and renamed after Joseph Stalin. In November 1956, after the worker revolt in June, the factory reverted to its original name. Kazimierz Doktor took a job as a blue-collar worker in the factory in the 1960s when writing a doctoral dissertation on industrial sociology. After working at the factory, he made friends with his fellow workers and became accepted as part of the team.
